Money, Money

Such principles shed unexpected light on controversies about the moral standing of monetary compensation for accidental death (Borneman 2002; Lascher and Powers 2004.). In the case of 9/11 payments, critics often accused victims’ families of simple, distaste­ful greed. However, 9/11 recipients of compensation repeatedly de­clared that it was “not about the money.” Fund administrator Ken­neth Feinberg backed them up:

I have received. .. and have read in the newspapers, comments from a few American citizens expressing the opinion that the victims and their families are “greedy” in seeking additional compensation. As I have repeatedly stated. . . I believe that characterization is unfair. This Fund, and the comments of dis­tressed family members, are not about “greed” but, rather, re­flect both the horror of September 11 and the determination of family members to value the life of loved ones suddenly lost on that tragic day. (U. S. Department of Justice 2002: 11,234).

Properly understood, indeed, recipients were mostly right to say it was not just about the money. As Herbert Nass, a lawyer repre­senting a 9/11 victim’s family commented, “This is not about the money for them, because it’s such sad money” (Chen 2003: sec. B1). On the whole, victims’ families were seeking not only financial ad­vantage but also public recognition of their loss and of their special relationship to the victim. As we saw earlier, some payments directly recognized the unpaid contributions that the victims had been mak­ing to their households. Once again, we see that the medium and modality of compensation represents not simply quid pro quo cash value but the meaning of the relationships involved. Yet in a very different sense it was about the money. As in medical malpractice, wrongful death settlements, and compensation for disabling on-the — job injuries, the payment of large sums simultaneously announces the seriousness of the loss involved and the responsibility of some­one else for that loss. Large penalties may even impel the authors of dangerous conditions to clean them up.

For our purposes, the most important feature of 9/11 compensa­tion was its assignment of significant value to relational work. With such valuation, courts and policymakers enter the world we have been exploring. In this world, a simple search for the closest market equivalent of the relational work at hand will almost always miscon­strue and undervalue that work. Consider the analogy of ecological intervention, where straightforward compensation of users for the commercial value of forests or streams they have lost fails to reckon the overall effect of depleted forests and streams on the environment at large.

When policies assign value to relational work within intimate set­tings, they will distort what they are doing, and the intervention’s likely effects, unless they recognize the impact of proposed policies on third parties, diffuse reciprocity, longer-term security, and com­munities of fate. Both in the short term and the long, superior poli­cies will ask which arrangements for paid personal care of children, the elderly, the disabled, and the sick damage the recipients, the caregivers, and the households involved. Which arrangements actu­ally enrich participants’ lives? This book’s intimate revelations thus bear on policy discussions.

Leaving aside questions of policy, this analysis also requires us to rethink more generally how intimate relations work. We have established the multiplex mingling of intimacy and economic trans­actions. We have seen that intimate relations not only incorporate economic activity, but depend on it and organize it. Beyond that discovery, in the process of documenting how people couple, care, and participate in household economies, we have traversed a pro­foundly relational world. A world in which courting teenagers, lov­ers, husbands and wives, partners, children, grandparents, caretak­ers, and the many other intimate partners we have encountered are continually involved in maintaining, reinforcing, testing, and some­times challenging their relations to each other. In fact, their sense of themselves intertwines closely with the meanings of their rela­tionships to others.

This world of intimacy is not, as some theories of social behavior imply, peopled with characters playing out fixed roles based on gen­der, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity. Nor is it a world, as other theorists would argue, in which each single individual is busily strategizing how to maximize his or her own self-interest. Yes, we do find continuous bargaining and negotiation between couples, caregivers, and care recipients, as well as among household mem­bers, but not one strategic actor moving against another. Instead, we find people locating themselves within webs of social relations, working out their places by means of interaction with others, and constantly taking into account the repercussions of any particular relation for third parties.

Intimate relations matter. Because of their importance, intimate relations become vulnerable to misunderstandings, moral outrage, mismatches, falsification, and betrayal. Intimacy creates all sorts of dilemmas: is this person a gold digger or an intimate friend? Is this a caring relation or exploitation? When should care be paid for? Why should it be acceptable to pay a babysitter but not to pay a sister to watch her baby brother? Over what kinds of children’s and teenagers’ expenditures should parents hold vetoes? Determining which kind of economic activity matches which kind of intimacy matters enormously to the participants. We have seen this in cou­ples, caring, and households. People invest a great deal of energy in marking the right economic transactions for the relationship and distinguishing them sharply from the wrong economic transactions. We see this both in practices and legal arena. Which is an acceptable economic transaction for which family member?

