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by Eva Feder Kittay (Author)
This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay's feminist classic, Love's Labor, explores how theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics of care.
Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents figures neither in political theory nor in social policy. While some women have made many gains, equality continues to elude many others, as in large measure, social institutions fail to take into account the dependency of childhood, illness, disability and frail old age and fail to adequately support those who care for dependents. Using a narrative of her experiences caring for her disabled daughter, Eva Feder Kittay discusses the relevance of her analysis of dependency to significant cognitive disability. She explores the significance of dependency work by analyzing John Rawls' influential liberal theory and two examples of public policy-welfare reform and family leave-to show how theory and policy fail women when they miss the centrality of dependency to issues of justice. This second edition has updated material on care workers, her adult disabled daughter and key changes in welfare reform.
Using a mix of personal reflection and political argument, this new edition of a classic text will continue to be an innovative and influential contribution to the debate on searching for greater equality and justice for women.
Love's Labor has spoken to audiences around the world and has had an impact on readers from many countries and in many disciplines: philosophy, sociology, disability studies, nursing. It has been required and supplementary reading on many undergraduate courses on Ethics, Feminist Ethics, Gender and Religious Ethics, Political Theory, Bioethics and Disability Studies. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese and Korean.
Author Biography
Eva Feder Kittay is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY. Her pioneering work interjecting questions of care and disability (especially cognitive disability) into philosophy, and her work in feminist theory and the philosophy of disability, have garnered a number of honors and prizes: 2003 Woman Philosopher of the Year by the Society for Women in Philosophy; the inaugural prize of the Institut de Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft; the Lebowitz prize from the American Philosophical Association; and Phi Beta Kappa, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Discovery, an NEH Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Eva Kittay's first works in philosophy were in the philosophy of language, publishing Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (1987). Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (1999) received international attention. The edited collection Women and Moral Theory (with Diana Meyers, 1987) ushered in decades-long work by philosophers in the ethics of care. Other edited collections include The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (with Linda Alcoff, 2007) and The Subject of Care: Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (with Ellen Feder, 2003). A 2008 collection--based on a conference she organized, Cognitive Disability and the Challenge to Moral Philosophy--opened a new field of inquiry in philosophy. Her most recent book is Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds (2019).
