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Postsocialist Caring Biographies: Care Work between Work and Non-Work

Postsocialist Caring Biographies: Care Work between Work and Non-Work Abstract This article examines the ambiguous status of paid care work by focusing on how nannies make sense of paid care work. Drawing on fifteen in-depth interviews with Czech nannies caring for second-generation Vietnamese immigrant children, the article seeks answers to the following questions: How are postsocialist caring biographies and gendered subjectivities shaped in paid child care and how do they shape the understanding/meaning of (paid) care work? This article aims to bring a local experience to the global discussion while emphasizing the need for an examination of the cultural and political context in which nannies provide paid caregiving. Introduction Many scholars focusing on the delegation of domestic work argue that care work and social-reproductive labor are barely recognized as regular work, regardless of whether this is performed by family members or “hired hands” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Lutz 2008, 2011; Uttal and Tuominen 1999, etc.). Macdonald (1998, 2010) describes child care as “shadow work” drawing on Illich’s definition of such work as an “entirely different form of unpaid work which an industrial society demands as a necessary complement to the production of goods and services” (Macdonald 1998, 31; see Illich 1981, 99–100). Such work—“naturally feminine”—is usually “invisible work” because “much of it is difficult to conceptualize in market exchange terms” (ibid). Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001, 9) describes the peculiar status of domestic work that is “distinctive not in being the worst job of all but in being regarded as something other than employment.” She gives many examples of how both employers and employees reproduce this peculiarity and ambiguity of paid caregiving. While employers tend to see care work as “not real work,” employees refer to it as to their “hobby” instead of employment, even though it is a full-time breadwinning activity. In her research on domestic workers in contemporary Germany, Lutz (2011) reaches a different or even opposing conclusion. She shows that both the employers of domestic workers and the employees themselves have gone “to great pains to ‘normalize’ the work, i.e. to characterize it as a perfectly normal employment relationship” (Lutz 2011, 75). Her analysis presents many examples of how such normalization occurs on both sides. While the employers, for example, “outline the picture of a functionally differentiated society in which each member performs a particular task and is paid for it” (ibid.), the employees’ normalization strategies “correspond to a wish to construct a positive work identity, and hence a perspective in which they are active players” (ibid, 76). The character of paid child care is then quite ambiguous, uncertain, and filled with tension. Despite this, the centrality of the cultural and political contexts of gendered subjectivities in paid child care is not recognized and is taken for granted. As a case study of particular caring relations emerging in a specific sociocultural context, this article aims to bring a local experience to the global discussion while emphasizing the need for an examination of cultural and political context. Drawing upon interviews with Czech nannies who provide care for second-generation Vietnamese children in the Czech Republic, the article seeks answers to the following main questions: How are postsocialist caring biographies and gendered subjectivities shaped in paid child care and how do they shape the understanding/meaning of (paid) care work as work and non-work? I am interested in how the nannies understand their role in caregiving work and what it means to be a caregiving worker. In order to capture the complexity of the possible meanings, I argue for the need to see these meanings in a particular cultural and political context. To see how the gendered subjectivities of caregivers are created in historical and political dynamics, I develop the notion of postsocialist caring biographies. The term “caring biographies” was introduced by Chamberlayne and King (2000). They suggested understanding care as a “biographical project, in which past life events and experiences, expectations and aspirations for the future, as well as the present circumstances, are formatively involved in the development of informal care” (Chamberlayne and King 2000, 129). The authors emphasize that both caring and being a carer are actively (re)negotiated and that “caring is an active and potentially transformative process, in which carers need to adjust their perspectives of their own lives to accommodate caring into their own life perspectives” (ibid, 130). Drawing upon their work, I pay attention to how the caring biographies of the interviewed nannies have developed in the specific political and cultural contexts of two different political regimes, separated by the milestone of 1989 and the fall of communism. I use the term postsocialist to characterize these caring biographies in order to emphasize how the shift of regimes, accompanied by the transformation of family policies, changes in the organization of child care, and altered mothering strategies inscribe and find expression in the biographies of the interviewed women and in their reflection on the meaning of care work as work and non-work. Postsocialist caring biographies include the interplay between the micro level of gendered subjectivities, expectations, and individual strategies and the macro level of the political and cultural contexts that are central to them. With this focus, the article contributes to ongoing debates on care work. It shows what it means to be a nanny in a postsocialist country where only 1–2 percent of families hire nannies (Hašková 2008; for postsocialist specificity, see Hrženjak 2012; Tkach and Hrženjak 2016). The case study of non-migrant nannies working for migrant families tears the established understanding of paid child care from the economic frame and precarious situations and opens a space for addressing the gendered subjectivities in paid care. The article, above all, shows that the nannies refuse to see paid caregiving as work and this rejection is essential to their self-perception as gendered human beings. In many regards, the findings presented here are against the widely accepted assumption that domestic/care workers do everything they can to be recognized as workers and that such recognition is an essential step toward improving their lives and working conditions. My article begins by briefly describing the basic work/non-work dilemma in caregiving which gives this activity an ambiguous character. Then I present the data and methods of research and the analytical strategy. The third section develops the notion of postsocialist caring biographies while investigating how the nannies whom I interviewed describe their previous experiences with caregiving (as mothers and grandmothers) and with their balancing between work and non-work (family) life. The fourth part of the article focuses on how nannies articulate the work/non-work character of paid caregiving in relation to mothers and to cared-for children. Finally, the conclusion addresses the reasons behind the nannies’ refusal to see caregiving work as work. At the same time, it deals with what the nannies’ narratives can say about the role of paid caregiving in the constitution of gendered subjectivities in postsocialist Czech Republic. Work, Non-Work, and Care Work: Sources of Ambiguity in Paid Care This article investigates how paid caregivers understand the character of paid caregiving and explores the articulations of work and non-work divides in their narratives. Such articulations take place in a wider socio-cultural context in which the nature of work and non-work in contemporary (Western) societies is changing. While the post-war era has been characterized by the myth of a divided world in which work and non-work are considered strictly separate parts of life (Kanter 1977), Ramarajan and Reid (2013) argue that this myth has never matched the actual experiences of people. However, they add, it has shaped the design of work in many organizations. Contemporary understanding of the work and non-work interface shifts and re-shapes the boundaries between the two domains—domestic identities often spill over into the workplace and work identities sometimes cross into home life (Hochschild 1997). There are several reasons for this shift. Ramarajan and Reid (2013) see the explanations in declining job security, increasing work diversity, and the spread of communication technology (see also Kreiner, Hollensbe, and Sheep 2009). Geurts and Demerouti (2003) argue that the old segregation between work and non-work paralleled gender segregation—work was associated with masculinity and non-work with femininity. With the feminization of the workforce and the emergence of dual-earner couples, the distinction partly lost its relevance. Similarly, James (2014, 274) connects the dismantling of the work and non-work separation with its inappropriate gendered connotations and with the “rejection of the masculinist myth of the disembodied ‘ideal worker’ …, for whom work is primary, time available to work unlimited, and the demands of family and personal life insignificant.” The fact that wage labor was historically associated with “men’s work” while unwaged/domestic/unpaid work became “women’s work” is written in the structure of work organizations (Acker 2006), and this impacts the (d)evaluation of tasks performed outside the work logic, including (paid) caregiving and domestic work. Household and caregiving work are seen as “not-real work, thus devaluing over again practices and activities usually associated with the private and feminine while upholding the value of the public and the masculine” (Bourne and Calás 2013, 434). Work is coded as a productive activity which takes place in the public space, while non-work is associated with social-reproductive tasks performed in the private sphere. When a typically social-reproductive activity becomes a productive (breadwinning) one, the doubts about its status come to the fore, as the prevailingly ambiguous character of care and domestic work repeatedly show. These common-sense meanings of work/non-work distinctions are inscribed in how domestic/care workers and those who hire them understand their roles and value the tasks they do or they pay for. Care work is an activity that “lies at the juncture of different kinds of articulation of work and non-work,” writes Lyon (2010). She sees three main boundaries within care work which can be expressed in the following binaries: (1) love or money; (2) morality versus instrumentality; and (3) from professional demarcations to embeddedness in everyday life. In her comparative analysis of these articulations in four European countries (England, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands), Lyon argues that despite the growing interest in care work in the last couple of decades, the boundaries and intersections between work and non-work remain vague—both in research on care work and in research on work and employment generally. However, this does not mean that researchers have not focused on the borders and boundary makings within paid child care. On the contrary, extensive research has been conducted on the tensions and ambiguities in paid care that illuminate the critical points around which the comprehension of care work as work and non-work turns. Researchers have addressed the spatiality of paid care, dealing with what happens when the home becomes a workplace (Lutz 2008). For example, in her research on Filipina domestic workers in Taiwanese households, Lan (2003) employs the notion of socio-spatial boundaries in reference to the borders of domesticity and privacy that are “particularly vital in the employment of migrant domestic workers, who usually live in the homes of their employers” (Lan 2003, 526). Similarly, Martin-Matthews (2007) illuminates how space and relationships between care-givers and care-receivers are negotiated when a home becomes the site of overlapping life spheres. Murray (1998, 149) writes that nannies “conduct their care giving labor in the borderlands of family life.” This means that they provide children with the essence of family life, which requires intimacy and emotionality, but they nonetheless remain hired hands (and hearts) that are being paid for caring. The issue of emotionality is a tension-generating aspect of care work which has attracted the attention of many scholars (Aronson and Neysmith 1996; Lan 2003; Lyon 2010; Nelson 1990). Margaret K. Nelson developed a very useful term for this practice of negotiating the emotional investment in cared-for children (1990; see also Macdonald 1998, 2010). Drawing on Hochschild’s work on emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), Nelson formulated the concept of “detached attachment,” which refers to how care workers balance between showing enough, but not too much, affection to the children they care for; the term also captures the conflicting feelings care workers have when they are caring for another mother’s child. Within these ambiguities and tensions, care workers construct and negotiate their gendered subjectivities and vis-à-vis their employers constitute who they are by demarcating themselves from what they are not (see Davidoff 1974; Palmer 1990). While previous studies examined how the identities of nannies are constructed along the divides of class and ethnicity or nationality and citizenship (Andall 2003; Glenn 1992; Lan 2003; Lutz and Pallenga-Möllenbeck 2012) in the context of transnationalization of care (Erel 2012; Yeates 2011), this article investigates the sources of the meanings of individual paid care and the negotiation of the gendered subjectivities of nannies who care for second-generation Vietnamese children in the postsocialist cultural and political context. Data and Methods This paper is based on the analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews conducted with native Czech nannies working for Vietnamese immigrant families. These nannies work in response to a demand among first-generation Vietnamese parents for paid caregivers to look after their second-generation children. Vietnamese immigrants are currently the third largest group of immigrants in the Czech Republic. The history of Vietnamese immigration to this country dates back to the 1970s, when agreements on mutual assistance were signed between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Vietnamese Socialist Republic (Williams and Baláž 2005). The collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia introduced a problem into the lives of Vietnamese immigrants, as their status became unclear and they either had to find a legal way to remain in Czechoslovakia with a kind of new residence permit, return to Vietnam, or move further west. If they chose the first option, one way to get a residence permit was to obtain a trade license (Brouček 2003). This was part of what started the development of an immigrant economy. The people for whom the nannies in my interviews work are all self-employed entrepreneurs who own either clothing shops, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, or nail studios. Running their own business is time-consuming, and this breadwinning activity of men and women is therefore one of the reasons that the parents need to hire nannies. To explore this particular case study of immigrant families that hire native nannies, I conducted fifty interviews with nannies (fifteen), mothers (fifteen), and children (twenty). My research focused only on mothers. I did not conduct interviews with fathers, not because they do not play any role in the childcare decisions but because I was interested only in the specific strategy of mothering performed by the women who delegated (together with their partners or husbands) child care. The initial aim of my research was to explore mothering practices and woman-to-woman relationships in paid caregiving. From the interviews conducted with mothers, children, and nannies, I know that fathers were part of the decision to delegate child care and they were part of the daily negotiations with nannies, though to a lesser