Even more generally, we have discovered a relational world. The same people behave quite differently in different relations, as well they should. In this book’s longer perspective, the old continuum from intimate to impersonal does not disappear but takes on new meaning. First, we find that it is, indeed, a continuum rather than a dichotomy into separate spheres. Second, we recognize that both individual relations and social settings vary significantly along the continuum. Third, we notice economic activity at every step along the continuum, instead of concentrated at one end. Fourth, we see that the economic activity actually supports and reproduces the relations and settings all along the continuum. Fifth, we observe throughout the range that people are constantly negotiating and renegotiating matches among relations, media, transactions, and boundaries. Sixth, we understand that some negotiated matches in­volve injustice, cruelty, damage, or confusion, not because they mix personal relations with economic activity but because they result from improper exercises of power. Finally, in a high proportion of cases we witness consequences for third parties: how people interact affects other relations in which those people are involved.

We could obviously follow these insights into other intimate set­tings this book has neglected: larger kinship groups, friendship, neighborhoods, family businesses, combat units, hospital wards, and more. In those settings, we would expect the same general lessons to apply. With appropriate changes in perspective, we could likewise

follow them into other settings that are not predominantly intimate, but in which intimate relations nevertheless appear: corporations, schools, college dormitories, prisons, retail trade, soup kitchens, welfare offices, and the creative arts. The basic lessons would remain the same. Far from constituting a fragile separate sphere, intimate relations ramify across an enormous range of social settings and ac­tivities, beyond spouses, lovers, children, and kin.

If this book has done its job well, it will help readers recognize what is happening to them in everyday social life. All of us are, after all, constantly negotiating appropriate matches between our inti­mate relations and crucial economic activities. Choices people make in these regards carry great moral weight and have serious conse­quences for the viability of their intimate lives. Intimacy, we have seen, has great value for its participants, and therefore involves seri­ous risks. No single model of intimacy will serve for all its uses. Intimacy takes many forms. So does its purchase.

that repeat a citation typically use the form “(Id. at 85),” I have simply reported the page number in parentheses: “(85).”

[2] Bawin and Dandurand 2003; Cancian 1987; J. Cohen 2002; Collins 2004; Davis 1973; Giddens 1992; Hochschild 2003; Neiburg 2003; Simmel 1988; Swidler 2001.

[3] For a survey and synthesis of trust’s place in social structure, see Barber 1983; for a contrasting view, Weitman 1998.

[4] For more general discussion of emotions in social life, see Collins 2004; Hochschild 2003; Katz 1999; Kemper 1990; for the place of emotions in law, see Kahan and Nussbaum 1996.

[5] Earlier statements of my arguments (e. g., Zelizer 2004) used the terms differen­tiated ties, bridges, and crossroads to identify the alternative view. All of these terms catch some of the reality, but connected lives points more directly to the interaction and interdependence I want to signal here.

[6] For another example of a culturalist approach, see Laqueur 1990. For an excel­lent review of prostitution studies, including culturalist analyses, see Gilfoyle 1999. An influential culturalist account appears in Butler 1990, 1993.

[7] For each meaningfully distinct category of social relations, people erect a boundary, mark the boundary by means of names and practices, establish a set of distinctive under­standings and practices that operate within that boundary, designate certain sorts of economic transactions as appro­priate for the relation, bar other transactions as inappropri­ate, and adopt certain media for reckoning and facilitating economic transactions within the relation. All these efforts belong to relational work.

2. Within the legal arena, a parallel but stylized matching of social relations, understandings, practices, transactions, and media occurs. Despite that stylization, legal negotia-

[8] On other sorts of markets, see Abolafia 2001; Hochschild 2003: esp. 30-44; Ingram and Roberts 2000; Keister 2002; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Uzzi and Lancaster 2004; Velthuis 2003; White 2001.

[9] See Foster 1962; Leslie 1999; Macneil 1980; Prosser 1971: 873; for an earlier statement, see Pound 1916.

[10] On the concern about “extravagant wives,” see Ryon v. John Wanamaker, New York, Inc., 190 N. Y.S. 250 (N. Y. Sup. Ct. 1921); Saks v. Huddleston, 36 F.2d 537 (D. C. Cir. 1929); and W. A.S. 1922. See also Salmon 1986.

