Governing Social Reproduction: Privatized Care, Public Responsibility and Coercion in COVID-19 Policy Across the U.S. States

This article examines state-level COVID-19 policy and social reproductive care in the United States through theoretical, policy-genealogical, and empirical lenses. It reworks the early “COVID moment,” from March to November 2020, as a policy opportunity moment in which states were compelled to make unusually explicit decisions about the relationship among work, markets, care, households, and state responsibility. The article situates this state-level moment within the longer genealogy of American national policy paradigms governing social reproductive care, from the beginnings of national policy attention in the early twentieth century to the late-twentieth-century marketization and privatization of care. Using interpretive and statistical methods, the article analyzes an original dataset of more than 150 stay-at-home orders and reopening plans from all fifty states, alongside governors’ messaging and executive orders. The analysis finds that state responses clustered into three distinct COVID governance paradigms that differently allocated social reproductive care, state responsibility, and work coercion: a care-focused paradigm, which most substantially recognized the public value of care and the interdependence of productive and reproductive labor; a market-restoration paradigm, which largely reproduced the inherited prioritization of productive work, economic reopening, personal responsibility, and privatized care; and a regulated hybrid paradigm, which modified the inherited approach by combining care governance and market-restoration orientations. The article argues that states’ divergent approaches were shaped by political context and by varied alignment with an inherited, market-centered logic that privatized responsibility for social reproduction. Neoliberalism is treated as a historical source of the prevailing governing logic of privatized care. Although care governance states most clearly recognized care and interdependence as matters of public concern, they did not establish a public care system; all three paradigms operated within a predominantly private, household- and market-based, care infrastructure. COVID-19 therefore temporarily unsettled, but did not displace, the inherited privatized-care logic. By tracing these patterned state responses historically and empirically, the article suggests that the COVID moment generated policy alternatives whose significance may extend beyond the crisis itself. Although they did not produce a durable paradigm shift, some state-level COVID responses offer care-focused policy models that may be revived under different political circumstances, while also revealing a nascent political willingness to expand public responsibility for social reproductive care. In so doing, the article contributes to American political development, public policy, and feminist care scholarship.