Abstract
This paper morally evaluates the phenomenon Sylvia Chant calls "the feminization of responsibility," wherein women's unrecognized labor subsidizes international development while men retain or increase their power over women. I argue that development policies that feminize responsibility are incompatible with justice in two ways. First, such policies involve Northerners extracting unpaid labor from women in the global South. Northerners are obligated to provide development assistance, but they are transferring the labor of providing it onto women in the global South and expecting them to do it for free. Second, development policies that feminize responsibility increase women's exposure to sexist domination. These two problems are present irrespective of whether policies that feminize responsibility improve women's basic well-being.
Highlights
This paper morally evaluates the phenomenon Sylvia Chant calls "the feminization of responsibility," wherein women's unrecognized labor subsidizes international development while men retain or increase their power over women
Women take on increased responsibility for income generation, while their household labor burdens stay the same, and their domination by men sometimes increases
Jaggar argues that we cannot track the status of these women without attention to the vulnerabilities to which interlaced local, national, and transnational factors subject them (Jaggar 2009). She injects concerns about intergroup fairness, calling our attention to the way in which global structures systematically transfer the value of labor extracted from women in the global South to the inhabitants of the North (Jaggar 2013)
Summary
This paper morally evaluates the phenomenon Sylvia Chant calls "the feminization of responsibility," wherein women's unrecognized labor subsidizes international development while men retain or increase their power over women. A second reason is that, if I am correct that development assistance is owed to women in the global South, it is unfair to require uncompensated labor in exchange for access to these benefits.
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