[11] For reservations concerning the obliteration of coverture, see Hasday 2004.

[12] Later, courts in some states conceded the extension of consortium rights to parent-child relations and, in some cases, to cohabiting couples—see Korzenowski 1996; Mogill 1992; Soehnel 1985; Szarwark2003. Meanwhile, whether consortium applied to same-sex couples stirred legal contestation; see Culhane 2000-2001; Markowitz 2000; Merin 2002: 209-17.

[13] A 1925 New York decision, Buteau v. Naegeli, 208 N. Y.S. 504 (N. Y. Sup. Ct. 1925), shows both relational strategies at work. In an alienation of affections suit, the court allowed a jury’s nominal award of $1 in compensatory damages to the plaintiff wife, finding she had little affection for her husband. Yet the court also allowed $5,000 in punitive damages, endorsing the jury’s intention to punish the defendant’s “disregard of the marital relationship in its aspect of menace to the

community” (506). The appellate court later reduced the judgment to $1,218.76 (see Brown 1934: 501-2).

[14] Similarly, Stephen Schulhofer, in his concern with establishing protections for sexual autonomy, dismisses economic reductionism as an explanatory model. He likewise moves away from a hostile worlds view, but not completely. Recognizing that “we cannot automatically condemn every exchange of sex for money, regardless of context,” he still worries that “sexual relationships founded on economic motives seldom seem admirable, and we often regard them as degrading.” The challenge, he says, “is in knowing when, if ever, a person can legitimately link sexual intimacy with economic support” (Schulhofer 1998: 161).

[15] For a male equivalent of bodily services, see Wacquant 1998 on boxing.

[16] On how courts have moved away from the more severe “meretricious spouse” rules toward a more flexible contractual approach to cohabitation arrangements, see Hunter 1978. The controversial 1976 Marvin v. Marvin decision dramatized the new reach of the severability rule. Stating that “express agreements will be enforced unless they rest on an unlawful meretricious consideration,” the court distinguished sexual services from domestic labor and the sacrifice of a career, allowing Michelle Marvin recovery for the latter. Ironically, by allowing recovery for domestic services, the court, as Hunter points out, grants “meretricious part­ners” greater economic latitude than married couples, who cannot contract for do­mestic services (Hunter 1978: 1,092-94).

[17] See Chamallas 1998; Dubler 2003; Fellows 1998; Finley 1989; Goodman et al. 1991; Jones 1988; Kornhauser 1996; McCaffery 1997; Schlanger 1998; Schultz 2000; Silbaugh 1996; Tushnet 1998.

[18] On this issue, see Bittker 1983: chap. 3, pp. 11-12; McDaniel, Ault, McMahon Jr., and Simmons 1994: 149; Klein and Bankman 1994: 150-51. United States v. Harris, a criminal prosecution, is of course an exception to the usual pursuit of such cases in civil courts.

[19] See Adams and Allan 1998; Allan 1989; Boase and Wellman 2004; Di Leonardo 1987; Hansen 1994; Kendall 2002; Litwak 1969; Menjivar 2000; Pahl and Pahl 2000; Rubin 1985; Silver 1990, 2003; Stack 1997.

[20] See D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Joselit 1994; Modell 1989; Stansell 1986.

[21] See also Clement 1998a on club hostesses and female vaudeville performers as new forms of commercial heterosexual interaction after the 1920s.

[22] On treating, see also Gilfoyle 1992: 56, 288, 311. Gilfoyle suggests that the adoption of treating was related to the decline in commercial sex. On Jewish court­ship and treating, see Heinze 1990.

[23] For race relations in dance halls, see Moran 2001. Taxi dancing continues, with modifications, to this day: see Meckel 1995.

[24] The literature on sexual payments among men is very thin. For preliminary indications, see Aggleton 1999; Boag 2003; Chauncey 1985, 1994; Humphreys 1975; Reiss 1961.

[25] See Wood Hill 1993. For a graphic description of prostitutes’ negotiation over the category of sexual relationship and associated monetary transfers, see Sanchez

[26] See Flowers 1998; Frank 1998; Garb 1995; Lewis 2000; Rasmussen 1979; Rich and Guidroz 2000.

