By looking at three ethnographic cases, the author explores discrepancies between French notions of paternity and maternity in their legal and ideological aspects, between fathering and mothering in their moral and affective dimensions and between different aspects of caring in the cases of dependent children and of aging parents. The author analyzes these discrepancies from the triple point of view of legal responsibility (who should pay), economic transactions (who gives and receives unpaid and paid care) and of moral feeling (feelings of natural linkage, sense of duty, elective love and quotidian, constructed feeling). She uses the concepts of households of care and lines of transmission to show how the economic and affective dimensions of kinship are connected, trying to understand why French social policies have recently invented a salaried status for caring daughters, but none for caring mothers.
Kinship; Economics of care; Feelings; Social policies