extent than the mothers. In these cases, the selection of who communicates with the nannies was driven by the language skills of the parents. The purpose of this original research was to illuminate the character of inter-personal, inter-generational, and inter-ethnic ties between nannies, children, and mothers. I analyzed these relations through the lens of mutual dependence (Souralová 2015a). In the fifteen in-depth interviews that I conducted with the nannies, I sought to examine the dynamics of the relationships between nannies and children and nannies and mothers, and the continuity and changes in the life courses of the women in the sample. In order to trace both the dynamics and the continuity of the relationships created and maintained between nannies and families, I looked for women who were in contact with a cared-for child: they were either currently taking care of a child (seven nannies in my sample) or they had done so in the past and still maintained a relationship of some type with the child (eight nannies in my sample, see Table 1). The sample of nannies was gathered through second-generation Vietnamese children. I approached the children with the question of whether they knew anybody who had a nanny. Then they provided me with contacts for both current and former nannies. All of the nannies (except one) had one basic thing in common when they started working as paid caregivers: they were receiving some form of financial support from the state. One nanny was on parental leave, nine were pensioners, four were unemployed, and one was employed (and took care of the child after work). This means that the nannies were available for enough time (in the day) to be able to perform the time-consuming work of caregiving and that they had a regular formal income from the state that made it possible to be nannies and be paid a relatively small amount of money “under the table”—the average salary of the nannies was one quarter of the average salary in the Czech Republic and slightly below the minimum wage. (This segment of the market with care is completely in the black market, with no written contracts. Hiring private nannies is not regulated by any policy; however, the work of care placement agencies is regulated by the Trade Licensing Act.) For the interviewed women, becoming nannies was not driven by financial need, as they received social support from the state and were not dependent on the income of their spouses. As to family status, four of the women were living on their own (either divorced or widowed), and were thus the sole breadwinners in their household. Eleven nannies lived with their partners. Fourteen nannies had children (five of them had children under the age of eighteen, seven of them had grandchildren), and one nanny was childless. The interviews with the nannies lasted 90–160 minutes. I asked questions about the nannies’ past and current experiences with unpaid and paid caregiving and the meaning of caregiving in women’s lives. I followed the understanding of caregiving proposed by King and Chamberlayne, namely that caregiving is a “biographical project, in which past life events and experiences, expectations and aspirations for the future, as well as the present circumstances, are formatively involved in the development of informal care” (Chamberlayne and King 2000, 129). The analysis proceeded in two interrelated directions. The first step was to diachronically contextualize paid caregiving in the women’s biographies in order to understand the place of paid caregiving in their life course. For this purpose, two steps were taken. First, I asked about the nannies’ experiences with caregiving, mothering, and grandmothering, and their responses provided me with both a description of how they performed the role of caregiver and an understanding of what the role means to them. I asked the following questions: Why and how did you become a nanny? How do you perceive your own mothering and/or grandmothering? How has the general notion of motherhood changed since you were a mother of little children?, etc. It was necessary to contextualize these descriptions and meanings in the socio-cultural and historical context that shaped the nannies’ care biographies; these are briefly presented in the following section. The second step was to create a complex picture of the role of nannies, synchronically, in the “here and now.” A synchronic perspective was achieved by asking the following questions: What does your day look like? What you usually do with the children? How would you characterize your role in the child’s life? What is your relationship with parents?, etc. This included looking at the daily routine of a nanny, what the job entails, the amount of decision making relating to the child that is assumed by the nanny, the pros and cons of this work, and, generally, how the nannies understand this role in relation to their other roles—for example, as mothers, grandmothers, wives, and friends. Postsocialist Caring Biographies: The Work and Non-Work Identities of Women before Becoming Nannies In this section, I will briefly explain the specific nature of postsocialist caring biographies. To do so, I draw upon both a literature review and an analysis of the interviews. In my sample, I can distinguish two groups of women according to the period during which they performed their mothering and which then had an essential impact on the formation of their comprehension of how child care should be organized and performed by a woman. The experience of mothering shapes the daily practice of caring for the Vietnamese child and provides nannies with a point of reference for ideas and ideals about care (work) generally. Eight women in my sample mothered their children before 1989 under the socialist ideal of working motherhood and the state support of collective child care. On the other hand, seven women became mothers in the early 1990s, exactly in the period of postsocialist transition. These two groups vary to a huge extent, as do their experiences with “socialist” and “postsocialist” contexts. For the women who were mothers before 1989, their caring biographies include both the period before 1989 and the period after 1989 as important resources and contexts in which the care was performed. The “post” in postsocialist for them indicates that their past experiences with being a carer (mother) in the socialist period are a part of being a nanny in the postsocialist period, and this past experience provides a lens for reflecting on the present activity. These nannies contrast pre-1989 and post-1989 situations while building the continuity of their own caring biographies around the discontinuity of the local contexts. For the women who became mothers in the early 1990s, only the period after 1989 is a key formative context for their own caring biographies, and “post” simply means “after.” In the state-socialist system, before 1989, socialist ideology stressed the emancipatory effect of participation in work outside the home, and the regime set up services to support women at work so they could take paid jobs; this incorporation of women into the labor market was presented (by the regime) as a sign of gender equality. The state provided services (e.g. support for state nurseries and kindergartens) that encouraged women’s employment while minimizing the conflicts between work and home life. Despite this, however, women continued to be fully responsible for the household chores and caregiving—after returning home from the workplace, they began their second shift. This double burden characterized the “gender politics of communism” (Stenning and Hardy 2005, 504). The traditional roles and gendered division of labor within the family were not recognized under state socialism and therefore were not questioned or criticized (Einhorn 1993; Hašková 2005b). Einhorn (1993, 40) observes that “state socialism “emancipated” women not as equal citizens, but as worker-mothers. … The maternal role ascribed to women in the dominant discourse was constructed as a social duty to bear and rear the ‘socialist citizens of the future’.” Eight of the fifteen nannies in my sample who became mothers before 1989 had experienced this model. Ms. Dudková, a former primary school teacher, described her mothering experience in the following words: My son was born in 1965, and that was a time when you had to go to work. I was lucky that it was the summer holidays then, so I started work when he was six months old, otherwise mothers went back when the children were four months, and he went off to the nursery school. Things were like that then. … But it was hard. And my younger son was born in 1975 and at that time I could afford to stay home longer, so I spent one year with him.1 When recalling her mothering years, this nanny referred to the acceptable way of balancing work and home life. Her experience is also expressed in the quantitative data: Hašková (2005a) points out that in the 1960s, 61 percent of mothers stayed at home with their children for up to one year, 15 percent for one to two years, 17 percent for two to three years, and 7 percent for more than three years. Sirovátka and Saxonberg (2006, 192) describe the situation of women in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland as follows: “[I]n contrast to Western Europe, where women fought for the right to work, the communist regimes forced women to work whether they wanted to or not. Consequently, some women experienced work as state exploitation rather than a move towards liberalization. Thus, many women’s organizations in the early 1990s made the right for women to stay at home and be housewives one of their main demands” (see also Saxonberg 2001, 2003). After 1989, the postsocialist transformation brought about changes in gender roles, work roles, and work–life balance. Scholars have traced evidence of these shifts in changing family policies and have identified a trend toward re-familization (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006; Szelewa and Polakowski 2008) and genderization (Saxonberg 2012) in post-1989 Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The transformation period in the 1990s introduced new—and previously unknown—risks into the Czech(oslovak) labor market, including instability and unemployment, which disproportionately impacted women, who were the first to lose their jobs, and the restriction of state family policies (Valentová 2009). According to Sirovátka and Saxonberg (2006), the shift towards re-familizing family policies was manifested by a combination of: long maternity leave with a fixed replacement rate (total amount 220,000 CZK, approximately 8450 EUR) for all women regardless of their previous salary; the mothers can choose whether they stay at home with the child up to the age of 2, 3, or 4 years; this means that a parent can draw the money for 19 months (a monthly amount of almost 12,000 CZK) up to 43 months (at around 5,100 CZK a month). In 2012, when the research was conducted, the average salary in the Czech Republic was just over 24,000 CZK. Minimum wage in the same period was 8000 CZK per month, which means 48 CZK per hour. a radical decrease in the number of available spaces in nurseries for children under the age of 3 (see also Hašková, Saxonberg, and Mudrák 2012); the available state nurseries dropped from more than 1000 (placing almost 40,000 children) in 1990 to 43 (placing 1000 children) in 2011; the lack of state nurseries created an opportunity for for-profit actors to develop a private market with kindergartens and nurseries for children under 3 years old (Španielová 2017); and the absence of labor market policies aimed at helping people to balance work and family. The level of employment of women with children is low in the Czech Republic and it significantly rises only when the younger child is older than four years. Becoming a father does not change the patterns of men’s employment: 95 percent fathers of children under the age of 7 are employed (Hora 2009). This combination of changes reinforced the traditional, separate roles for men as breadwinners and women as caregivers (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006). In addition, these changes further strengthen the lack of demand for private nannies that is a shared trait of both pre-1989 and post-1989 reality. Before 1989, the presence of a nanny would have violated the illusory egalitarian ideology, and the dense network of state nurseries operated as work–life balance facilitators; after 1989, it seems that nannies are not needed because most mothers assume the childcare responsibilities themselves at the expense of their participation in the labor market. Other factors influencing the demand for nannies are support from grandparents, the absence of au pair schemes, the lack of foreigners, and problems of trust. As a result, seven of the women in my sample—post-1989 mothers—raised their children in a radically different environment characterized by a specific model of what the role of women and mothers entailed. After 1989, women started taking long parental leave: 5 percent of women stayed at home with their children for one year, 17 percent for one to two years, 51 percent for two to three years, and 27 percent for more than three years (Hašková 2005a). In addition, a very common pattern emerged of stringing together successive periods of parental leave uninterruptedly, in which mothers increasingly tended to complete their first parental leave with a second pregnancy and second term of parental leave, at the end of which they then returned to the labor market (Hašková 2011). Valentová (2009) notes that in many cases parental leave served as a temporary form of escape from unemployment and a strategy for achieving work–life balance. This was the case of some of the nannies interviewed. For example, Ms. Jestřábová and Ms. Křepelková became nannies right after their successive terms of parental leave ended. Each of these nannies have two children with whom they spent six years at home on parental leave before starting their careers as nannies. In these two cases, unpaid and paid caregiving became a means of long-term escape from the labor market. Ms. Jestřábová recalled the beginning of her career as a nanny as follows: My parental leave just terminated and I was unemployed. And I could not find a job that would be flexible and that would give me enough time to be with my children. And then they asked me if I wanted to become their nanny. And it was just perfect because I could be at home and have a regular income. The definitions of work and non-work differed in these two periods, and so did the interviewees’ descriptions of their roles as mothers, as is apparent in the short quote from the interview with Ms. Jestřábová. For those women who forged a work–life balance before 1989, which involved working full time and also taking advantage of the services of state-run nurseries, work and family are seen as compatible. A mother can both go to work and equally have a robust non-work identity. Conversely, intensively mothering mothers after 1989 had different options open to them. For many of them, parental leave offered a way to achieve a work–life balance. For these women, work and non-work (family life) are at odds with each other: mothers should not work, at least not before the child is ready for kindergarten or preferably for school. For the former group, becoming a nanny means the opportunity to experience caregiving full time, which they could not do before; for the latter group, it is a way to prolong intensive mothering. While the nannies in the former group expressed sympathy with and understanding for Vietnamese working mothers, the nannies in the latter group were rather critical in their judgments of the mothering of the Vietnamese mothers (see below). All in all, these historically and socio-culturally specific experiences of mothering and work/non-work definitions shaped the nannies’ interpretations of paid caregiving, and these are dealt with in the following section. Employers’ Servants and/or Children’s Loving Nannies? The interviewed nannies entered into paid caring relations with their own experiences, ideals, and aspirations about how care should be organized. These shape their caring biographies, which in turn provide them instructions about how to perform the care and how to include this paid activity into the repertoire of the roles they