Caregiving

Stacey J. Oliker

Caregiving is gendered, and gendered caregiving contributes to gender inequality. In this entry, caregiving is defined as affect and actions that are responsive to an individual's needs and well-being within a face-to-face relationship. Issues treated here are the emergence of modern ideas of caring; how caregiving is gendered; the relationship between unpaid and paid care work, including why caregiving jobs are underpaid and whether payment undermines care; and how affluent democracies support caregiving. In the past few decades, philosophers, historians, social scientists, and scholars of “social politics” and “social care” have theorized and researched caregiving in relation to gender inequality. This literature frequently uses the term care work to describe the time-consuming, effortful labor that caregivers invest in relations of care. The definition in this entry does not include the sustaining activities of economic provision and other feelings and actions that Nell Noddings labels “caring about” though not “caring The ...

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