Love and Work: A Response to Vicki Schultz's Life's Work

Abstract

Professor Ertman engages Vicki Schultz's critique of proposals to remunerate homemaking labor on two fronts. First she questions the way Professor Schultz seems to assume a rigid barrier between love and work, suggesting instead that legal feminists need not choose between work for love and work for wages as the cornerstone of feminist legal reform. Second she challenges Schultz's suggestion that proposals to remunerate homemaking labor are backward thinking. Since wage labor is not the only route to citizenship, Professor Ertman contends, proposals to remunerate homemaking labor can buttress many women's citizenship claims. In particular, she explains, they have the potential to effect both positive change by getting cash to many economically marginalized women and normative change by reconstructing gender and sexual orientation.