play. During my analysis, it became evident that the way nannies understand care work differs when they relate this activity to their employers and when they relate it to the cared-for children. In this section, I will explore how the nannies construct their gendered biographies when they provide paid caregiving, both in relation to the mothers and in relation to the children. “I am the Mistress of My Time”: Autonomy, illusory Independence, and Claimed Superiority The woman-to-woman relationship in situations in which child care is delegated is tricky. On the one hand, these women are related by the very fact that they share the care responsibilities of a child and they cooperate in order to provide the child with the best care. On the other hand, delegated child care is an arena in which mothering ideals are negotiated and contested. The nannies verbally establish their relationship with the mothers on two basic themes—their autonomy from the mothers and their superiority over them. The first theme tells us about the daily organization of caregiving and its implications; the second tells us about the nannies’ perception of the clash between the mothering ideals, ideas, and strategies that they themselves use and those performed by the mothers. First, the spatial organization of caregiving impacts the work content and hugely affects how nannies define their roles vis-à-vis mothers. The paid care in Vietnamese families can be organized in one of four models distinguished according to the spatial arrangements. These models are: live-in nanny, live-out nanny, live-out child, and live-in child. In my sample, there was only one live-in nanny who lived in the house of her employers, and she was there for just one year. The more common models were live-out nannies (three in my sample), live-out children (seven in my sample, the situation in which the child is cared for in the nanny’s home and goes home to the parents at night), and live-in children (four in my sample, the situation in which the child lives with the nanny at least five days a week; some children go to their parents’ place for the weekend, while others are visited by their parents every day or one day at week at the nanny’s home). Each of these models presents different challenges to nanny–parent and nanny–child ties. While live-out nannies complained that from the beginning of their caregiving the mothers added new responsibilities to their workload (such as washing the dishes or hanging the laundry), nannies of live-in and live-out children appreciated that they could provide the caregiving at their own places. Ms. Zvonková, a post-1989 mother of one child, described the importance of the place as follows: Home is home, you know. It’s different. Sometimes it happens that, for example, Lili had chicken pox and the parents wanted me to be at their place. And I said, no way, absolutely not! I told them I would not look after her at their place. I have my son who needs me and I have to take care of him. I would refuse such a job. From the beginning the condition has always been that I do it in my home. I don’t go anywhere. No. Ms. Orlová, a pre-1989 mother, recalled how happy she had been when she retired at the age of 58. She said she had been tired of commuting to work for her whole life, and she emphasized this experience while recollecting the short time that she was able to spend at home with her two children—six months and one year—and the impossibility of being present as a grandmother for her grandchildren because of her participation on the labor market. On the other hand, however, following an active pre-retirement life, she had sought entertainment after retirement, some activity that would fill her days. She did not want to continue working full time outside the home. Becoming the nanny of live-in children was therefore a perfect solution for her. For Ms. Orlová, the situation of paid care in her home was also important for another reason, as the following quotation shows. Ms. Orlová: I wouldn’t want someone to look at me as a servant. Q: And have you ever experienced that? Ms. Orlová: No, I haven’t, but I cannot imagine being a servant. That is why I prefer to take the child to my home rather than being in their house, where I’d have to do all sorts of things like cleaning and so on. These two examples illuminate the role of spatiality in the nannies’ understanding of the status of caregiving. Ms. Orlová links performing caregiving in the Vietnamese family’s household with servanthood—in the sense of expanding her responsibilities (the vision that then she should do household chores, not only caregiving) and in the meaning of a lower position in relation to the mother. Ms. Zvonková emphasizes that performing paid caregiving in her own household is necessary for maintaining autonomy and independence from and superiority over the mothers as de facto employers. What these two examples clearly show is that the negotiations of space and the content of the nanny’s responsibilities are part of their negotiations of their selves. This is most evident in how Ms. Orlová thinks about herself, as being everything but a servant. In her view, working in the household of the employers would mean she is in the inferior position and would also mean a loss of control over her self. To these women, providing care in their own households means that they are the sole mistress of their time and organizers of their daily routines with children, hidden from the mothers’ gaze and commands. The importance of the spatial arrangements of paid care must be seen in the context of the nannies’ caring biographies. Although it is manifested for both nannies through the refusal to work outside of their own homes, the manifestation has different roots for each. On the one hand, Ms. Orlová, as a representative of pre-1989 mothers, having experienced the socialist model of working motherhood and in her view intensive participation on the labor market, feels a desire after retirement for entertainment combined with a lack of interest in working outside her home. Both of these wishes are met in her role as a nanny for a live-in child. On the other, Ms. Zvonková’s incentives to keep her household as a place for performing paid caregiving are found in her desire to be a present mother for her son (who was, at the time of the interview, 12 years old). The testimony of Ms. Zvonková brings us to the second important point in how nannies make sense of paid caregiving: their mobilization of the ranking between mothers and “good motherhood.” Obviously, the ideas and ideals about good motherhood are culturally specific and they mean different things for nannies who mothered before 1989 and those mothering after 1989. Ms. Křepelková, a post-1989 mother of two children, wondered in the interview “why they [Vietnamese parents] have children when then they only work.” Similarly, Ms. Jestřábová highlighted that the mothers should enjoy their mothering by being at home and so make use of the opportunities which the post-1989 state offers to women. She said: I have never understood it [why Vietnamese mothers return to work so early]. I even discussed it with my sister. She returned to work when her child was two years old. And I told her: ‘Petra, why don’t you enjoy maternal leave and your baby? You won’t see how he grows up and then you’ll regret it!’ And now she regrets it, of course she does. Similar statements also appeared in interviews with other nannies, who said “I could not do it” or “I would not have the heart and stomach for it” in reference to the mothers’ decision to delegate child care. These statements employ what Uttal (1993 in Uttal and Tuominen 1999) calls “moral hierarchies”—judgments about other mother’s mothering. These hierarchies were a powerful tool which nannies used to build up and protect their gendered subjectivities as full-time caregivers. In their accounts, there is a strong link between womanhood and caregiving—the former is constructed through the latter and consequently caregiving becomes “the expression of women’s natural, social and moral identity” (McMahon 1995, 24; see also Nelson, 1994). The delegation of child care in Vietnamese families challenges what these Czech nannies see as the “normal” (because supported by the state family policies) and only correct way of mothering in contemporary Czech Republic. Consequently, they describe Vietnamese mothers as cold, emotionally inexpressive, caring little, only working, etc. All of these characteristics—observed and reported in the interviews with the nannies—are the expression of mothers failing as mothers but above all failing as women (see also Macdonald 2010; McMahon 1995; Nelson 1994). The nannies with previous experience as working mothers demonstrated more understanding toward the Vietnamese mothers’ breadwinning activity. Ms. Kolibříková recalled the benefits that her employer provided her when she had small children. These included the shortened work hours which enabled her to take her children to and from kindergarten and changed work hours during summer when she went to work in the afternoon and her husband or her mother took care of the children in the afternoon. “Nowadays you have to look for nannies if you do not have grandmothers or grandfathers and you have to go back to work,” she said. Other nannies with the experience of balancing work and life before 1989 recalled that the situation of mothers was radically different then. In contrast to Ms. Kolibříková’s view, they brought up the short maternity leave and the state nurseries which their children attended beginning in early childhood. “It was like that” or “it was just normal,” said my interviewees when talking about the double shifts they experienced; some of them appreciated the current options available to mothers. These nannies did not directly criticize the mothers’ decision to work; rather, they expressed pity for the mothers because they cannot enjoy the moments with their children—either because they want to work or because they must work in order to prepare a better future for their children. From these parts of the narratives, it seemed, surprisingly, that these women (former working mothers) preferred an ideal of stay-at-home mothering. The nannies claim independence from the mothers; however, this independence in the daily organization of caregiving is only on the surface. This superficial independence masks the deep interdependence between the nannies and the mothers. It is an interdependence at the level of gendered subjectivities—in the constitution of preferable mothering trajectories and gendered caring biographies. The nannies constitute their identities as care workers around the following interrelated dichotomies: maintaining autonomy versus obedience to the children’s mothers; being an independent caregiver versus being a dependent caregiver who has to take orders from and thus is subordinate to the child’s mother; and being in a superior versus an inferior position in the nanny–mother relationship. Paradoxically, the more childcare responsibilities that the nannies take on, the freer they feel from the mother’s gaze and control. In other words, the more the nanny’s life is centered on the needs of the child, the less the nannies feel that they are in the service of the parents. Put simply, the nannies employ the strategy of denying the work-like character of paid caregiving in order to maintain their autonomy in circumstances in which they are selling their social-reproductive labor to employers. They do so in an environment in which stay-at-home motherhood is a preferable model and a norm which the women should follow and where paying for care is not a common strategy of motherhood. “I Would Do Anything for the Girl”: Closeness, Intimacy, and Emotions in Caregiving Non-Work In the previous section, I discussed how the work character of care work is articulated in the nannies’ relationship with the mothers. Now I will explore how the nannies make sense of the work/non-work distinction in relation to the children they care for. I will limit my analysis to two topics in order to maintain coherence with the previous section: the issue of spatiality—in terms of sharing space with children—and emotionality—attachment to and detachment from the child. I explained the importance of the spatial arrangement of care for the nannies’ independence from the mothers and for maintaining their autonomy as independent caregivers. The organization of space is particularly important for the nannies’ relationships with the children because it fundamentally impacts the intensity of their contact and the mutual sharing of everydayness. If the child lives at the nanny’s, the nanny’s place becomes, for a limited period of the child’s life, a home. The children are provided with their own equipment—including beds, clothes, toys, etc. In many cases, the child’s comfort is achieved only when the comfort of the nanny is, for the moment, side-lined. Ms. Dudková, who looks after two Vietnamese live-in siblings from Monday to Friday, described how the children sleep in her and her partner’s bedroom, while she and her partner sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. The additional room in their three-room apartment serves as the playroom for the cared-for children and their guests. Ms. Kosová, the nanny of one boy (now aged 17) recalled how she and her husband cohabitated with the little boy: We reconstructed everything; he had his baby bed, everything. He had his own room and the door was open to our bedroom. It was the same as when we had our kids. And sometimes it happened that he came and whoosh into our bed and he was there with us. This statement demonstrates how the boundaries of intimacy and closeness between the nanny (and her partner or other cohabitants respectively) and the child are negotiated. It is not only the reconstruction of the space and the creation of a children’s room but also the small details squeezed into every inch of the nannies’ household which indicate that becoming a nanny goes hand in hand with the transformation of the household atmosphere. The fact that the nannies are never without children does not mean that their work life overwhelms their private life but rather that they consider the children and child care as being fully integrated into their private, non-work lives. The spatial arrangements of caregiving have varying effects on the nannies’ ties with the parents and with the children. The narratives reveal what limits the nannies set on the scope of their work, which could be summed up as follows: I’d rather my home and every minute of my day be devoted to the children than (any of it) to their parents. The examples of sharing the common space are also articulated demonstrations of the bonds and temporal inseparability of the nanny-child dyad. This dyad is important both for the bonds which develop between nannies and children and for the manifestations of the exclusivity or superiority vis-à-vis mothers who are not part of these bonds. As the child spends more time with the nanny than with the parents, it is usually more often the nannies who provide for the emotional needs of children. Nannies welcome the emotional ties which develop between themselves and the children (Souralová 2015b). There are two main reasons for the appreciation of emotionality between care-giver and care-receiver, each of which is specific for the two groups of women. First, for the women whose motherhood took place before 1989, the paid caregiving is an opportunity to experience the at-home intensive care that they could not experience with their own children or grandchildren because they participated in the labor market. And second, for the women mothering after 1989, the emotional investment in children was explained as an effort to compensate the children for their absent mother’s love and—following the model of post-1989 motherhood—to give the children what their mothers cannot give them. The fact that the nannies welcome the emotional ties with children, however, does not mean that they are not cautious about the consequences these ties can have when the paid caregiving terminates. Some of them therefore employ what Nelson (1994) and Macdonald (2010) call “detached attachment.” This term perfectly expresses the main boundaries within paid caregiving. It is the outcome of how naturally an attachment to the cared-for child is born, but at the same time