Bethany Carson
For Bethany Carson, a single mother balancing the demands of caregiving, law school, and professional responsibilities, the question of unpaid domestic labor was a personal one long before she considered its legal or scholarly aspects.
“I became increasingly aware of the economic and legal invisibility of domestic labor and envisioned writing about these issues back when I first applied to Mitchell Hamline,” she said.
Originally developed as a long paper for the Reproductive Rights Seminar taught by Professor Laura Hermer, Carson’s paper, “Engendering Equity: Monetizing Invisible Domestic Labor Through Child Support Calculations,” has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, allowing this important topic to reach a broader audience.
Formerly the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender is among the nation’s foremost student-edited feminist law journals and is the nation’s oldest continuously publishing feminist law journal. Since its first publication in 1978, the journal has developed and advanced feminist jurisprudence and combined legal analysis with political, economic, historical, and sociological perspectives.
“Simply developing this piece in Professor Hermer’s Reproductive Rights Seminar was personally fulfilling. Receiving a publication offer from the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender has made the experience even more meaningful,” said Carson.
Her article draws on interdisciplinary research in sociology, psychology, and economics to demonstrate the consequences of the inequitable distribution of invisible domestic labor on women’s mental health, economic security, and civic equality. Public policy has largely confined its responses to employment-based remedies, leaving the domestic sphere effectively unregulated.
She argues that while constitutional limits and social norms constrain direct regulation of intact families, separated families fall under substantial state oversight through child support enforcement. The ostensibly neutral policies and child support formulae currently in place impact separated mothers by failing to account for the labor they disproportionately perform. Carson’s article proposes revising state child support calculations to potentially help shift cultural norms surrounding caregiving and make visible the legally unseen labor that has sustained families.
“I’m thrilled that my work may contribute to broader conversations about domestic equity and that it might, even in a small way, help bring the real value of invisible labor to light,” Carson added.