Chapter 16: Gender, Care, and the Welfare State

Clare Ungerson

Gender, care, and the welfare state This chapter outlines the way in which feminist debates surrounding care have developed, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Much of this debate has been concerned with unpaid ‘informal’ care which takes place within households, and where it was initially assumed women very much predominated as household carers. The chapter suggests that this assumption was in certain respects oversimplified, and that succeeding debates have taken into account that men care, too, that disabled people feel demeaned by the whole notion of ‘care’, and that a gendered perspective on care has also to take account of a perspective informed by ‘race’ and ethnicity. This last perspective has encouraged widening the concept of care to include work carried out within households by non-kin and eventually to a discussion of paid as well as unpaid care. The chapter then goes on to consider various ...

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