how necessary it is to establish a sense of detachment from the child. The following statement from the interview with Ms. Brhlíková clearly shows that achieving detached attachment is a conscious process that nannies practice in order to protect their feelings and emotional investment: I keep saying to myself I don’t know what I’ll do when she starts kindergarten one day. I somehow have to try to keep a distance. I can’t be so attached to her. … The kindergarten is open till 4 pm, so I could pick her up and be with her till 7 pm when her mother comes home. We console ourselves with the idea that she might get sick as soon as she starts kindergarten and I could be with her. It would be terrible to be without her all of a sudden. In her reflections on the possible end of her relationship with the girl she cares for, Ms. Brhlíková consolidates two contradictory (sets of) feelings involved in the caregiving process. On the one hand, paid caregiving satisfies her need to be needed and her need for emotional fulfilment. On the other hand, she is aware that the sense of well-being she derives from caring for the child is temporary and may be lost at any time—that is why she talks about establishing a distance (Nelson 1994). The loss that Ms. Brhlíková anticipates as inevitable was experienced by Ms. Křepelková. Ms. Křepelková was the only nanny in the sample who had experienced the end of a caregiving arrangement and this had the effect of transforming her work identity and the degree of emotional attachment she invested in subsequent care arrangements (see also Macdonald, 2010). Well, like I say, it was terrible [when my first caregiving arrangement reached an end]. You get used to a baby, then she grows up, and then there’s another little baby. Now I take it as a job, but the first time, when they come and take the child back, mentally, what that does, it’s a terrible, tremendous blow. And when you and the child can’t see each other anymore, all of a sudden she’s gone. Ms. Křepelková’s narrative sheds light on how the nannies have to balance between the managed and conscious rationality of detachment and the spontaneous and unconscious emotionality of attachment in response to the way in which caregiving is so closely tied up with emotional involvement. Work is associated with rationality, while emotionality is a feature of non-work life—and this distinction is articulated by the nannies in the interviews. Consequently, when rational detachment is achieved and emotional attachment is put aside, the nanny becomes a care worker and can say “now I take it as a job.” Ms. Křepelková’s experience was unique in my sample as she was the only one who, when she spoke of emotions, described her role as work. The other nannies had the opposite experience and they (including Ms. Brhlíková) described the emotion-giving and emotion-receiving as an important reward of paid caregiving and a sign of its status as something other than work. Nevertheless, whether they endorsed emotionality or suppressed it, all their accounts support the same argument—emotional involvement is the key barrier to their interpreting caregiving as a job. This is evident in the definition of caregiving proposed by Ms. Jestřábová. When I asked her if she sees paid caregiving as work, she replied: I don’t consider it work. The little girl, it’s like she’s mine, you know? So it’s not a job. I imagine a job to be something very different [laughs]. It’s refreshing when they [the children] come to my place, they run into my apartment. But it’s definitely not a job. The strong ties between the nannies and the children in many—if not all—cases lead to the development of kinship ties between them. The nannies feel like the children’s aunt (when they are similar in age to the parents) or grandmother (when they are older). Such ties further complicate the work status of care work because many nannies—especially the “grandmothers”—do not (or do not want to) make a distinction between the activity of caring for their own grandchildren and that of caring for the Vietnamese children. For example, when these nannies talk about themselves and enumerate how many grandchildren they have, they include the Vietnamese “grandchild” on the list. This indicates that the nannies form what could be called “pure relations” with them, which means that “the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship can deliver” (Giddens 1991, 6). Simply put, the intimacy and emotionality that are an inherent part of paid caregiving prevent nannies from seeing paid caregiving as work. For them, emotional attachments can flourish only in the realm of non-work, while work life is based on very different principles—such as rationality (emotional detachment), effectiveness, and efficiency, which are valued in work life (see also Lutz 2011). Concluding Remarks The Czech Republic witnessed a profound change in the organization of child care and mothering ideals after the fall of communism in 1989. This change included the shift from the socialist model of working motherhood and support for women’s employment to the promotion of separate gender roles and support for stay-at-home motherhood, and the shift from the collectivization of child care (support of state nurseries) to its individualization (support for mothers to take child care onto their own shoulders and the rapid decrease of state nurseries in the 1990s). In such a cultural and political context, women navigate their gendered subjectivities and postsocialist caring biographies. It is a context in which paying for care is not a common part of the lives of families. However, there is one exception—the Vietnamese immigrant families, which are significant consumers of paid caregiving. While only 1–2 percent of families in the Czech Republic seek private nannies, according to estimates they are sought by 80–95 percent of Vietnamese families (Souralová 2015a). This article focused on nannies working in these families. By foregrounding their quotidian boundary-making between care work as work and as non-work, the article illuminates the persistent tensions in care work definitions that contribute to the low level of recognition accorded to this (paid or unpaid) activity. It showed that nannies reject the idea that the caregiving they perform for money is regular work. This concluding section will provide a clue to understanding the incentives behind this refusal or even denial. First, the nannies do not (or do not want to) see caregiving work as work because they want to protect the authenticity of their feelings for the children they care for and to become the guardians of the authenticity of the care they provide. They are struggling against the monetarization and instrumentalization of the nanny–child relationship and argue that authentic care includes not only the daily care for the child but also really (meaning: coming from the heart) caring about the child and the real exchange of emotions between the nanny and the child. The nannies find in paid caregiving the satisfaction of their need to be needed, which shapes their moral identities. Such moral needs originate in their culturally specific comprehension of how “good care” should look. The ideals of care which are now part of the nannies’ caring biographies were shaped under two different regimes—before and after 1989—and they can only be fully understood as the outcomes of this historic, political, and cultural specificity. For nannies, this is an important aspect of how they understand their role in the children’s lives and the role of children in their lives. Paid care work, as well as non-paid kin care, is poorly valued—both financially and symbolically. As Bauer and Österle argue, “often it is the moral and the emotional aspects of care work that lack recognition” (Bauer and Österle 2013, 462). The nannies endeavor to receive recognition of their devotion or even of the sacrifices they make for the children, their impact on the children’s wellbeing, and their investment in shaping the children’s personality. Their contribution to the child’s development would be diminished if all of this were seen as “just” a part of the execution of their work duties, and not as driven by their devotion, self-sacrifice, and personal/emotional commitment. Simply put, when protecting the authenticity of their feelings, the nannies say that “pure” caregiving can only be done when the nannies really love the children in their care; the nannies’ caregiving is authentic because it is not done (only) for money. Through this strategy, the nannies can very clearly see (and present) their caregiving work as part of their caring biographies—as the extension of the motherhood they do (post-1989 mothers) or of the motherhood and grandmotherhood they could not do as intensively as they would now retrospectively have appreciated (pre-1989 mothers). Articulating this logic, the nannies draw upon the principles of non-paid kin caregiving and transmit them to paid caregiving. In doing so, they are implicitly stating that only unpaid caregiving is valuable. The nannies are therefore providing a service they do not believe in (Nelson 1994), and in order to make it a meaningful part of their mental map, they insist on the non-work character of paid caregiving—emphasizing the emotional relationship with the child and denying the importance of money, rationality, and the employment-like relationship with the parents. Second, the nannies refuse to define caregiving as work in order to resist the commodification of their personalities (on commodification, see Ungerson 1997). When constituting their care work identities, the nannies seek to protect the integrity of their personalities and resist becoming the property of their employers (Anderson 2000). To protect their personal identities and to demarcate the boundary between being a nanny (a role oriented toward the child) and being a servant (a role characterized by subordination to the parents), the nannies highlight their interdependence with the child and independence from the parents. In their narratives, “boss” figures are irrelevant—the nannies present themselves as their own bosses and so free themselves from the daily gaze of employers. On the other hand, they erase any boundaries between themselves and the cared-for children and form with them a (kin) unit, sharing intimacy, familiarity, and memories. The nannies mobilize these dependencies in order to protect their autonomy and integrity. In doing so, the definition of their role is the following: the nannies are not selling a caregiving service to the parents; rather, they are providing caregiving to the children. Consequently, they are giving the children the best of themselves, while not selling a single piece of themselves to the parents. Third, the nannies refuse to define caregiving in terms of employment because they seek to emphasize their agency and free will and to disengage themselves from economic relations and the labor market. Hoerder (2015, 106, italics in original) highlights that Since over the centuries—millennia in fact—women have also chosen domestic-caregiving labor, their reasons and options need to be assessed (and accepted with respect) in addition to the analysis of the frames of inequalities. For the nannies in my sample, paid caregiving is a chosen activity—it allows them to free themselves from external pressures: the labor market, economic necessity, and the biological roles that are taken for granted. Being a nanny is a voluntary role to which the nannies turn in a particular stage of their lives. What does caregiving work mean to these women, if it is not work? The nannies “just” like doing it because it fulfils their gendered subjectivities—despite the fact that paid child care is usually seen as precarious work bringing less recognition. Some of the women in my sample want to be emancipated from the “annoying” labor market and continue being full-time mothers to their children and so develop the preferable model of caregiving promoted by family policies after 1989. Other women become nannies in order to enjoy being full-time caregivers, acting as present intensive grandmothers for Vietnamese children, as they could not be with their own children as state socialism preferred a different model. For them especially, the financial aspect plays a marginal role in their decisions. Denying the economic side of caregiving is a strategy to elevate the role of the free will and suppress the image of nannies as “pawns” on the chessboard of economic relations. At the same time, this strategy is the nannies’ way of responding to the devaluation of social-reproductive activities and of those who perform them. In many cases, the nannies idealize paid caregiving, construing it as an activity from which they derive self-realization, self-actualization, and contentment. In sum, the nannies have several reasons for refusing to see paid caregiving as work. However, in doing so, they reinforce a perception of paid caregiving more generally as not being a form of work, and they may even contribute to its devaluation (Bourne and Calás 2013). When they claim that caregiving is “just something they do in their leisure time,” they present the tasks of caregiving as “natural,” routine, and “easy to do.” In her analysis of the “shadow work” of nannies, Macdonald (1998, 31) writes: “Our common-sense understanding of what ‘counts’ as work obscures work that is unpaid, work that takes place in the private sphere, and interactive work traditionally performed by women.” The women who perform unpaid work also shape this common-sense understanding of work and non-work activities. By critically reviewing the nannies’ narratives about constituting their roles and identities, we can see how the nannies contribute to shadowing the care work and to reproducing the gender-stereotyped division between work and non-work. It is not the intent of this article to romanticize the altruistic motivations of nannies to become and be nannies. On the contrary, while addressing the ambiguous character of caregiving work that is perceived by nannies, it provides an insight into the nature and aspects of this activity that need to be acknowledged if social-reproductive tasks are to achieve recognition. Table 1 Profile of interviewees Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Table 1 Profile of interviewees Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Adéla Souralová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology (Social Anthropology Program) and Office for Population Studies, Masaryk University in Brno. In her research, she concentrates on the issues of paid care, migration, and sociology of family. She has published a book titled New Perspectives on Mutual Dependency in Care-Giving (Ashgate, 2015), several chapters in edited volumes (Ashgate, Routledge, Brill), and articles in international journals (Childhood, Journal of Family Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ageing and Society, and Journal for Masculinity Studies). ORCID: 0000-0002-2599-4094 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adela_Souralova2https://muni.academia.edu/Ad%C3%A9laSouralov%C3%A1 Funding This work was supported by Specific Research at the Office for Population Studies (MUNI/A/1151/2015). References Acker Joan. 2006 . Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations . Gender & Society 20 ( 4 ): 441 – 64 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Andall Jacqueline. 2003 . Hierarchies and Interdependence: The Emergence of a Service Caste in Europe. 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Going global: The transnationalization of care . Development and Change 42 ( 4 ): 1109 – 30 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS PubMed Footnotes 1 All names have been changed. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Social Politics Oxford University Press

Postsocialist Caring Biographies: Care Work between Work and Non-Work

Social Politics , Volume Advance Article (2) – Mar 30, 2018

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Oxford University Press
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© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
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1072-4745
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1468-2893
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10.1093/sp/jxy011
