Several authors have attempted to specify the distinctive temporal consciousness that characterizes caring. Such discussions emphasize that the dominant mode of temporality in modern industrial society, standard linear clock time, represents only one of many diferent tempos people inhabit. While abstract labor time is a medium of market exchange that can be bought and sold as a commodity, the more fluid open-ended times of the private sphere are harder to measure. “The expenditure of time in diferent economic spheres or social relationships may well be incommensurable. It is certainly not homogenous; nor can it be straightforwardly converted or “clocked” since there is no common external standard for conversion, other than clock time itself.” Attempting to do this, argues Miriam Glucksmann, would be to confuse the measuring instrument with what it is intended to measure.31
Feminist theory draws attention to the embedded character of women’s time. For example, Karen Davies introduces the concept of process time to describe the plural, relational, and context-linked nature of the time that caring for others involves. According to her, there is a clash between nurturing rationality rooted in the process time that good care requires and the technical-administrative rationality of workplace organizations.32 Barbara Adam also stresses that, while both men and women are caught up in multiple times, time is not gender-neutral and many women’s times are constituted in the shadow of the market economy. Caring tasks are often cyclical, fragmented, and woven into other processes rather than being completed as discrete tasks that can be accomplished.
While some early critics, such as Julia Kristeva, endorsed a dualistic opposition between female and male time, contemporary analyses maintain that “women’s socially ascribed caring roles and, to a lesser extent, their physical role as reproducers, are linked to a range of temporal perceptions and logics very diferent from those that drive the labour market.”33 In this limited sense, it is meaningful to talk about women’s time. As Valerie Bryson argues in her book Gender and the Politics of Time, we need to recognize temporal rhythms outside the commodified clock time of the capitalist economy in order to value time spent caring for others as an important economic and civic activity.
Chapter five
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