Issue Four
Extract – Emily Maguire, ‘The Invisible Women: Carers in Australian Families’
In Issue Four of Kill Your Darlings (released on January 14), Emily Maguire records three women’s experiences caring for ill and disabled family members. Read an exclusive extract from the essay here.
Care, the nursing historian Marie-Françoise Collière wrote, ‘is at the very root of women’s history, as it is around care that the main part of women’s destiny is woven’. This is true for Wendy, who has cared her entire life and swears she will do so until the day she dies. ‘When Mum’s gone,’ she tells me, ‘I’ll find someone else who needs me. I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself.’
She tells me repeatedly that speaking to her is probably a waste of my time: ‘My life’s nothing to talk about.’ It’s a sentiment I’ll hear again and again from family carers.
Collière argues that, as medicine became professionalised, ‘anything related to care became taken for granted, considered unworthy, requiring “lower skills” and scanty knowledge, limited to routine procedures and “know-how”’. Non-professional, unpaid carework became ‘invisible work done by invisible women.’
There are male carers, of course, but they are in the minority. More than 70 per cent of primary carers in Australia are women, and American research shows that daughters are three times more likely to become primary carers than sons; this blows out to four times more likely when the parent is severely impaired. The gendered nature of care is, as the Sydney Morning Herald’s Ross Gittins has argued, ‘a feminist issue with similarities to the need for child care – although it gets far less attention than the problems faced by younger women.’
The disparity in male/female care reflects the traditional division of labour in families. In our culture, as well as in many others, women and girls are still expected to take on all or most of the domestic responsibility. The gender pay gap is also a factor: women still earn only 83 per cent of the male wage, so leaving work or reducing work hours in order to take on family responsibilities is considered less of an economic sacrifice. As historian Emily Abel points out, care work is undervalued not only because it has traditionally been seen as ‘women’s work’, but also because the people who need care – the sick, the disabled, the elderly – are also undervalued.
2 Responses to Extract – Emily Maguire, ‘The Invisible Women: Carers in Australian Families’
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5:05 pm, January 18, 2011
This is a lightly written but still devastating article… I will think much more about it. However, I thought I would draw out something that troubled me, although I think that my concern is definitely yours as well.
You quote “Abel” who “points out that, while the obligation to perform care work has often reduced women’s independence in terms of physical and economic freedom, it could also be – to use a very modern term – empowering because of the skills acquired, the inner strength drawn on and the resourcefulness developed.”
I worry that this is something of a dangerous reversal, valuing what has been undervalued without questioning the apparent rightness of women being such isolated doers-of-good. These skills might be acquired but they are not acknowledged as professional, and inner strength is drawn on and resourcefulness developed because they have to be, because they are the only alternative, in the case of such a total lack of support.
It shows your subject’s achievement when you say that “She has done what she had to do, changing in the process from ‘a timid little thing’ to a woman with so much knowledge and experience in navigating the system that others turn to her for help” – but again, the kind of help she can offer, informally, to others, is part of an invisible economy of exchange – the very fact of working around a shaky system, in one sense supports the inadequate system and allows it to continue and to stretch itself just a little bit more thin. Dawn says, “You only find out through word of mouth, because someone else has gone through it and tells everyone” – this is, in one sense, the only practical way to find out things that are fundamentally necessary to the individuals in the situation, but in another way it is an alternative to agitating for change … I am not demanding anything else of these carers! But it is another way to look at it.
Also I can’t tell you how much it struck me that Dawn says “Obviously, there are people out there who need it more and so I just put up with it.” It is a case of sympathy for others’ situations leading away from political change instead of towards it… but I can understand and honour the sentiment so much nonetheless.