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Abstract

Abstract This article examines the ambiguous status of paid care work by focusing on how nannies make sense of paid care work. Drawing on fifteen in-depth interviews with Czech nannies caring for second-generation Vietnamese immigrant children, the article seeks answers to the following questions: How are postsocialist caring biographies and gendered subjectivities shaped in paid child care and how do they shape the understanding/meaning of (paid) care work? This article aims to bring a local experience to the global discussion while emphasizing the need for an examination of the cultural and political context in which nannies provide paid caregiving. Introduction Many scholars focusing on the delegation of domestic work argue that care work and social-reproductive labor are barely recognized as regular work, regardless of whether this is performed by family members or “hired hands” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Lutz 2008, 2011; Uttal and Tuominen 1999, etc.). Macdonald (1998, 2010) describes child care as “shadow work” drawing on Illich’s definition of such work as an “entirely different form of unpaid work which an industrial society demands as a necessary complement to the production of goods and services” (Macdonald 1998, 31; see Illich 1981, 99–100). Such work—“naturally feminine”—is usually “invisible work” because “much of it is difficult to conceptualize in market exchange terms” (ibid). Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001, 9) describes the peculiar status of domestic work that is “distinctive not in being the worst job of all but in being regarded as something other than employment.” She gives many examples of how both employers and employees reproduce this peculiarity and ambiguity of paid caregiving. While employers tend to see care work as “not real work,” employees refer to it as to their “hobby” instead of employment, even though it is a full-time breadwinning activity. In her research on domestic workers in contemporary Germany, Lutz (2011) reaches a different or even opposing conclusion. She shows that both the employers of domestic workers and the employees themselves have gone “to great pains to ‘normalize’ the work, i.e. to characterize it as a perfectly normal employment relationship” (Lutz 2011, 75). Her analysis presents many examples of how such normalization occurs on both sides. While the employers, for example, “outline the picture of a functionally differentiated society in which each member performs a particular task and is paid for it” (ibid.), the employees’ normalization strategies “correspond to a wish to construct a positive work identity, and hence a perspective in which they are active players” (ibid, 76). The character of paid child care is then quite ambiguous, uncertain, and filled with tension. Despite this, the centrality of the cultural and political contexts of gendered subjectivities in paid child care is not recognized and is taken for granted. As a case study of particular caring relations emerging in a specific sociocultural context, this article aims to bring a local experience to the global discussion while emphasizing the need for an examination of cultural and political context. Drawing upon interviews with Czech nannies who provide care for second-generation Vietnamese children in the Czech Republic, the article seeks answers to the following main questions: How are postsocialist caring biographies and gendered subjectivities shaped in paid child care and how do they shape the understanding/meaning of (paid) care work as work and non-work? I am interested in how the nannies understand their role in caregiving work and what it means to be a caregiving worker. In order to capture the complexity of the possible meanings, I argue for the need to see these meanings in a particular cultural and political context. To see how the gendered subjectivities of caregivers are created in historical and political dynamics, I develop the notion of postsocialist caring biographies. The term “caring biographies” was introduced by Chamberlayne and King (2000). They suggested understanding care as a “biographical project, in which past life events and experiences, expectations and aspirations for the future, as well as the present circumstances, are formatively involved in the development of informal care” (Chamberlayne and King 2000, 129). The authors emphasize that both caring and being a carer are actively (re)negotiated and that “caring is an active and potentially transformative process, in which carers need to adjust their perspectives of their own lives to accommodate caring into their own life perspectives” (ibid, 130). Drawing upon their work, I pay attention to how the caring biographies of the interviewed nannies have developed in the specific political and cultural contexts of two different political regimes, separated by the milestone of 1989 and the fall of communism. I use the term postsocialist to characterize these caring biographies in order to emphasize how the shift of regimes, accompanied by the transformation of family policies, changes in the organization of child care, and altered mothering strategies inscribe and find expression in the biographies of the interviewed women and in their reflection on the meaning of care work as work and non-work. Postsocialist caring biographies include the interplay between the micro level of gendered subjectivities, expectations, and individual strategies and the macro level of the political and cultural contexts that are central to them. With this focus, the article contributes to ongoing debates on care work. It shows what it means to be a nanny in a postsocialist country where only 1–2 percent of families hire nannies (Hašková 2008; for postsocialist specificity, see Hrženjak 2012; Tkach and Hrženjak 2016). The case study of non-migrant nannies working for migrant families tears the established understanding of paid child care from the economic frame and precarious situations and opens a space for addressing the gendered subjectivities in paid care. The article, above all, shows that the nannies refuse to see paid caregiving as work and this rejection is essential to their self-perception as gendered human beings. In many regards, the findings presented here are against the widely accepted assumption that domestic/care workers do everything they can to be recognized as workers and that such recognition is an essential step toward improving their lives and working conditions. My article begins by briefly describing the basic work/non-work dilemma in caregiving which gives this activity an ambiguous character. Then I present the data and methods of research and the analytical strategy. The third section develops the notion of postsocialist caring biographies while investigating how the nannies whom I interviewed describe their previous experiences with caregiving (as mothers and grandmothers) and with their balancing between work and non-work (family) life. The fourth part of the article focuses on how nannies articulate the work/non-work character of paid caregiving in relation to mothers and to cared-for children. Finally, the conclusion addresses the reasons behind the nannies’ refusal to see caregiving work as work. At the same time, it deals with what the nannies’ narratives can say about the role of paid caregiving in the constitution of gendered subjectivities in postsocialist Czech Republic. Work, Non-Work, and Care Work: Sources of Ambiguity in Paid Care This article investigates how paid caregivers understand the character of paid caregiving and explores the articulations of work and non-work divides in their narratives. Such articulations take place in a wider socio-cultural context in which the nature of work and non-work in contemporary (Western) societies is changing. While the post-war era has been characterized by the myth of a divided world in which work and non-work are considered strictly separate parts of life (Kanter 1977), Ramarajan and Reid (2013) argue that this myth has never matched the actual experiences of people. However, they add, it has shaped the design of work in many organizations. Contemporary understanding of the work and non-work interface shifts and re-shapes the boundaries between the two domains—domestic identities often spill over into the workplace and work identities sometimes cross into home life (Hochschild 1997). There are several reasons for this shift. Ramarajan and Reid (2013) see the explanations in declining job security, increasing work diversity, and the spread of communication technology (see also Kreiner, Hollensbe, and Sheep 2009). Geurts and Demerouti (2003) argue that the old segregation between work and non-work paralleled gender segregation—work was associated with masculinity and non-work with femininity. With the feminization of the workforce and the emergence of dual-earner couples, the distinction partly lost its relevance. Similarly, James (2014, 274) connects the dismantling of the work and non-work separation with its inappropriate gendered connotations and with the “rejection of the masculinist myth of the disembodied ‘ideal worker’ …, for whom work is primary, time available to work unlimited, and the demands of family and personal life insignificant.” The fact that wage labor was historically associated with “men’s work” while unwaged/domestic/unpaid work became “women’s work” is written in the structure of work organizations (Acker 2006), and this impacts the (d)evaluation of tasks performed outside the work logic, including (paid) caregiving and domestic work. Household and caregiving work are seen as “not-real work, thus devaluing over again practices and activities usually associated with the private and feminine while upholding the value of the public and the masculine” (Bourne and Calás 2013, 434). Work is coded as a productive activity which takes place in the public space, while non-work is associated with social-reproductive tasks performed in the private sphere. When a typically social-reproductive activity becomes a productive (breadwinning) one, the doubts about its status come to the fore, as the prevailingly ambiguous character of care and domestic work repeatedly show. These common-sense meanings of work/non-work distinctions are inscribed in how domestic/care workers and those who hire them understand their roles and value the tasks they do or they pay for. Care work is an activity that “lies at the juncture of different kinds of articulation of work and non-work,” writes Lyon (2010). She sees three main boundaries within care work which can be expressed in the following binaries: (1) love or money; (2) morality versus instrumentality; and (3) from professional demarcations to embeddedness in everyday life. In her comparative analysis of these articulations in four European countries (England, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands), Lyon argues that despite the growing interest in care work in the last couple of decades, the boundaries and intersections between work and non-work remain vague—both in research on care work and in research on work and employment generally. However, this does not mean that researchers have not focused on the borders and boundary makings within paid child care. On the contrary, extensive research has been conducted on the tensions and ambiguities in paid care that illuminate the critical points around which the comprehension of care work as work and non-work turns. Researchers have addressed the spatiality of paid care, dealing with what happens when the home becomes a workplace (Lutz 2008). For example, in her research on Filipina domestic workers in Taiwanese households, Lan (2003) employs the notion of socio-spatial boundaries in reference to the borders of domesticity and privacy that are “particularly vital in the employment of migrant domestic workers, who usually live in the homes of their employers” (Lan 2003, 526). Similarly, Martin-Matthews (2007) illuminates how space and relationships between care-givers and care-receivers are negotiated when a home becomes the site of overlapping life spheres. Murray (1998, 149) writes that nannies “conduct their care giving labor in the borderlands of family life.” This means that they provide children with the essence of family life, which requires intimacy and emotionality, but they nonetheless remain hired hands (and hearts) that are being paid for caring. The issue of emotionality is a tension-generating aspect of care work which has attracted the attention of many scholars (Aronson and Neysmith 1996; Lan 2003; Lyon 2010; Nelson 1990). Margaret K. Nelson developed a very useful term for this practice of negotiating the emotional investment in cared-for children (1990; see also Macdonald 1998, 2010). Drawing on Hochschild’s work on emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), Nelson formulated the concept of “detached attachment,” which refers to how care workers balance between showing enough, but not too much, affection to the children they care for; the term also captures the conflicting feelings care workers have when they are caring for another mother’s child. Within these ambiguities and tensions, care workers construct and negotiate their gendered subjectivities and vis-à-vis their employers constitute who they are by demarcating themselves from what they are not (see Davidoff 1974; Palmer 1990). While previous studies examined how the identities of nannies are constructed along the divides of class and ethnicity or nationality and citizenship (Andall 2003; Glenn 1992; Lan 2003; Lutz and Pallenga-Möllenbeck 2012) in the context of transnationalization of care (Erel 2012; Yeates 2011), this article investigates the sources of the meanings of individual paid care and the negotiation of the gendered subjectivities of nannies who care for second-generation Vietnamese children in the postsocialist cultural and political context. Data and Methods This paper is based on the analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews conducted with native Czech nannies working for Vietnamese immigrant families. These nannies work in response to a demand among first-generation Vietnamese parents for paid caregivers to look after their second-generation children. Vietnamese immigrants are currently the third largest group of immigrants in the Czech Republic. The history of Vietnamese immigration to this country dates back to the 1970s, when agreements on mutual assistance were signed between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Vietnamese Socialist Republic (Williams and Baláž 2005). The collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia introduced a problem into the lives of Vietnamese immigrants, as their status became unclear and they either had to find a legal way to remain in Czechoslovakia with a kind of new residence permit, return to Vietnam, or move further west. If they chose the first option, one way to get a residence permit was to obtain a trade license (Brouček 2003). This was part of what started the development of an immigrant economy. The people for whom the nannies in my interviews work are all self-employed entrepreneurs who own either clothing shops, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, or nail studios. Running their own business is time-consuming, and this breadwinning activity of men and women is therefore one of the reasons that the parents need to hire nannies. To explore this particular case study of immigrant families that hire native nannies, I conducted fifty interviews with nannies (fifteen), mothers (fifteen), and children (twenty). My research focused only on mothers. I did not conduct interviews with fathers, not because they do not play any role in the childcare decisions but because I was interested only in the specific strategy of mothering performed by the women who delegated (together with their partners or husbands) child care. The initial aim of my research was to explore mothering practices and woman-to-woman relationships in paid caregiving. From the interviews conducted with mothers, children, and nannies, I know that fathers were part of the decision to delegate child care and they were part of the daily negotiations with nannies, though to a lesser extent than the mothers. In these cases, the selection of who communicates with the nannies was driven by the language skills of the parents. The purpose