Mrs. Clinton could be a champion of caregiverism. She has been blunter this electoral season about family-friendly policies than she has ever been before. She emphasized paid family leave when she began her campaign and again in the opening statements of the first Democratic presidential debate. In May, she said she’d cap the cost of child care at 10 percent of a household’s income, down from what, for a household supported by minimum-wage workers, can now be more than 30 percent.

But she needs to go further. Her focus is on wage-earners; what about the people who want to get out of the workplace, at least for a while? Mrs. Clinton should talk to Representative Nita Lowey of New York, who last year introduced a bill that would give Social Security credits to caregivers who left the labor market or cut back on hours — a public nod to the reality that care is work and caregivers merit the same benefits as other workers.

Mrs. Clinton belongs to an earlier generation, one whose objective was to free women from the prison of domesticity — at least the middle-class women who didn’t already have jobs — and send them marching into the work force to demand equality there. But true equality will take more than equal pay and better working conditions. It will require something more radical, a “transvaluation of all values,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.

Am I calling for a counterrevolution? I don’t think so. Feminists have not always seen work as the answer to women’s problems. Many who put in sweatshop hours in the textile industry or open-ended days in domestic service fought for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour workweek. Working women “were not just organizable; they were the best constituency for struggle over the working day,” write David Roediger and Philip Foner in “Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day.”

There is also a venerable tradition in feminist history of trying to overturn a status quo that esteems professionals and wage-earners while demeaning those who do the unpaid or low-paid work of emotional sustenance and physical upkeep. In the 1960s, the largely African-American National Welfare Rights Organization demanded welfare payments that would maintain a decent standard of living, partly on the grounds that these mothers were working already, raising future workers, and partly because they couldn’t find jobs that would support them. “I am 45 years old; I have raised six children,” wrote the group’s chairwoman, Johnnie Tillmon, in 1972. “A job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some 10 million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one.”

Around the same time, the Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James began a campaign called Wages for Housework that called for the overthrow of a capitalist order subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of homemaking and, yes, sexual services. This did not mean that women should necessarily go out and find jobs. “Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work,” they wrote. “Slavery to an assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.”