Women In Community Care

In the modern world we all have definite roles we are assigned to play. It does not mean that someone specific gives this assignment to us, it is simply somehow understood what part each and everyone has to fulfil and what obligations to carry out. We can discuss responsibility and role division among different classes of society, age groups, professional groups, but also from the point of a gender classification. Somehow it is believed that there are jobs for women and those that are meant only for men.



It is a common observation that there are invisible threads that link women with community care. We are so used to conceptualising personal and community care as 'women's work' that we often do not stop to question the invisible threads but act unconsciously in a way so as to reinforce the notion that 'community care is by women'.

The word 'community' is a term that is used to describe many situations and its meaning remains broad but elusive. It has been linked to the commons or common people, the people of a district and the quality of holding something in common.



Community can convey a sense of direct common concern, of organisation or to describe an existing set of relationships. Women and community are interconnected in complex and contradictory ways and Fiona Williams argues that of central importance is the question of which communities and which women. Fiona Williams also goes on to make the distinction between 'space' and 'place'. When women collectively organise for better facilities, safety issues etc. then the community becomes women's 'space' in which to redefine conditions.



In contradiction to this, community can also represent the women's 'place' to which they are confined and relegated.

Community care is often viewed as care being provided by the family, which tends to amount to care by women, and common ideology, leads us to believe that it is 'natural' for women to be carers. Stereotypical expectations of women are reinforced by society's perceived idea of the 'normal' woman, i.e. wife and mother as nurturer and carer and the male breadwinner as provider. This ideology is promoted by the concept of patriarchy, literally 'the law of the father' which is reflected in Michele Barratt and Helen Robert's observation of GP's working with their patients:
Working with GP's over some time it became clear to us that our respondents made certain unspoken assumptions about the 'nature' of men and women.



Men, it was clear, had a primary, natural 'drive' to work to support their wife and family. Women had a similar 'drive' to nourish and cherish their husband and family. These assumptions, so fundamental to the ideological structure of patriarchal capitalism (and evident constantly in the media, religion, political discourse and so on), are not merely reflected in the practice of medicine but are actively endorsed and sanctioned with medical authority.

Patriarchy links to capitalism and the Marxist notion of men as producers and women as reproducers.



This is illustrated also in Carlen & Worrall's comments on the expectations of a 'normal' woman: Being a normal woman means coping, caring, nurturing and sacrificing self-interest to the needs of others. It also means being more than man, in order to support and embrace man. On the other hand, femininity is characterised by lack of control and dependence. Being a normal woman means needing protection……It means being childlike, fragile and capricious. It is being less than man in order to serve and defer to man.



Existing values and images of women are reinforced daily through the norms of our culture and our roles become internalised. Through the media, magazines and the society within which we live women inherit expectations and anxieties, based on a mixture of tradition, myth and reality about what her role is to be.

This 'role' is reflected in the labour market with women taking up those jobs that most closely resemble their family 'caring task' - such as nursing, social work, waitressing, midwifery etc.



As teachers, also, women continue their 'caring role' and this is reinforced by their concentration in infant and junior schools with some 92% of nursery teachers being women.
The same roles are seen to exist in other countries such as the Soviet Union where, in 1978, women made up 99% of nurses and 98% of day-care personnel and it is believed that the statistics have not changed markedly since then.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia proclaimed the full liberation of women and granted them equal political and civil rights but, from the Marxist perspective, female employment was emphasised as the condition of full equality, in society and within the home.



The reality of this was, though, that employment was simply added to the women's traditional family roles.
Around 1928 the Industrial Revolution gained momentum in the Soviet Union and more workers were needed for the expanding industry. So, it could be argued that the reasons that brought women back into the work force were as much economical as ideological despite equal pay for equal work being established by law in Russia; the same roles exist with women performing the caring, routine low paid jobs while the majority of men are in management jobs.



In 1978 the man's salary was estimated as being 50% higher than the woman's.

In England, also, figures for 1988 show that only 15% of management posts are occupied by women and even these are believed to be due to the enormous expansion of the service sector, in areas such as retail, hotel and catering and care services, where the overall workforce is predominately female and has, therefore, allowed women to increase their foothold in management.

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