of this original research was to illuminate the character of inter-personal, inter-generational, and inter-ethnic ties between nannies, children, and mothers. I analyzed these relations through the lens of mutual dependence (Souralová 2015a). In the fifteen in-depth interviews that I conducted with the nannies, I sought to examine the dynamics of the relationships between nannies and children and nannies and mothers, and the continuity and changes in the life courses of the women in the sample. In order to trace both the dynamics and the continuity of the relationships created and maintained between nannies and families, I looked for women who were in contact with a cared-for child: they were either currently taking care of a child (seven nannies in my sample) or they had done so in the past and still maintained a relationship of some type with the child (eight nannies in my sample, see Table 1). The sample of nannies was gathered through second-generation Vietnamese children. I approached the children with the question of whether they knew anybody who had a nanny. Then they provided me with contacts for both current and former nannies. All of the nannies (except one) had one basic thing in common when they started working as paid caregivers: they were receiving some form of financial support from the state. One nanny was on parental leave, nine were pensioners, four were unemployed, and one was employed (and took care of the child after work). This means that the nannies were available for enough time (in the day) to be able to perform the time-consuming work of caregiving and that they had a regular formal income from the state that made it possible to be nannies and be paid a relatively small amount of money “under the table”—the average salary of the nannies was one quarter of the average salary in the Czech Republic and slightly below the minimum wage. (This segment of the market with care is completely in the black market, with no written contracts. Hiring private nannies is not regulated by any policy; however, the work of care placement agencies is regulated by the Trade Licensing Act.) For the interviewed women, becoming nannies was not driven by financial need, as they received social support from the state and were not dependent on the income of their spouses. As to family status, four of the women were living on their own (either divorced or widowed), and were thus the sole breadwinners in their household. Eleven nannies lived with their partners. Fourteen nannies had children (five of them had children under the age of eighteen, seven of them had grandchildren), and one nanny was childless. The interviews with the nannies lasted 90–160 minutes. I asked questions about the nannies’ past and current experiences with unpaid and paid caregiving and the meaning of caregiving in women’s lives. I followed the understanding of caregiving proposed by King and Chamberlayne, namely that caregiving is a “biographical project, in which past life events and experiences, expectations and aspirations for the future, as well as the present circumstances, are formatively involved in the development of informal care” (Chamberlayne and King 2000, 129). The analysis proceeded in two interrelated directions. The first step was to diachronically contextualize paid caregiving in the women’s biographies in order to understand the place of paid caregiving in their life course. For this purpose, two steps were taken. First, I asked about the nannies’ experiences with caregiving, mothering, and grandmothering, and their responses provided me with both a description of how they performed the role of caregiver and an understanding of what the role means to them. I asked the following questions: Why and how did you become a nanny? How do you perceive your own mothering and/or grandmothering? How has the general notion of motherhood changed since you were a mother of little children?, etc. It was necessary to contextualize these descriptions and meanings in the socio-cultural and historical context that shaped the nannies’ care biographies; these are briefly presented in the following section. The second step was to create a complex picture of the role of nannies, synchronically, in the “here and now.” A synchronic perspective was achieved by asking the following questions: What does your day look like? What you usually do with the children? How would you characterize your role in the child’s life? What is your relationship with parents?, etc. This included looking at the daily routine of a nanny, what the job entails, the amount of decision making relating to the child that is assumed by the nanny, the pros and cons of this work, and, generally, how the nannies understand this role in relation to their other roles—for example, as mothers, grandmothers, wives, and friends. Postsocialist Caring Biographies: The Work and Non-Work Identities of Women before Becoming Nannies In this section, I will briefly explain the specific nature of postsocialist caring biographies. To do so, I draw upon both a literature review and an analysis of the interviews. In my sample, I can distinguish two groups of women according to the period during which they performed their mothering and which then had an essential impact on the formation of their comprehension of how child care should be organized and performed by a woman. The experience of mothering shapes the daily practice of caring for the Vietnamese child and provides nannies with a point of reference for ideas and ideals about care (work) generally. Eight women in my sample mothered their children before 1989 under the socialist ideal of working motherhood and the state support of collective child care. On the other hand, seven women became mothers in the early 1990s, exactly in the period of postsocialist transition. These two groups vary to a huge extent, as do their experiences with “socialist” and “postsocialist” contexts. For the women who were mothers before 1989, their caring biographies include both the period before 1989 and the period after 1989 as important resources and contexts in which the care was performed. The “post” in postsocialist for them indicates that their past experiences with being a carer (mother) in the socialist period are a part of being a nanny in the postsocialist period, and this past experience provides a lens for reflecting on the present activity. These nannies contrast pre-1989 and post-1989 situations while building the continuity of their own caring biographies around the discontinuity of the local contexts. For the women who became mothers in the early 1990s, only the period after 1989 is a key formative context for their own caring biographies, and “post” simply means “after.” In the state-socialist system, before 1989, socialist ideology stressed the emancipatory effect of participation in work outside the home, and the regime set up services to support women at work so they could take paid jobs; this incorporation of women into the labor market was presented (by the regime) as a sign of gender equality. The state provided services (e.g. support for state nurseries and kindergartens) that encouraged women’s employment while minimizing the conflicts between work and home life. Despite this, however, women continued to be fully responsible for the household chores and caregiving—after returning home from the workplace, they began their second shift. This double burden characterized the “gender politics of communism” (Stenning and Hardy 2005, 504). The traditional roles and gendered division of labor within the family were not recognized under state socialism and therefore were not questioned or criticized (Einhorn 1993; Hašková 2005b). Einhorn (1993, 40) observes that “state socialism “emancipated” women not as equal citizens, but as worker-mothers. … The maternal role ascribed to women in the dominant discourse was constructed as a social duty to bear and rear the ‘socialist citizens of the future’.” Eight of the fifteen nannies in my sample who became mothers before 1989 had experienced this model. Ms. Dudková, a former primary school teacher, described her mothering experience in the following words: My son was born in 1965, and that was a time when you had to go to work. I was lucky that it was the summer holidays then, so I started work when he was six months old, otherwise mothers went back when the children were four months, and he went off to the nursery school. Things were like that then. … But it was hard. And my younger son was born in 1975 and at that time I could afford to stay home longer, so I spent one year with him.1 When recalling her mothering years, this nanny referred to the acceptable way of balancing work and home life. Her experience is also expressed in the quantitative data: Hašková (2005a) points out that in the 1960s, 61 percent of mothers stayed at home with their children for up to one year, 15 percent for one to two years, 17 percent for two to three years, and 7 percent for more than three years. Sirovátka and Saxonberg (2006, 192) describe the situation of women in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland as follows: “[I]n contrast to Western Europe, where women fought for the right to work, the communist regimes forced women to work whether they wanted to or not. Consequently, some women experienced work as state exploitation rather than a move towards liberalization. Thus, many women’s organizations in the early 1990s made the right for women to stay at home and be housewives one of their main demands” (see also Saxonberg 2001, 2003). After 1989, the postsocialist transformation brought about changes in gender roles, work roles, and work–life balance. Scholars have traced evidence of these shifts in changing family policies and have identified a trend toward re-familization (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006; Szelewa and Polakowski 2008) and genderization (Saxonberg 2012) in post-1989 Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The transformation period in the 1990s introduced new—and previously unknown—risks into the Czech(oslovak) labor market, including instability and unemployment, which disproportionately impacted women, who were the first to lose their jobs, and the restriction of state family policies (Valentová 2009). According to Sirovátka and Saxonberg (2006), the shift towards re-familizing family policies was manifested by a combination of: long maternity leave with a fixed replacement rate (total amount 220,000 CZK, approximately 8450 EUR) for all women regardless of their previous salary; the mothers can choose whether they stay at home with the child up to the age of 2, 3, or 4 years; this means that a parent can draw the money for 19 months (a monthly amount of almost 12,000 CZK) up to 43 months (at around 5,100 CZK a month). In 2012, when the research was conducted, the average salary in the Czech Republic was just over 24,000 CZK. Minimum wage in the same period was 8000 CZK per month, which means 48 CZK per hour. a radical decrease in the number of available spaces in nurseries for children under the age of 3 (see also Hašková, Saxonberg, and Mudrák 2012); the available state nurseries dropped from more than 1000 (placing almost 40,000 children) in 1990 to 43 (placing 1000 children) in 2011; the lack of state nurseries created an opportunity for for-profit actors to develop a private market with kindergartens and nurseries for children under 3 years old (Španielová 2017); and the absence of labor market policies aimed at helping people to balance work and family. The level of employment of women with children is low in the Czech Republic and it significantly rises only when the younger child is older than four years. Becoming a father does not change the patterns of men’s employment: 95 percent fathers of children under the age of 7 are employed (Hora 2009). This combination of changes reinforced the traditional, separate roles for men as breadwinners and women as caregivers (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006). In addition, these changes further strengthen the lack of demand for private nannies that is a shared trait of both pre-1989 and post-1989 reality. Before 1989, the presence of a nanny would have violated the illusory egalitarian ideology, and the dense network of state nurseries operated as work–life balance facilitators; after 1989, it seems that nannies are not needed because most mothers assume the childcare responsibilities themselves at the expense of their participation in the labor market. Other factors influencing the demand for nannies are support from grandparents, the absence of au pair schemes, the lack of foreigners, and problems of trust. As a result, seven of the women in my sample—post-1989 mothers—raised their children in a radically different environment characterized by a specific model of what the role of women and mothers entailed. After 1989, women started taking long parental leave: 5 percent of women stayed at home with their children for one year, 17 percent for one to two years, 51 percent for two to three years, and 27 percent for more than three years (Hašková 2005a). In addition, a very common pattern emerged of stringing together successive periods of parental leave uninterruptedly, in which mothers increasingly tended to complete their first parental leave with a second pregnancy and second term of parental leave, at the end of which they then returned to the labor market (Hašková 2011). Valentová (2009) notes that in many cases parental leave served as a temporary form of escape from unemployment and a strategy for achieving work–life balance. This was the case of some of the nannies interviewed. For example, Ms. Jestřábová and Ms. Křepelková became nannies right after their successive terms of parental leave ended. Each of these nannies have two children with whom they spent six years at home on parental leave before starting their careers as nannies. In these two cases, unpaid and paid caregiving became a means of long-term escape from the labor market. Ms. Jestřábová recalled the beginning of her career as a nanny as follows: My parental leave just terminated and I was unemployed. And I could not find a job that would be flexible and that would give me enough time to be with my children. And then they asked me if I wanted to become their nanny. And it was just perfect because I could be at home and have a regular income. The definitions of work and non-work differed in these two periods, and so did the interviewees’ descriptions of their roles as mothers, as is apparent in the short quote from the interview with Ms. Jestřábová. For those women who forged a work–life balance before 1989, which involved working full time and also taking advantage of the services of state-run nurseries, work and family are seen as compatible. A mother can both go to work and equally have a robust non-work identity. Conversely, intensively mothering mothers after 1989 had different options open to them. For many of them, parental leave offered a way to achieve a work–life balance. For these women, work and non-work (family life) are at odds with each other: mothers should not work, at least not before the child is ready for kindergarten or preferably for school. For the former group, becoming a nanny means the opportunity to experience caregiving full time, which they could not do before; for the latter group, it is a way to prolong intensive mothering. While the nannies in the former group expressed sympathy with and understanding for Vietnamese working mothers, the nannies in the latter group were rather critical in their judgments of the mothering of the Vietnamese mothers (see below). All in all, these historically and socio-culturally specific experiences of mothering and work/non-work definitions shaped the nannies’ interpretations of paid caregiving, and these are dealt with in the following section. Employers’ Servants and/or Children’s Loving Nannies? The interviewed nannies entered into paid caring relations with their own experiences, ideals, and aspirations about how care should be organized. These shape their caring biographies, which in turn provide them instructions about how to perform the care and how to include this paid activity into the repertoire of the roles they play. During my analysis, it became evident that the way nannies understand care work differs when they relate this activity to their employers and when they