Unpaid Caregiving

Unpaid caregiving refers to the provision of care, support, and assistance to dependent individuals, including children, elderly relatives, people with disabilities, or those with chronic illness, performed without financial compensation and typically within the domestic or familial sphere. Sociologists regard unpaid caregiving as a form of socially necessary labour that sustains human welfare and reproduces the workforce, yet remains systematically devalued and rendered invisible within capitalist economies that privilege paid market labour as the primary measure of economic contribution. Feminist sociologists have been central to theorizing unpaid caregiving, challenging the public/private divide that has historically confined care work to the domestic sphere and treated it as a natural expression of femininity rather than as skilled and socially productive labour. Ann Oakley’s foundational work on domestic labour highlighted the extent to which unpaid work performed predominantly by women is excluded from formal economic measurement and social recognition. Arlie Hochschild extended this analysis through her concept of the “second shift,” documenting how women employed in paid work continue to shoulder a disproportionate burden of unpaid caregiving responsibilities at home. Nancy Fraser further situated unpaid caregiving within a broader critique of capitalist social reproduction, arguing that its systematic undervaluation reflects a structural contradiction between the demands of capital accumulation and the work required to sustain human life and social wellbeing.