Volume 48, Number 1 · January 11, 2001
Disabled Lives: Who Cares?
By Martha C. Nussbaum
Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency
by Eva Feder Kittay
Routledge, 238 pp., $19.99 (paper)
Life As We Know It:A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child
by Michael Bérubé
Vintage, 284 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It
by Joan Williams
Oxford University Press, 338 pp., $30.00
Sesha, daughter of the philosopher Eva Kittay and her husband Jeffrey, is a young woman in her early thirties. Attractive and affectionate, she loves music and pretty clothes, and responds with joy to the affection and admiration of others. Sesha sways to music and hugs her parents. But she will never walk, talk, or read. Because of congenital cerebral palsy and severe mental retardation, she will always be profoundly dependent on others. She needs to be washed, fed, dressed, wheeled out into Central Park. Beyond such minimal custodial care, if she is to flourish in her own way she needs companionship and love, a visible response to the capacities for affection and delight that are her strongest ways of connecting with others. Her parents, busy professionals, both care for Sesha for long hours themselves and pay a full-time caregiver. Still other helpers are needed on the many occasions when Sesha is ill or has seizures, and cannot help by telling where she hurts. In Love's Labor Kittay argues that Sesha's need for care suggests both major criticisms of our dominant theories of social justice and major changes that should be made in our political arrangements.
Review, 5484 words
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