As our society has shifted from a preindustrial to postindustrial framework, the systems of both work and domestic/private spheres have been mutually transformed. The labor market has been radically changed as women have entered the workforce in higher numbers and the labor market has seen a rise in service and care segments of the economy. Our understanding of relationships and family structures also continue to evolve as “norms” become harder to identify and the dichotomy of caregiver and breadwinner roles has been blurred. As a result of these changing dynamics, the sociological concept of “care” has attracted more discussion and analysis. While the concept of “care” is not uniformly defined, the balance in care provision among families, states, and markets and the intersections of care and work are of central concern to the field. The arguments presented Andrea Doucet’s Do Men Mother?, Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Domestica, and other course lectures and resources serve to complicate the concept of care, force us to reexamine our definition of work, and recognize the way in which these responsibilities affect and limit people’s opportunities.
The Concept of Care: Complicating the definition of Care
The ways in which care is being organized varies greatly throughout individual households and arrangements. It is important to note that fully deconstructing the concept of care would require an exploration of a range of issues including gender and care, elder care, childcare, and disability studies, that is simply not possible within this short paper. Care can perhaps most broadly be defined as the act of looking after needs of oneself or other persons. Since the shift to a postindustrial society, the concept of care has been widel...
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...es. Our attempts to understand new divisions of care and work have been complicated by changes in our economic system over the last fifty years.
The implications of this devaluation of this care work, while the growing ideas about the “priceless child” and our investment in advancing our society through the next generation is a confusing juxtaposition. Systems of both work/organizations and domestic/private spheres have been mutually transformed and as women and men attempt to negotiate new forms of care arrangements, perhaps the time has come to reimagine our definition of work and our society’s investment in the act of care. More family friendly work policies, corporate training to address gender and motherhood penalties and a continual reassessment of our own perceptions of care will all be necessary to truly adapt our system to our new sociological ideals.
The quality of child care in the United States leaves room for improvement. According to (Deborah, L., Vandell, & Barbara, W.), suggest that when low-income families received child care, mothers are more likely to keep doctor’s appointments and decrease their stress level. The cost of child care is having a huge impact on the careers of working parents and people with disabilities. According to the case study of Katy Adams is one that conveys the message of different facets of stress and, how it impacts a person’s health and well been.
Social work practice has a responsibility to adequately support the chosen lifestyle of unpaid carers as their efforts form an invaluable service which saves the economy £132 billion per year (Carers UK, 2015a). Without the thousands of carers, the health of many of society’s most vulnerable would suffer as the government would struggle to fund the costs of providing alternative care. Yet there is a growing reliance upon unpaid carers who are willing and able to provide the care which allows people to remain within their home. Firstly, the health issues of an aging and unhealthy population means there are increasing numbers of people aged 18+ who find it difficult to look after themselves. Secondly, there is an expectation that unpaid carers
...er, K. (2013). Men at work, fathers at home: uncovering the masculine face of caregiver discrimination. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 253.
The Open University (2010) K101 An introduction to health and social care, Unit 1, ‘Care: a family affair’, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Women throughout history have been considered to have an active role in the family life as the caretakers, while the men are considered the “breadwinners” of the family. However, a few women still have had to provide for their families throughout the years and as a result have sought employment in industries that “were highly segregated by sex” (Goldin 87). Women employm...
Eva Kittay’s “Love’s Labor” truly opened my eyes to the profession of dependency work. I realized that there are many underlying ethical concerns of the job and that it is not to be taken lightly. I believe that society should provide more opportunities for caregivers and that more people should take the time to learn in more depth about what the profession requires.
- care by other - care of other: the meaning of self-care from research, practice, policy
Following the rise of capitalism, the revolution of women’s rights and the availability of contraception, the late twentieth century ushered in new household structures, not unprecedented, but certainly not within what was previously accepted as a social norm. These new familial structures included unmarried couples, homosexual parents, and parents who had been remarried and brought the new dynamic of step relations into the family unit. Gradually divorce, pregnancy outside of marriage, and the now oft liberating realm of single parenthood lost some of its social stigma. When industrial capitalism took hold, women were ushered outside of the domestic sphere and into the workforce. In addition to the socialization of domestic tasks, this was a condition required for liberation. The institution of the nuclear family, however, as an economic unit is central to meeting the needs of capitalism. Within the present system, employers pay workers a wage, but fail to take responsibility for the social costs of maintaining the current generation of workers- or for raising the next generation of workers into adulthood. These tasks are shouldered by separate families, and within the family, it is principally women who are expected to perform the unpaid domestic labor of raising children, cooking, housework and primary healthcare. Capitalism, in essense, now essentially relies on the unpaid labor of women within the home.
