ABSTRACT
How a social order organizes care of these needs is a matter of social justice. Traditionally women have been those attending to dependen cies. The labor has been seen as part of familial obligations, obligations that trump all other responsibilities. Women who have been sufficiently wealthy or of sufficiently high status have sometimes been presented with an option to confer the daily labor of dependency care to othersgenerally other, mostly poor and ill-situated, women. Poor women who have had dependency responsibilities along with paid employment have often relied on female familial help. The gendered and privatized nature
of dependency work has meant, first, that men have rarely shared these responsibilities-at least with the women of their own class; and, sec ond, that the equitable distribution of dependency work, both among genders and among classes, has rarely been considered in the discussions of political and social justice that take as their starting point the public lives of men. This starting point has determined not only moral, social, and political theory; it also has determined the shape of public policy.
