Women S Caring

Caring For/Caring About explores the complex nature of caring in Canadian society today by examining current research on women, home care, and unpaid caregiving.

Most of the caring work in our society is done by women. This work is often hidden in the roles of mothers, daughters, and wives and is undervalued outside the home as women work in the community as volunteers, in the 'caring' professions, and in low-wage jobs in hospitals, child-care centres, and homemaking services. In this second edition of Women's Caring, a ground-breaking feminist perspective on social welfare in Canada, the editors and their contributors have added three new chapters - on women of colour, women abused in intimate relationships, and Canada's live-in caregiver policy. As well, the entire book has been widely updated and revised to reflect the changed legal, political, and policy contexts and the growing literature on the formal paid and informal unpaid caring work that women perform.

What are the realities of ‘community care’ – the unpaid care given by hundreds of thousands of women, often in their own homes – for children and adults who are handicapped or chronically sick, or for frail elderly people? Originally published in 1983, this book explores the experiences of such women and the dilemmas which ‘caring’ poses for them. At a time when most women needed to earn money from a paid job, how did ‘carers’ manage to juggle their caring and other domestic responsibilities, and what happened if they had to give up work? Against a background of government policies which favour care ‘by’ the community, the contributors to this book raise crucial issues for social and economic policy. Hilary Graham examines what caring really means and Clare Ungerson asks why women do it. Sally Baldwin and Caroline Glendinning focus on mothers with handicapped children and Fay Wright on single adults with elderly dependants. Alan Walker highlights the dependencies implicit in caring relationships with the elderly. Lesley Rimmer looks at the economic ‘costs’ of care, and Dulcie Groves and Janet Finch examine the invalid care allowance – a carers’ benefit for which married women can never qualify. In exploring the domestic sector of welfare, A Labour of Love was a highly topical contribution to the debate both on welfare provision and on the division of labour between men and women at the time.

This work examines the experience of women providing care to children, disabled persons, the chronically ill, and the frail elderly. It differs from most writing about caregiving because it focuses on the providers rather than the care recipients. It looks at the experience of women caregivers in specific settings, exploring what caregiving actually entails and what it means in their lives

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea, public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare privileged the new nation’s reproductive health and women’s responsibility for care work to produce novel organization of services in hospitals and practices in the home. The first monograph on this topic, Imperatives of Care places women and gender at the center of modern medical transformations in Korea. It outlines the professionalization of medicine, nursing, and midwifery, tracing their evolution from new legal and institutional infrastructures in public health and education, and investigates women’s experiences as health practitioners and patients, medical activities directed at women’s bodies, and the related knowledge and goods produced for and consumed by women. Sonja M. Kim draws on archival sources, some not previously explored, to foreground the ways individual women met challenges posed by uneven developments in medicine, intervened in practices aimed at them, andseized the evolving options that became available to promote their personal, familial, and professional interests. She demonstrates how medicine produced, and in turn was produced by, gendered expectations caught between the Korean reformist agenda, the American Protestant missionary enterprise, and Japanese imperialism.

Thinking Women and Health Care Reform in Canada explores why health care is a woman's issue and seeks to address gender equity in health services. Written by members of Women and Health Care Reform (WHCR), this collection establishes the importance of including gender in discussions and decisions surrounding health sector reform. In twelve concise chapters, Thinking Women and Health Care Reform in Canada addresses a wide range of issues, including obesity, maternity care, mental health of health care workers, and private health insurance. This thought-provoking collection is an essential read for students and researchers in the fields of women's studies, health sciences, sociology, and nursing, as well as for anyone who is looking for a new picture of health care in Canada.

Are women naturally better caregivers than men? Can paid care in an institutuion be good care? Can voluntary community care replace government welfare? Is the caring family disappearing? What role should government play in supporting or regulating families? Is day care for children as good as home care? Using engaging case studies and research findings, this lively new book from the Gender Lens Series explores these and other questions and controversies, challenging the notion that caregiving is a "natural" pattern and demonstrating how it is thoroughly social. Written in an inviting and readable style, the authors address complex issues about caring, making them accessible to undergraduate students and lay people. The book shows those who will enter diverse caregiving professions how to see their particular occupation as influenced by the larger society and broader social relations of caring. It also shows how beliefs about gender and family shape caregiving, and how caregiving affects gender inequality.

This volume provides a critical introduction to contemporary attempts to base nursing ethics on a feminine 'ethics of care'.