Book Review: The Backstage of the Care Economy: Transnational Perspectives on the Commercialisation of Care

Guest post by Giovanna da Custódia. Giovanna is a recent MSc graduate in International Migration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the governance of emerging technologies, particularly how AI-powered surveillance systems reshape accountability and transparency in U.S. immigration control. She has previously contributed to projects with UNESCO, the Mozilla Foundation, and the European Parliament.

Review of: The Backstage of the Care Economy: Transnational Perspectives on the Commercialisation of Care by Helma Lutz (Pluto Press, 2025)

Helma Lutz’s The Backstage of the Care Economy: Transnational Perspectives on the Commercialisation of Care reframes existing analyses of feminised care migration by foregrounding intra-Europe migration, often overlooked in global narratives. The book recounts how women from Eastern European countries such as Poland and Ukraine, migrate to provide domestic and care work in Western Europe. By contrasting what she terms the frontstage of the care economy - the visible spaces of paid care in the households of receiving countries - with its backstage - the often-invisible worlds of families and communities left behind - she exposes how transnational care migration simultaneously sustains and destabilises gendered and economic inequalities across Europe. 

She advances the literature on the topic by offering one of the first - and to date, arguably the most comprehensive - empirical analyses of transnational care migration within the European context. As Lutz herself notes, existing scholarship on transnational care migration has predominantly centred on Global South-to-Global North ‘care supply chains.’ By repositioning the phenomenon within an intra-European framework, Lutz not only fills an important empirical gap but also challenges the theoretical foundations of the field - particularly the dominant Global Care Chains and Care Circulation concepts. As to the former, she offers an important critique of the reductive and ultimately unsuitable North–South binary that the framework relies upon - one that fails to capture the socio-economic, cultural, and geopolitical asymmetries of post-socialist Eastern European societies in relation to their ostensibly ‘superior’Western counterparts. While Lutz acknowledges that it would indeed be inappropriate to collapse Eastern Europe into the Global South category - given their distinct histories of colonisation, racialisation, and geopolitical positioning - she nonetheless identifies significant structural parallels between the Global South’s subordination to the North and Eastern Europe’s subjugation within Europe’s own internal hierarchies. 

A scalar distinction can therefore be discerned between Eastern Europe and the Global South - one that complicates and extends the conventional North–South binary by foregrounding the graded and relational nature of geopolitical asymmetries. Importantly, positions along this continuum are neither static nor immutable. States and regions may shift within the scalar hierarchy in response to geopolitical, economic, or institutional transformations, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of global and intra-European hierarchies - one attentive to the interplay between geography, history, and the mutable logics of modernity and power.

Lutz’s attention to these shifting hierarchies forms perhaps the most illuminating dimension of her work, as she persuasively reveals the continuities between the gendered organisation of today’s transnational care labour and the broader political, economic, and moral reconfigurations that accompanied Eastern Europe’s transition from socialism to liberalisation. In tracing how the dismantling of socialist welfare infrastructures and the neoliberal restructuring of the 1990s - accelerated by EU accession - eroded the state-supported dual-breadwinner model, she demonstrated to the reader how the burden of care came to be placed back onto families and, crucially, onto women. While she acknowledges that gender relations under socialism were far from utopian - women continued to shoulder the double burden of paid labour and domestic care despite state commitments to equality - the collapse of socialist institutions nonetheless intensified these inequalities. The ensuing ‘familialisation’ of care, together with the revival of conservative, nationalist, and religious discourses that idealised the stay-at-home mother and reasserted the male breadwinner model, reinstated traditional gender hierarchies under the guise of moral and national renewal. Yet, as Lutz underscores, economic precarity rendered these ideals largely unattainable: men, facing unemployment and declining industrial opportunities, migrated in pursuit of work, while women, contending with both the erosion of care infrastructures and the demand for domestic labour in Western Europe, increasingly entered transnational care circuits. 

Importantly, Lutz extends this analysis beyond motherhood to interrogate how transformations in the political economy and moral order of post-socialism reshaped fatherhood - an aspect often overlooked in previous works - revealing how shifting care responsibilities and masculinities were negotiated within households fractured by mobility. The ensuing moral panic around so-called ‘Euro-orphans’ - children of migrant mothers framed as victims of abandonment - thus exposes not merely anxieties over family disruption, but the gendered and moralised dimensions of nation-building in post-socialist societies, where motherhood and fatherhood alike became symbolic sites for negotiating loss, belonging, and the reconstitution of social order. 

By foregrounding how gendered notions of care and responsibility are mobilised in the moral reconstruction of post-socialist societies, Lutz makes a compelling contribution to feminist and migration scholarship alike. Nevertheless, the book’s analytical architecture leaves certain threads less developed than others, offering fruitful ground for further research and reflection. Notably, although the book’s opening chapters offer detailed and well-contextualised accounts of the legislative and institutional infrastructures governing transnational care work in both the sending and receiving countries (Poland and Ukraine; Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), the comparative and regulatory dimensions of this analysis recede almost entirely as the book progresses. Thereafter, the discussion moves away from systematic comparison to focus instead almost exclusively on the socio-cultural, feminist, and political-economic dynamics of care migration. This shift leaves relatively unexplored the concrete implications of differing legal and institutional arrangements - whether between sending contexts, such as Poland’s EU membership versus Ukraine’s exclusion from it, or between receiving contexts with distinct welfare and migration regimes. These variations could plausibly generate divergent experiences for care workers in terms of labour protections, working conditions, and mobility rights, yet they are addressed only in passing and more explicitly only in the final chapter on the Covid-19 pandemic and border closures. 

While this move allows Lutz to foreground the lived and affective dimensions of transnational care, it also leaves a gap at the intersection of regulation, policy, and everyday experience. Future research could build on her framework by re-integrating the comparative and institutional dimensions she initially sets up - examining how membership in supranational structures such as the EU, as well as the national legal architectures of receiving states, mediate not only labour conditions but also the moral economies of care, family separation, and social citizenship. Such an approach could further illuminate how legal status, migration governance, and welfare regimes shape the differentiated vulnerabilities and agency of transnational care workers within Europe’s stratified care economy, opening up avenues for more concrete change to be exerted on a policy level.

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