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Women's Perspectives on Informal Care of the Elderly: Public Ideology and Personal Experience of Giving and Receiving Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Jane Aronson
Jane Aronson
Affiliation:
School of Social Work, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4M2, Canada.
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Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative study of thirty-two women aged between 35 and 85, this paper links women's experiences of giving and receiving care in the informal sphere to their wider social and ideological context. While subjects subscribed to cultural assumptions about families, responsibility, gender and old age, they experienced awkwardness in translating them into their own lives. Younger women and women looking back on their middle years experienced contradiction between the cultural expectation that they be responsive to others and their wishes for self-enhancement. Older women experienced contradiction between the cultural imperative to be unburdensome and independent and their wish for security. Feelings of guilt and shame were associated with not living up to these expectations. They rendered subjects' concerns, individual failings and stifled expression of their needs. To facilitate such expression and work towards social policies that enhance women over the life course, it will be necessary to envision alternative types of supportive services and to challenge the ideological barriers to their use that the subjects of this study had so acutely internalised.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 61 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

NOTES

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