[27] For a telling analysis of changing legal treatments in breach of promise suits and premarital law more generally, see Tushnet 1998. See also Brinig 2000: 40-42; Ludington 1960. In a separate action for seduction, fathers had the right to sue their daughters’ errant lovers. Juries often awarded large monetary compensation for the loss of fathers’ material welfare or honor caused by sexual injury to their daughters. As fathers’ financial interests in their daughters’ marriagability lost standing in American law, the women themselves acquired the legal right to sue their seducers (VanderVelde 1996). In breach of promise cases, however, seduction did not constitute a separate cause for action, but served to increase damages (Clark 1968: 13).

[28] For a discussion of gender bias in legal treatment of broken engagements, see Tushnet 1998.

[29] See also Goldsmith 1987 for an account that differs from Margolick in some details.

[30] “Changing Places: Should Your Parents Move in with You?” Family Caregiver Alliance, http://www. caregiver. org. Accessed May 24, 2003. See also advice to “kin­ship caregivers” by the Child Welfare League of America, http://www. cwla. org/ programs/kinship/financial. htm. Accessed May 25, 2003. See also Copeland 1991; Fish and Kotzer 2002.

[31] In another investigation, DeVault shows the same work of creating and sus­taining family relations with “family outings” such as zoo visits; see DeVault 2002. For a comparison between DeVault’s and lesbian/gay households, see Carrington 1999.

[32] Adapted from the “Family Caregiver Alliance Fact Sheets: Selected Long-Term Care Statistics,” “Selected Caregiver Statistics,” “Work and Eldercare.” Family Caregiver Alliance, http://www. caregiver. org. Accessed May 24, 2003. See also Gray and Feinberg 2003.

[33] feel good, good you know because like I said, I feel fortunate that I can still do things at home. I went to look at some living room furniture the other day and the guy said: “Are you em­ployed?” And I said: “Yes, I’m employed.” You know my social security number, you know, you check it out. So, that kinda thing, it makes you, it makes you feel good.. .. You know, you’re in a different status [when] you’re not considered unem­ployed. (London, Scott, and Hunter 2002: 109)

[34] “Changing Places: Should Your Parents Move in with You?” Family Caregiver Alliance, http://www. caregiver. org. Accessed May 24, 2003. See also advice to “kin­ship caregivers” by the Child Welfare League of America, http://www. cwla. org/ programs/kinship/financial. htm. Accessed May 25, 2003. See also Copeland 1991; Fish and Kotzer 2002.

[35] Cancian 2000; see also Crittenden 2001; England and Folbre 1999; Folbre and Nelson 2000; Geen 2003; Linsk et al. 1992; Macdonald and Merrill 2002; Rose 1994; Ungerson 2000; Uttal 2002 a; Williams 2000.

[36] For the economy of seventeenth-century women healers, see Tannenbaum 2002; for nineteenth-century women caregivers, Abel 2000; for the overlap of heal­ing and magic in English history, see Davis 2003.

[37] On children’s perceptions of how their parents negotiate with child-care pro­viders, see Hochschild 2001.

[38] See Chaudry 2004; Formanek-Brunell 1998; Guzman 2004; Nelson 2002; Neus 1990; Sadvie and Cohen-Mitchell 1997: 5; Uttal 2002b; Zelizer 2004. For historical parallels, see Katzman 1978; Michel 1999; Palmer 1989; Rose 1999. “Local currency communities,” such as Ithaca, New York’s Ithaca HOURS, create a distinct currency for exchanges of goods and services among local residents; see, e. g., Raddon 2002.

[39] See Hochschild 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 2002; Romero 2001; Parrenas 2001: 112-13; Wrigley 1995: 152-53n.15.

[40] Abbott 1988; Cancian 2000: 146-48; Glenn 1992; Reverby 1987; Stevens 1989; Weinberg 2003.

[41] See American Bar Association 2003; American Psychological Association 2003; Missouri Synod 1999; NALS of Missouri 2003; National Register of Personal Trainers 2003; New York Celebrity Assistants 2003; Reid 1999; Seattle Nanny Net­work 2003.

[42] See DeFuria 1989; Merin 2002; Sherman 1981; Thornley 1996. Recognizing this reality, legal advisers to lesbian and gay couples strongly urge them to establish legal documents securing their economic contracts; see, for example, Curry, Clif­ford, and Hertz 2002.

[43] At http://www. signonsandiego. com/uniontrib/20040228/news_1c28solo. html. Accessed May 8, 2004.