relate it to the cared-for children. In this section, I will explore how the nannies construct their gendered biographies when they provide paid caregiving, both in relation to the mothers and in relation to the children. “I am the Mistress of My Time”: Autonomy, illusory Independence, and Claimed Superiority The woman-to-woman relationship in situations in which child care is delegated is tricky. On the one hand, these women are related by the very fact that they share the care responsibilities of a child and they cooperate in order to provide the child with the best care. On the other hand, delegated child care is an arena in which mothering ideals are negotiated and contested. The nannies verbally establish their relationship with the mothers on two basic themes—their autonomy from the mothers and their superiority over them. The first theme tells us about the daily organization of caregiving and its implications; the second tells us about the nannies’ perception of the clash between the mothering ideals, ideas, and strategies that they themselves use and those performed by the mothers. First, the spatial organization of caregiving impacts the work content and hugely affects how nannies define their roles vis-à-vis mothers. The paid care in Vietnamese families can be organized in one of four models distinguished according to the spatial arrangements. These models are: live-in nanny, live-out nanny, live-out child, and live-in child. In my sample, there was only one live-in nanny who lived in the house of her employers, and she was there for just one year. The more common models were live-out nannies (three in my sample), live-out children (seven in my sample, the situation in which the child is cared for in the nanny’s home and goes home to the parents at night), and live-in children (four in my sample, the situation in which the child lives with the nanny at least five days a week; some children go to their parents’ place for the weekend, while others are visited by their parents every day or one day at week at the nanny’s home). Each of these models presents different challenges to nanny–parent and nanny–child ties. While live-out nannies complained that from the beginning of their caregiving the mothers added new responsibilities to their workload (such as washing the dishes or hanging the laundry), nannies of live-in and live-out children appreciated that they could provide the caregiving at their own places. Ms. Zvonková, a post-1989 mother of one child, described the importance of the place as follows: Home is home, you know. It’s different. Sometimes it happens that, for example, Lili had chicken pox and the parents wanted me to be at their place. And I said, no way, absolutely not! I told them I would not look after her at their place. I have my son who needs me and I have to take care of him. I would refuse such a job. From the beginning the condition has always been that I do it in my home. I don’t go anywhere. No. Ms. Orlová, a pre-1989 mother, recalled how happy she had been when she retired at the age of 58. She said she had been tired of commuting to work for her whole life, and she emphasized this experience while recollecting the short time that she was able to spend at home with her two children—six months and one year—and the impossibility of being present as a grandmother for her grandchildren because of her participation on the labor market. On the other hand, however, following an active pre-retirement life, she had sought entertainment after retirement, some activity that would fill her days. She did not want to continue working full time outside the home. Becoming the nanny of live-in children was therefore a perfect solution for her. For Ms. Orlová, the situation of paid care in her home was also important for another reason, as the following quotation shows. Ms. Orlová: I wouldn’t want someone to look at me as a servant. Q: And have you ever experienced that? Ms. Orlová: No, I haven’t, but I cannot imagine being a servant. That is why I prefer to take the child to my home rather than being in their house, where I’d have to do all sorts of things like cleaning and so on. These two examples illuminate the role of spatiality in the nannies’ understanding of the status of caregiving. Ms. Orlová links performing caregiving in the Vietnamese family’s household with servanthood—in the sense of expanding her responsibilities (the vision that then she should do household chores, not only caregiving) and in the meaning of a lower position in relation to the mother. Ms. Zvonková emphasizes that performing paid caregiving in her own household is necessary for maintaining autonomy and independence from and superiority over the mothers as de facto employers. What these two examples clearly show is that the negotiations of space and the content of the nanny’s responsibilities are part of their negotiations of their selves. This is most evident in how Ms. Orlová thinks about herself, as being everything but a servant. In her view, working in the household of the employers would mean she is in the inferior position and would also mean a loss of control over her self. To these women, providing care in their own households means that they are the sole mistress of their time and organizers of their daily routines with children, hidden from the mothers’ gaze and commands. The importance of the spatial arrangements of paid care must be seen in the context of the nannies’ caring biographies. Although it is manifested for both nannies through the refusal to work outside of their own homes, the manifestation has different roots for each. On the one hand, Ms. Orlová, as a representative of pre-1989 mothers, having experienced the socialist model of working motherhood and in her view intensive participation on the labor market, feels a desire after retirement for entertainment combined with a lack of interest in working outside her home. Both of these wishes are met in her role as a nanny for a live-in child. On the other, Ms. Zvonková’s incentives to keep her household as a place for performing paid caregiving are found in her desire to be a present mother for her son (who was, at the time of the interview, 12 years old). The testimony of Ms. Zvonková brings us to the second important point in how nannies make sense of paid caregiving: their mobilization of the ranking between mothers and “good motherhood.” Obviously, the ideas and ideals about good motherhood are culturally specific and they mean different things for nannies who mothered before 1989 and those mothering after 1989. Ms. Křepelková, a post-1989 mother of two children, wondered in the interview “why they [Vietnamese parents] have children when then they only work.” Similarly, Ms. Jestřábová highlighted that the mothers should enjoy their mothering by being at home and so make use of the opportunities which the post-1989 state offers to women. She said: I have never understood it [why Vietnamese mothers return to work so early]. I even discussed it with my sister. She returned to work when her child was two years old. And I told her: ‘Petra, why don’t you enjoy maternal leave and your baby? You won’t see how he grows up and then you’ll regret it!’ And now she regrets it, of course she does. Similar statements also appeared in interviews with other nannies, who said “I could not do it” or “I would not have the heart and stomach for it” in reference to the mothers’ decision to delegate child care. These statements employ what Uttal (1993 in Uttal and Tuominen 1999) calls “moral hierarchies”—judgments about other mother’s mothering. These hierarchies were a powerful tool which nannies used to build up and protect their gendered subjectivities as full-time caregivers. In their accounts, there is a strong link between womanhood and caregiving—the former is constructed through the latter and consequently caregiving becomes “the expression of women’s natural, social and moral identity” (McMahon 1995, 24; see also Nelson, 1994). The delegation of child care in Vietnamese families challenges what these Czech nannies see as the “normal” (because supported by the state family policies) and only correct way of mothering in contemporary Czech Republic. Consequently, they describe Vietnamese mothers as cold, emotionally inexpressive, caring little, only working, etc. All of these characteristics—observed and reported in the interviews with the nannies—are the expression of mothers failing as mothers but above all failing as women (see also Macdonald 2010; McMahon 1995; Nelson 1994). The nannies with previous experience as working mothers demonstrated more understanding toward the Vietnamese mothers’ breadwinning activity. Ms. Kolibříková recalled the benefits that her employer provided her when she had small children. These included the shortened work hours which enabled her to take her children to and from kindergarten and changed work hours during summer when she went to work in the afternoon and her husband or her mother took care of the children in the afternoon. “Nowadays you have to look for nannies if you do not have grandmothers or grandfathers and you have to go back to work,” she said. Other nannies with the experience of balancing work and life before 1989 recalled that the situation of mothers was radically different then. In contrast to Ms. Kolibříková’s view, they brought up the short maternity leave and the state nurseries which their children attended beginning in early childhood. “It was like that” or “it was just normal,” said my interviewees when talking about the double shifts they experienced; some of them appreciated the current options available to mothers. These nannies did not directly criticize the mothers’ decision to work; rather, they expressed pity for the mothers because they cannot enjoy the moments with their children—either because they want to work or because they must work in order to prepare a better future for their children. From these parts of the narratives, it seemed, surprisingly, that these women (former working mothers) preferred an ideal of stay-at-home mothering. The nannies claim independence from the mothers; however, this independence in the daily organization of caregiving is only on the surface. This superficial independence masks the deep interdependence between the nannies and the mothers. It is an interdependence at the level of gendered subjectivities—in the constitution of preferable mothering trajectories and gendered caring biographies. The nannies constitute their identities as care workers around the following interrelated dichotomies: maintaining autonomy versus obedience to the children’s mothers; being an independent caregiver versus being a dependent caregiver who has to take orders from and thus is subordinate to the child’s mother; and being in a superior versus an inferior position in the nanny–mother relationship. Paradoxically, the more childcare responsibilities that the nannies take on, the freer they feel from the mother’s gaze and control. In other words, the more the nanny’s life is centered on the needs of the child, the less the nannies feel that they are in the service of the parents. Put simply, the nannies employ the strategy of denying the work-like character of paid caregiving in order to maintain their autonomy in circumstances in which they are selling their social-reproductive labor to employers. They do so in an environment in which stay-at-home motherhood is a preferable model and a norm which the women should follow and where paying for care is not a common strategy of motherhood. “I Would Do Anything for the Girl”: Closeness, Intimacy, and Emotions in Caregiving Non-Work In the previous section, I discussed how the work character of care work is articulated in the nannies’ relationship with the mothers. Now I will explore how the nannies make sense of the work/non-work distinction in relation to the children they care for. I will limit my analysis to two topics in order to maintain coherence with the previous section: the issue of spatiality—in terms of sharing space with children—and emotionality—attachment to and detachment from the child. I explained the importance of the spatial arrangement of care for the nannies’ independence from the mothers and for maintaining their autonomy as independent caregivers. The organization of space is particularly important for the nannies’ relationships with the children because it fundamentally impacts the intensity of their contact and the mutual sharing of everydayness. If the child lives at the nanny’s, the nanny’s place becomes, for a limited period of the child’s life, a home. The children are provided with their own equipment—including beds, clothes, toys, etc. In many cases, the child’s comfort is achieved only when the comfort of the nanny is, for the moment, side-lined. Ms. Dudková, who looks after two Vietnamese live-in siblings from Monday to Friday, described how the children sleep in her and her partner’s bedroom, while she and her partner sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. The additional room in their three-room apartment serves as the playroom for the cared-for children and their guests. Ms. Kosová, the nanny of one boy (now aged 17) recalled how she and her husband cohabitated with the little boy: We reconstructed everything; he had his baby bed, everything. He had his own room and the door was open to our bedroom. It was the same as when we had our kids. And sometimes it happened that he came and whoosh into our bed and he was there with us. This statement demonstrates how the boundaries of intimacy and closeness between the nanny (and her partner or other cohabitants respectively) and the child are negotiated. It is not only the reconstruction of the space and the creation of a children’s room but also the small details squeezed into every inch of the nannies’ household which indicate that becoming a nanny goes hand in hand with the transformation of the household atmosphere. The fact that the nannies are never without children does not mean that their work life overwhelms their private life but rather that they consider the children and child care as being fully integrated into their private, non-work lives. The spatial arrangements of caregiving have varying effects on the nannies’ ties with the parents and with the children. The narratives reveal what limits the nannies set on the scope of their work, which could be summed up as follows: I’d rather my home and every minute of my day be devoted to the children than (any of it) to their parents. The examples of sharing the common space are also articulated demonstrations of the bonds and temporal inseparability of the nanny-child dyad. This dyad is important both for the bonds which develop between nannies and children and for the manifestations of the exclusivity or superiority vis-à-vis mothers who are not part of these bonds. As the child spends more time with the nanny than with the parents, it is usually more often the nannies who provide for the emotional needs of children. Nannies welcome the emotional ties which develop between themselves and the children (Souralová 2015b). There are two main reasons for the appreciation of emotionality between care-giver and care-receiver, each of which is specific for the two groups of women. First, for the women whose motherhood took place before 1989, the paid caregiving is an opportunity to experience the at-home intensive care that they could not experience with their own children or grandchildren because they participated in the labor market. And second, for the women mothering after 1989, the emotional investment in children was explained as an effort to compensate the children for their absent mother’s love and—following the model of post-1989 motherhood—to give the children what their mothers cannot give them. The fact that the nannies welcome the emotional ties with children, however, does not mean that they are not cautious about the consequences these ties can have when the paid caregiving terminates. Some of them therefore employ what Nelson (1994) and Macdonald (2010) call “detached attachment.” This term perfectly expresses the main boundaries within paid caregiving. It is the outcome of how naturally an attachment to the cared-for child is born, but at the same time how necessary it is to establish a sense of detachment from the child. The following statement from the interview with Ms. Brhlíková clearly shows that