In “Nurses, fathers, teachers, mothers. Why do we devalue someone the minute they care for others?” Lily Cunningham interviews a university professor who examines the importance of those in caregiving roles. Anne-Marie Slaughter is an author whose book entitled “Unfinished Business” discusses the issues surrounding working parents, particularly women. The book discussed provides an outlook on struggles women encounter in the professional world. “If you are a woman who doesn’t have caregiving obligations, you’re earning somewhere between 92 and 96 percent on every male dollar. If you are a woman with caregiving obligations, you’re earning closer to 70 to 72 percent on the male dollar.” Slaughter believes that the problem isn 't work-life balance,
The term “Sandwich Generation” is what some are using to describe those people who, for one reason or another, are ‘sandwiched’ between the need to provide care not only for their own children but also for at least one aging parent. There has been much debate on what classifies someone as being included in such group, and little emphasis on the hardships that accompany the transition between child and caregiver. This paper will discuss the classification that make up the “sandwich generation’ and some of the financial and emotional stress that comes with this new responsibility.
Global Care Chain (GCC) focuses on the mechanism of global reproduction, care services internationalisation, and care labour migration (Yeates, 2009). According to Yeates (2009) GCC explores the transnational interconnections and inter-dependencies, involving the flow of workers from developing countries to work as paid elder caregivers in developed nations while leaving their own children and parents behind. Global nursing care chain has been found across the various regions, including North America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia (Yeats, 2009; Bettio et al, 2006; Michel and Peng, 2012). There are similarities underlying these care chains, according to Bettio et al (2006) and Yeats (2009), the reasons why this care chain emerge includes: 1) in input countries: population ageing, decreasing birth rates, increasing labour force participation of women, insufficient market and public care provision for elderly people, increasing needs of caregivers, unwillingness of national workers to unde...
Many families today have two parents with careers, which can put added stress on the family and especially mothers. With both parents working, one needs to consider the roles of the household. There are more husbands today that help with household duties such as laundry, cleaning, cooking, and caring for the children, but there are still many that don’t think this is a job for men, which can add more pressure and stress on mothers. Macionis (2015) claimed, with both men and women in the workforce, the majority of household duties are still
Should society value caregiving just as much as breadwinning? Over time, society has increased the value of breadwinning. However, at the same time, society has decreased the value of caregiving. There has been many assumptions about caregiving and breadwinning. For example, women were viewed as the primary caregiver while men were seen as the primary breadwinners. Around the 1950s, caregiving was valued just as much as breadwinning, but overtime that outlook has quickly morphed into something new. Caregiving is seen as less than breadwinning. Women and men are expected to focus all of their attention on there careers, which leaves almost no time for anyone to be caregiver. The new outlook has discredited caregivers and their role in society.
Generally speaking, the term ‘housework’ is used to refer to the managing of the home involving a range of domestic and often unpaid activities, ‘the purpose of which is to maintain household members’ (Hatt, 1997). According to Hatt, social events such as the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution produced a surge of change throughout society causing the separation of the home and the workplace, as well as the shift from household work to factory work. As society gradually altered to reflect this, the home became the place of the ‘reproduction’ of labour, a predominantly female-gendered role shaped by social policies and ideologies which maintain the gendered division of labour. However, since the mid-20th century we have seen many significant changes in housework and who is responsible for its implementation, following the feminist movement and social changes which have allowed women to have access to equal opportunities with regards to paid employment. Although women were finally able to engage in paid work with less prejudice and similar opportunities as men, they were also expected to complete household tasks on top of this, regularly performing what Hochschild (1989) describes as ‘the second shift’, or the ‘double shift’. It was not until the early 21st century that middle class families began to seek paid domestic workers to perform their household management activities for them, eliminating the issues that arose with the double shift. A huge rise in demand for this service has led to the commoditisation of domestic labour, although some sociologists such as Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) argue that ‘as class polarization grows, the classic posture of submission makes a comeback’, with many domestic cleaning...