[44] As of 2004, only a minority of states authorized courts to impose a legal obliga­tion on separated or divorced parents to pay for their children’s college education. In Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court in 1995 overruled the constitutionality of such an obligation. The court argued that imposing mandatory post-majority edu­cational support discriminated against children in intact marriages who lacked similar legal claims and was therefore in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution (Curtis v. Kline 666 A.2d 265 (Pa. 1995); see also Momjian and Momjian 2004). Still, divorcing parents in Pennsylvania and other states that oppose mandatory obligations for children’s college support may include college support provisions in private property settle­ment agreements (see “Responsibility of Noncustodial Divorced Parent” 1980; Snearly 2003).

[45] See Antonovics and Town 2004; McManus and DiPrete 2001; Gallagher 2003; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994;McLanahan et al. 2002; Waite and Gallagher 2000; Weitzman 1985.

[46] See Bengtson 2001; Eggebeen and Davey 1998; Furstenberg et al. 1995, 2004; Furstenberg and Cherlin 1986; Ingersoll-Dayton et al. 2001; Logan and Spitze 1996; Rossi and Rossi 1990; Rossi 2001.

[47] Waller Meyers 1998; see also Durand, Parrado, and Massey 1996; de la Garza and Lindsay Lowell 2002; Pew Hispanic Center 2003. On how remittance systems connect to bargaining within households, see Curran and Saguy 2001; Georges 1990; Mahler 2001. On remittances and social ties more generally, see Mooney 2003; Roberts and Morris 2003.

[48] See Edin and Lein 1997; Edin, Lein, and Nelson 2002; Gerson 1993; Hamer 2001; Henly 2002; Hertz 1986; Schwartz 1994; Treas 1993.

[49] See Berhau 2000; Cross 2000; DeVault 1991; DiMaggio and Louch 1998; Halle 1993; Horowitz 1985; Joselit 1994; Miller 1998; Pleck 2000; Zukin 2003.

[50] See Calder 1999; Chinoy 1955; Gans 1967; Halle 1984; Lynd and Lynd [1929}1956; Nicolaides 2002; Patillo-McCoy 1999.

[51] On family businesses, see Aldrich and Cliff 2003; Fletcher 2002; Gersick et al. 1997; Lansberg 1999; Light and Gold 2000; Portes and Rumbaut 1990; Portes 1996; Spector 2001.

[52] On the impact of economic depression on households, see the classic studies by Bakke [1940] 1969; Elder 1974; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel [1933] 1971; Komarovsky 1940. On bankruptcy see Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook 1999.

[53] For cases bearing on these issues, see In re Marriage of Graham, 135 Cal. Rptr. 2d 685 (Cal. Ct. App. 2003); Riggs v. Riggs, 478 S. E.2d 211 (N. C. Ct. App. 1996); Eller v. Comm’r, 11 T. C. 934 (1981); Ver Brycke v. Ver Brycke, 843 A.2d 758 (Md. 2004); In re Marriage of Morris, 640 N. E.2d 344 (111. App. Ct. 1994); Gary Coleman suit against parents, http://www. minorcon. org/childrenaschattels. html;

L. S.K. v. H. A.N., 813 A.2d 872 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2002); Bass p. Bass, 779 N. E.2d 582 (Ind. Ct. App. 2002). See also Spragins 2003.

[54] Clayton and Moore 2003; Edin, Nelson, and Paranel 2004; Martin 2001; Mu — mola 2000; Western, Patillo, and Weiman 2004.

[55] For a contrasting view of stories and the law, see Brooks and Gewirtz 1996. For a far different evaluation of the 9/11 awards, see Shapo 2002.

[56] For outstanding examples of non-American studies concerning similar phe­nomena, see Altman 2001; Castle and Konate 2003; Collier 1997; Cohen, Pepin, Lamontagne, and Duquette 2002; Comaroff 1980; Cresson 1995; Day 1994; Evers, Pijl, and Ungerson 1994; Fehlberg 1997; Gowing 1996; Guerin 2003; Gillis 1996; Howell 1998; Leonard 1980; Miller 1994;Moodie andNdatshe 1994; Moors 1998; Pahl 1999; Saguy 2003; Scambler and Scambler 1997; Singh 1997; Song 1999; Wilson 2004.

[57] See also Crittenden 2001; Folbre 2001; Held 2002; Himmelweit 1999; Nelson 1999; Ruddick 1998. For an introduction to selected social science approaches to caring, see Cancian and Oliker 2000; Tronto 1994. For related views on regard as an incentive for reciprocity, see Offer 1997.

Updated: 12.11.2015 — 21:39