I was reading a New York Times opinion piece recently, titled “It’s Not Normal to Raise Children Like This.” The article laments the fact that many people in the modern West lack a “village,” people with whom we can share the intricacies of daily life and on whom we can mutually depend in times of need. Near the end of the article, the author describes the benefit of knowing that there will be people who will “feel it their duty to look after you” when needed. She then drops a zinger. “Feminism has encouraged women to reject this sense of duty,” she writes.[1]
I have been a caregiver for a family member for four years now, balancing caregiving duties alongside writing my dissertation. In all that time, I don’t think it really occurred to me that some people might see caregiving and feminism as somehow mutually opposed. Of course, on reflection, it’s easy to understand the misapprehension. Feminists have rightly critiqued the disproportionate load of care work that women (especially women of colour) have shouldered, usually without compensation. And feminism rejects prescribed gender norms that restrict women to only occupying the roles of wife, mother, homemaker, and caregiver. In conjunction with this, some versions of feminism have emphasized women’s ability to advance in their chosen careers as the central tenet of women’s liberation.
Yet career advancement on its own isn’t nearly radical enough to be called feminism. Climbing to the top of the patriarchal food chain isn’t itself smashing the patriarchy. As an example, Taylor Swift might be considered feminist by some because she has successfully beat the boys at their own game. However, becoming a billionaire—a status that relies on and intensifies extreme wealth disparity—is fundamentally and unequivocally incompatible with being a feminist, no matter how much Girl Boss feminist-washing you engage in. Feminism isn’t about getting to the top of the hierarchy, but about dismantling hierarchies altogether—not just those of gender, but also the intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and wealth.
Overturning these hierarchies is not only central to feminism but also to the Christian faith. Mary’s Magnificat powerfully bears witness to a God who is actively engaged in “[bringing] down rulers from their thrones” and “lift[ing] up the humble,” a God who “has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52-53, NRSV). Jesus echoes these themes in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-10) and in his statement that his vocation is one of enacting liberation for the poor, the prisoners, the disabled, and the oppressed (Luke 4:18). His mission is to turn things upside down.
And Jesus’s mission of liberation as described in the Gospels looks decidedly like care work. His ministry is marked by tending to the sick, providing food for hungry people, spending time with small children. He is woken by his disciples in the middle of the night when they are frightened by a storm and sings to them about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (okay, he calms the storm instead so they can all go back to sleep). One of his final and most significant acts is washing his disciples’ feet.
At the beginning of Acts, the early church seems to follow Jesus’s example and prioritize care work as central to their mission. The believers carefully choose and anoint seven men (including Stephen, who would become the first Christian martyr) to look after the distribution of food to widows and ensure that everyone receives what they need (Acts 6:1-7). Yet the importance of this work is simultaneously undermined by the language of the text, which seems to pit the task of preaching against this care work. The twelve apostles say, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables” (Acts 6:2, NRSV). I’m not sure if the wording would have sounded as dismissive of waiting on tables to its original audience as it does to me in the English translation, but what does come through clearly is that the apostles understand caring for widows to be a distraction from their true vocation. Given that Jesus had only recently instructed them to wash each other’s feet as he washed theirs (John 13:1-20), I wonder why they so quickly decide that their calling has been narrowed to preaching only.
Thus, from almost the beginning, and increasingly over time, preaching has been prioritized over the more mundane work of caregiving in the church. In many contexts, this hierarchy of preaching over care work within the church has paralleled and reinforced existing gender hierarchies, with preaching exclusively done by men and care work exclusively done by women. This is another hierarchy for feminist theology to dismantle, not just by erasing gendered notions of who can and should take on these tasks, but also by critiquing the framework that elevates one over the other. If we look to Jesus’s words and example as recorded in the Gospels, the binary between preaching and care work seems to evaporate. When Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord… has anointed me to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives” (Luke 4:18), I don’t think he was just talking about the spoken words of preaching. What if care work is the proclamation of the gospel? What if the kingdom that Jesus inaugurated can only be truly proclaimed in the act of caring for one another?
Feminist writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has stated, “One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort… Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.”[2] Caregiving seems like the least revolutionary, most mundane activity possible. Yet I find Solnit’s suggestion comforting, especially when I worry that I’m not doing enough to try to enact political change. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s famous statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[3] If our task, both as feminists and as Christians, is to participate in overturning oppressive hierarchies, it makes sense that our tools for revolution must be different from those of the oppressor. It makes sense that care for others might be the seed for growing a new reality.
The New York Times article I quoted at the beginning was correct that we need more villlages, more networks of mutual care. But I don’t think it is feminism that has ruined the village or has tried to convince people that care work is unnecessary or demeaning. Instead, feminism asserts that the care work that women have been doing for centuries is skilled, creative, intelligent work, which should be valued. A feminist theology of caregiving recognizes that care work is central, not peripheral to the proclamation of the gospel. It is God’s own work, the root of liberation. Blessed are the caregivers, for we are shaping a new world.
[1] Louise Perry, “It’s Not Normal to Raise Children Like This,” The New York Times (October 14, 2025). Perry is a podcaster and writer who seems to be a member of the so-called “reactionary feminism” movement, which I don’t see as feminist in any sense of the word. By focusing on biological gender essentialism and heteronormativity, reactionary feminism only reinforces existing hierarchies and supports patriarchal norms.
[2] David Marchese, “The Interview: Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero is Already Here,” The New York Times (March 7, 2026). This section is also quoted in Solnit’s newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency.
[3] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 1979.
Image: “A photo of my grandmother and father” by Christiaandup, shared under Creative Commons license.
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