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Americans have long been stuck in an unfinished revolution for women's equality. Even though women now make up nearly half the workforce, we are "leaning in" to jobs with longer hours and without a national system of good care for our young.

In this themed section, the editors and authors take us far beyond the usual thinking about welfare reform. How, they ask, do politicians want us to feel about welfare reform? How do we think we should feel and how do we feel about it? How does the disabled woman who has lost her government-provided caregiver and 'hasn't been out of the house since Christmas', feel about it? Or the man who petitions to restore his lost government aid – but fails to do so? Or the wealthy Dutch tax payer? These are are the sorts of questions that arise in the study of a changing welfare states.

As American society has become ever more dominated by the market, sociological interest in commodification has paradoxically declined. Marx, among others, noted how a worker can become estranged from his work—the doing of it, the tools of it, and the product resulting from it. Consumers can become estranged from all these, too. As workers and consumers today, we often detach ourselves from what we make and buy, and extreme forms of detachment we can call estrangement or alienation. Marx's iconic worker was (a) the nineteenth-century male factory worker for whom (b) estrangement was a static state (c) about which the victim had no narrative. In today's economy, we can look to the female service worker who does emotional labor to alter her state of estrangement and whose narrative may be that of "free choice." Is the commercial surrogate I met in a for-profit clinic in India an autonomous agent in a free market, I wondered, or is she the latest version of Marx's "alienated man"? This essay grapples with that question.

Während in der traditionellen Familie Kinderreichtum oder Kinderlosigkeit als Schicksal begriffen wurden, wird die Forderung nach dem Recht auf das eigene Kind im "emotional capitalism" für viele Paare zu einem wichtigen Merkmal eines erfüllten Lebens. Dieses erfüllte Leben wird durch Menschen auf der Hinterbühne das globalen Marktes ermöglicht. Im Falle der Unfruchtbarkeit eines oder beider Partner stehen in indischen Reproduktionskliniken auch Eispenden und Spermien zur Verfügung. Solche Situationen werden oft als "win-win"-Situationen beschrieben, die für alle Beteiligten vorteilhaft sind - tatsächlich geht es um den emotionalen Gewinn der Klienten und den materiellen Gewinn der Vermittler und Kliniken. Die Verfasser zeigt dies auf der Basis qualitativer Interviews mit Ersatzmüttern und Nannies. (ICE2).