Hildegard Lee Borelli and Michael J. Borelli were married in 1980. Three years later, as Michael’s health began to falter, he went to the hospital repeatedly with heart trouble. In 1988, after he suffered a stroke, Michael’s doctors recommended round-the-clock institutional care. But Michael resisted the move. Instead, he promised his wife that if she cared for him at home, at his death he would leave her a large share of his estate.Read more at location 4496
he had bequeathed the bulk of his estate to Grace Brusseau, his daughter by an earlier marriage.Read more at location 4500
Michael’s wife, Hildegard owed him nursing care free of charge and therefore had no right to ask compensationRead more at location 4503
implication that Hildegard “had a preexisting . . . nondelegable duty to clean the bedpans herself”Read more at location 4505
in this day and age spouses should have every right to contract with each other for services and their compensation.Read more at location 4506
modern marriage has become like a businessRead more at location 4509
every relationship of coupling, caring, and household membership repeatedly mingles economic transactions and intimacy, usually without contamination,Read more at location 4514
As long as we cling to the idea of hostile worlds we will never recognize, much less explain, the pervasive intertwining of economic activity and intimacy. Yet nothing-but reductionism fails to allow for the distinctive properties of coupling, caring, and households. The prominence of intimacy in those social relations transforms the character and consequences of economic activity within them.Read more at location 4516
question, therefore, is not whether intimate partners can or should engage in economic transactions but what sorts of economic transactions match which intimate relations.Read more at location 4518
By no means do all matches work well. Some properly excite indignation,Read more at location 4522
In the Bedroom (Au bord du lit) tells the tale of the Comte de Sallure, who once had dallied with various mistresses, offering the women “money, jewels, suppers, dinners, theatres.” After ignoring his wife for some time, Sallure suddenly developed a renewed and powerful infatuation for the Comtesse. The newly smitten Sallure became jealous of his estranged wife’s many admirers. One evening, returning home from a reception, Sallure resolved to seduce her by declaring his reborn passion. After reminding her husband of his infidelities and his earlier claims that “marriage between two intelligent people was just a partnership,” the Countess agreed to rekindle their relationship, but at a price. Sallure would have to pay her five thousand monthly francs, approximately what he had spent on each of his mistresses.Read more at location 4523
By putting a price on our lawful love you’ll give it a new value . . . the spice of wickedness”Read more at location 4531
Maupassant caught the incongruity of a quid pro quo contract—sexRead more at location 4534
The point was not that spouses never passed money from hand to hand in nineteenth- century French households. It was that the terms of the proposed contract blurred existing boundaries between prostitution and marriage.Read more at location 4535
Why, then, do participants in intimate relationships create elaborate stories and practices for situations that mingle economic activity and intimacy? For essentially the same reasons.Within households, for example, every bargain struck has significance both for the transaction at hand and for longer-term relations among household members. To the extent that household members have spun a web of reciprocity, a community of fate, and a set of obligations to mutual, collective protection, confusing household interaction with routine market transactions would, indeed, signal a threat to household viability.Read more at location 4558
intimate settings do not stand out from others by the absence of economic activity. Nor do they lack connection with the commercial world.Read more at location 4565
We must, however, maintain the distinction between intimate ties and intimate settings.Read more at location 4567
Intimate ties include all those in which at least one party obtains information or attention that if widely available would damage one or both of the parties.Read more at location 4568
have seen intimate ties appearing in professional-client relationsRead more at location 4570
Most interactions have implications for third parties who are intimately connected with at least one of the interacting persons, and often with both.Read more at location 4580
Members of intimate settings are engaged not only in short-term quid pro quo exchanges but also in longer-term reciprocity—commitmentsRead more at location 4582
each transaction matters not only for the instant but also for futureRead more at location 4584
minor failures take on major significance to the parties: they cast doubt on membership’s meaning and future.Read more at location 4587
Legal theorist Thane Rosenbaum notices the differences between legal proceedings and everyday practice,Read more at location 4593
Taking the example of compensation for 9/11 survivors, he condemns a legal system that assigns monetary values to moral and emotional losses. What victims of such losses need, Rosenbaum argues, is a chance to tell their stories, to grieve with others, to receive moral counsel from the law. “People look to the law,” he declares, “to provide remedies for their grievances and relief from their hurts, to receive moral lessons about life. .Read more at location 4594
Note: x L ESEMPIO DEL 9/11 E DEK COMPENSO IN DENARO X IL DANNO EMOTIVO. NESSUNO DI NOI FAREBBVE QS SCAMBIO Edit
Rosenbaum wants to erase the distinction between legal proceedings and everyday practice,Read more at location 4598
legal specialists and everyday practitioners of intimacy are pursuing quite different objectives.Read more at location 4600
Legal specialists are usually seeking ways to apply available rules to contested problems, while most of the time participants in intimate relations are simply trying to pursue their lives more or less satisfactorily.Read more at location 4601
To be sure, the law changes as general practices of intimacy change,Read more at location 4603
Legislators and courts also change the law in response to political shifts and popular mobilization.Read more at location 4605
strangely familiar set of distinctions separating the women they called hetaera from other sex workers.Read more at location 4619