achieving detached attachment is a conscious process that nannies practice in order to protect their feelings and emotional investment: I keep saying to myself I don’t know what I’ll do when she starts kindergarten one day. I somehow have to try to keep a distance. I can’t be so attached to her. … The kindergarten is open till 4 pm, so I could pick her up and be with her till 7 pm when her mother comes home. We console ourselves with the idea that she might get sick as soon as she starts kindergarten and I could be with her. It would be terrible to be without her all of a sudden. In her reflections on the possible end of her relationship with the girl she cares for, Ms. Brhlíková consolidates two contradictory (sets of) feelings involved in the caregiving process. On the one hand, paid caregiving satisfies her need to be needed and her need for emotional fulfilment. On the other hand, she is aware that the sense of well-being she derives from caring for the child is temporary and may be lost at any time—that is why she talks about establishing a distance (Nelson 1994). The loss that Ms. Brhlíková anticipates as inevitable was experienced by Ms. Křepelková. Ms. Křepelková was the only nanny in the sample who had experienced the end of a caregiving arrangement and this had the effect of transforming her work identity and the degree of emotional attachment she invested in subsequent care arrangements (see also Macdonald, 2010). Well, like I say, it was terrible [when my first caregiving arrangement reached an end]. You get used to a baby, then she grows up, and then there’s another little baby. Now I take it as a job, but the first time, when they come and take the child back, mentally, what that does, it’s a terrible, tremendous blow. And when you and the child can’t see each other anymore, all of a sudden she’s gone. Ms. Křepelková’s narrative sheds light on how the nannies have to balance between the managed and conscious rationality of detachment and the spontaneous and unconscious emotionality of attachment in response to the way in which caregiving is so closely tied up with emotional involvement. Work is associated with rationality, while emotionality is a feature of non-work life—and this distinction is articulated by the nannies in the interviews. Consequently, when rational detachment is achieved and emotional attachment is put aside, the nanny becomes a care worker and can say “now I take it as a job.” Ms. Křepelková’s experience was unique in my sample as she was the only one who, when she spoke of emotions, described her role as work. The other nannies had the opposite experience and they (including Ms. Brhlíková) described the emotion-giving and emotion-receiving as an important reward of paid caregiving and a sign of its status as something other than work. Nevertheless, whether they endorsed emotionality or suppressed it, all their accounts support the same argument—emotional involvement is the key barrier to their interpreting caregiving as a job. This is evident in the definition of caregiving proposed by Ms. Jestřábová. When I asked her if she sees paid caregiving as work, she replied: I don’t consider it work. The little girl, it’s like she’s mine, you know? So it’s not a job. I imagine a job to be something very different [laughs]. It’s refreshing when they [the children] come to my place, they run into my apartment. But it’s definitely not a job. The strong ties between the nannies and the children in many—if not all—cases lead to the development of kinship ties between them. The nannies feel like the children’s aunt (when they are similar in age to the parents) or grandmother (when they are older). Such ties further complicate the work status of care work because many nannies—especially the “grandmothers”—do not (or do not want to) make a distinction between the activity of caring for their own grandchildren and that of caring for the Vietnamese children. For example, when these nannies talk about themselves and enumerate how many grandchildren they have, they include the Vietnamese “grandchild” on the list. This indicates that the nannies form what could be called “pure relations” with them, which means that “the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship can deliver” (Giddens 1991, 6). Simply put, the intimacy and emotionality that are an inherent part of paid caregiving prevent nannies from seeing paid caregiving as work. For them, emotional attachments can flourish only in the realm of non-work, while work life is based on very different principles—such as rationality (emotional detachment), effectiveness, and efficiency, which are valued in work life (see also Lutz 2011). Concluding Remarks The Czech Republic witnessed a profound change in the organization of child care and mothering ideals after the fall of communism in 1989. This change included the shift from the socialist model of working motherhood and support for women’s employment to the promotion of separate gender roles and support for stay-at-home motherhood, and the shift from the collectivization of child care (support of state nurseries) to its individualization (support for mothers to take child care onto their own shoulders and the rapid decrease of state nurseries in the 1990s). In such a cultural and political context, women navigate their gendered subjectivities and postsocialist caring biographies. It is a context in which paying for care is not a common part of the lives of families. However, there is one exception—the Vietnamese immigrant families, which are significant consumers of paid caregiving. While only 1–2 percent of families in the Czech Republic seek private nannies, according to estimates they are sought by 80–95 percent of Vietnamese families (Souralová 2015a). This article focused on nannies working in these families. By foregrounding their quotidian boundary-making between care work as work and as non-work, the article illuminates the persistent tensions in care work definitions that contribute to the low level of recognition accorded to this (paid or unpaid) activity. It showed that nannies reject the idea that the caregiving they perform for money is regular work. This concluding section will provide a clue to understanding the incentives behind this refusal or even denial. First, the nannies do not (or do not want to) see caregiving work as work because they want to protect the authenticity of their feelings for the children they care for and to become the guardians of the authenticity of the care they provide. They are struggling against the monetarization and instrumentalization of the nanny–child relationship and argue that authentic care includes not only the daily care for the child but also really (meaning: coming from the heart) caring about the child and the real exchange of emotions between the nanny and the child. The nannies find in paid caregiving the satisfaction of their need to be needed, which shapes their moral identities. Such moral needs originate in their culturally specific comprehension of how “good care” should look. The ideals of care which are now part of the nannies’ caring biographies were shaped under two different regimes—before and after 1989—and they can only be fully understood as the outcomes of this historic, political, and cultural specificity. For nannies, this is an important aspect of how they understand their role in the children’s lives and the role of children in their lives. Paid care work, as well as non-paid kin care, is poorly valued—both financially and symbolically. As Bauer and Österle argue, “often it is the moral and the emotional aspects of care work that lack recognition” (Bauer and Österle 2013, 462). The nannies endeavor to receive recognition of their devotion or even of the sacrifices they make for the children, their impact on the children’s wellbeing, and their investment in shaping the children’s personality. Their contribution to the child’s development would be diminished if all of this were seen as “just” a part of the execution of their work duties, and not as driven by their devotion, self-sacrifice, and personal/emotional commitment. Simply put, when protecting the authenticity of their feelings, the nannies say that “pure” caregiving can only be done when the nannies really love the children in their care; the nannies’ caregiving is authentic because it is not done (only) for money. Through this strategy, the nannies can very clearly see (and present) their caregiving work as part of their caring biographies—as the extension of the motherhood they do (post-1989 mothers) or of the motherhood and grandmotherhood they could not do as intensively as they would now retrospectively have appreciated (pre-1989 mothers). Articulating this logic, the nannies draw upon the principles of non-paid kin caregiving and transmit them to paid caregiving. In doing so, they are implicitly stating that only unpaid caregiving is valuable. The nannies are therefore providing a service they do not believe in (Nelson 1994), and in order to make it a meaningful part of their mental map, they insist on the non-work character of paid caregiving—emphasizing the emotional relationship with the child and denying the importance of money, rationality, and the employment-like relationship with the parents. Second, the nannies refuse to define caregiving as work in order to resist the commodification of their personalities (on commodification, see Ungerson 1997). When constituting their care work identities, the nannies seek to protect the integrity of their personalities and resist becoming the property of their employers (Anderson 2000). To protect their personal identities and to demarcate the boundary between being a nanny (a role oriented toward the child) and being a servant (a role characterized by subordination to the parents), the nannies highlight their interdependence with the child and independence from the parents. In their narratives, “boss” figures are irrelevant—the nannies present themselves as their own bosses and so free themselves from the daily gaze of employers. On the other hand, they erase any boundaries between themselves and the cared-for children and form with them a (kin) unit, sharing intimacy, familiarity, and memories. The nannies mobilize these dependencies in order to protect their autonomy and integrity. In doing so, the definition of their role is the following: the nannies are not selling a caregiving service to the parents; rather, they are providing caregiving to the children. Consequently, they are giving the children the best of themselves, while not selling a single piece of themselves to the parents. Third, the nannies refuse to define caregiving in terms of employment because they seek to emphasize their agency and free will and to disengage themselves from economic relations and the labor market. Hoerder (2015, 106, italics in original) highlights that Since over the centuries—millennia in fact—women have also chosen domestic-caregiving labor, their reasons and options need to be assessed (and accepted with respect) in addition to the analysis of the frames of inequalities. For the nannies in my sample, paid caregiving is a chosen activity—it allows them to free themselves from external pressures: the labor market, economic necessity, and the biological roles that are taken for granted. Being a nanny is a voluntary role to which the nannies turn in a particular stage of their lives. What does caregiving work mean to these women, if it is not work? The nannies “just” like doing it because it fulfils their gendered subjectivities—despite the fact that paid child care is usually seen as precarious work bringing less recognition. Some of the women in my sample want to be emancipated from the “annoying” labor market and continue being full-time mothers to their children and so develop the preferable model of caregiving promoted by family policies after 1989. Other women become nannies in order to enjoy being full-time caregivers, acting as present intensive grandmothers for Vietnamese children, as they could not be with their own children as state socialism preferred a different model. For them especially, the financial aspect plays a marginal role in their decisions. Denying the economic side of caregiving is a strategy to elevate the role of the free will and suppress the image of nannies as “pawns” on the chessboard of economic relations. At the same time, this strategy is the nannies’ way of responding to the devaluation of social-reproductive activities and of those who perform them. In many cases, the nannies idealize paid caregiving, construing it as an activity from which they derive self-realization, self-actualization, and contentment. In sum, the nannies have several reasons for refusing to see paid caregiving as work. However, in doing so, they reinforce a perception of paid caregiving more generally as not being a form of work, and they may even contribute to its devaluation (Bourne and Calás 2013). When they claim that caregiving is “just something they do in their leisure time,” they present the tasks of caregiving as “natural,” routine, and “easy to do.” In her analysis of the “shadow work” of nannies, Macdonald (1998, 31) writes: “Our common-sense understanding of what ‘counts’ as work obscures work that is unpaid, work that takes place in the private sphere, and interactive work traditionally performed by women.” The women who perform unpaid work also shape this common-sense understanding of work and non-work activities. By critically reviewing the nannies’ narratives about constituting their roles and identities, we can see how the nannies contribute to shadowing the care work and to reproducing the gender-stereotyped division between work and non-work. It is not the intent of this article to romanticize the altruistic motivations of nannies to become and be nannies. On the contrary, while addressing the ambiguous character of caregiving work that is perceived by nannies, it provides an insight into the nature and aspects of this activity that need to be acknowledged if social-reproductive tasks are to achieve recognition. Table 1 Profile of interviewees Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Table 1 Profile of interviewees Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Nanny’s pseudonym Position in welfare state Mothering before/after 1989 Ms. Špačková Parental leave After Ms. Brhlíková Disability pensioner After Ms. Křepelková Disability pensioner After Ms. Kosová Pensioner Before Ms. Zezulková Pensioner Before Ms. Orlová Pensioner Before Ms. Dudková Pensioner Before Ms. Andulková Pensioner Before Ms. Lelková Pensioner Before Ms. Jestřábová Unemployed After Ms. Zvonková Unemployed + care for husband After Ms. Kolibříková Pensioner Before Ms. Havranová Pensioner Before Ms. Rorýsová Employed After Ms. Čápová Unemployed After Adéla Souralová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology (Social Anthropology Program) and Office for Population Studies, Masaryk University in Brno. In her research, she concentrates on the issues of paid care, migration, and sociology of family. She has published a book titled New Perspectives on Mutual Dependency in Care-Giving (Ashgate, 2015), several chapters in edited volumes (Ashgate, Routledge, Brill), and articles in international journals (Childhood, Journal of Family Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ageing and Society, and Journal for Masculinity Studies). ORCID: 0000-0002-2599-4094 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adela_Souralova2https://muni.academia.edu/Ad%C3%A9laSouralov%C3%A1 Funding This work was supported by Specific Research at the Office for Population Studies (MUNI/A/1151/2015). References Acker Joan. 2006 . Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations . Gender & Society 20 ( 4 ): 441 – 64 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Andall Jacqueline. 2003 . Hierarchies and Interdependence: The Emergence of a Service Caste in Europe. 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Going global: The transnationalization of care . Development and Change 42 ( 4 ): 1109 – 30 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS PubMed Footnotes 1 All names have been changed. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

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Social PoliticsOxford University Press

Published: Mar 30, 2018

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