Hetaeras were capricious, felt free to refuse prospective lovers, offered sexual liaisons to those suitors who pleased them, expecting seduction rather than bargaining. They also insisted on receiving gifts rather than quid pro quo payment: “He-taeras had a powerful interest in this game. Upon the fragile status of the gift depended their fragile status as ‘companions’ rather than common prostitutes” (Davidson 1998: 125).Read more at location 4619
“women who worked in brothels were registered and had to pay the pornikon telos, the whore-tax. Flute girls could charge no more than two drachmas a night and were forced to go with whomever the Astynomos [a public order board] allotted them”Read more at location 4623
Florence Weber (2003) takes up the case of agricultural households,Read more at location 4627
Consider the legal arrangements of “deferred income” in which a child of an agricultural family eventually receives compensation for unpaid labor contributed to the farm’s increase in value. In France, agricultural deferred income has served as a model for the creation of similar arrangements in retail trade, crafts, and wives’ unpaid contributions to their husband’s professional success.Read more at location 4629
this French doctrine raises the question of whether the unpaid contribu- tions of a child to the care of elderly parents establishes rightful claims to compensation from the parents’ estate. While some courts rejected such claims, declaring filial help a moral duty, in 1994 the country’s highest appeals court (Cour de Cassation) ruled in favor of compensating unpaid assistance that exceeded filial duty.Read more at location 4632
the case of a man who took complete charge of his aging and ailing parents at the cost of his own career,Read more at location 4635
The lower courts tried to defend something like a doctrine of separate spheres, but the higher court clearly ruled in favorRead more at location 4637
they actually set legal limits on the obligations of filial piety.Read more at location 4638
systems of law have their own inbuilt conventions, doctrines, and traditions.WeRead more at location 4639
all legal systems interact with ordinary practices in their areas of application.Read more at location 4643
questions of child support, alimony, foster care and adoption, or surrogacy and the sale of female eggs for reproduction. Others might analyze the practical impact of law on intimate economic practices, such as legalization of gay marriage or the parental rights of unwed fathers.Read more at location 4647
we often see what we might call reverse hostile worlds reasoning: the presence of intimacy, in this view, corrupts proper standards, as exemplified by cronyism, nepotism, insider trading, and sexual harassment.Read more at location 4651
battles between the worlds of sentiment and rationality, of market and domesticity,Read more at location 4661
unjust policies, such as the following: • Denial of compensation to women for household work in a range of areas • Low pay for caregivers, such as nannies and home-health aides • Condemnation of welfare to unmarried mothers, as a spur to dependency • Prohibitions on child labor that actually harm households or hinder children’s acquisition of valuable skillsRead more at location 4664
Looking at coupling, care, and households we did not find separate worlds of economy and sentiment, nor did we see markets everywhere. Instead we have observed crosscutting, differentiated ties that connect people with each other.We witnessed people investing energy and ingenuity in marking differences among their relations to each other and regularly including economic transactions in those intimate relations.Read more at location 4672
What will happen, many worry, if paid care substitutes for informal assistance?Read more at location 4692
Should grandmothers receive compensation when they care for grandchildren while their daughters work elsewhere?Read more at location 4695
Pointing to the child-care market as thickly social and relational, Julie Nelson argues that parents or caregivers seldom define that market “as purely an impersonal exchange of money for services. . . . The parties involved engage in extensive personal contact, trust, and interpersonal interaction. . . . The specter of the all-corrupting market denies that people—such as many child-care providers—can do work they love, among people they love, and get paid at the same time.” Paid care, she insists, should not be treated as “relationally second rate”Read more at location 4710
surrogate childbearing deserves recognition as serious women’s work deserving full rewardsRead more at location 4715
economic discrimination against those allegedly intangible caring activities.Read more at location 4717
Although the record of decisions was mixed, the study nevertheless found frequent disciplinary action, including firing, against employees who missed work to take care of family obligations to children, spouses, grandchildren, and parents. Employees defended by their unions in the arbitration hearings experienced a wide range of such obligations: the cases included a janitor who had missed one day of work to take care of a disabled child, a mechanic who stayed home attending to his cancer-stricken wife, and a worker at a psychiatric center who refused to work mandatory overtime because she was unable to find child care for her two young children.Read more at location 4720
Joan Williams and Nancy Segal provide ample proof of continuing stereotyping and unequal workplace treatment for parents, both women and men. In fact, they discovered startling evidence of blatant bias, with some employers openly declaring mothers to be unfit workers and others deriding fathers’ requests for parental leave.Read more at location 4727
“the principle that money cannot buy love may have the unintended and perverse consequence of perpetuating low pay for face-to-face service work”Read more at location 4735
such as teachers, counselors, healthcare aides, and child-care workersRead more at location 4738
Historians have long since documented the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres segregating domestic from market worlds (see Boydston 1990; Cott 1977), nineteenth-century movements advocating wages for housework moved the issue into practical politics, and developmental psychologists (see Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982) have debated extensively the cognitive gendering of such worlds.Read more at location 4749
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).Read more at location 4773
