‘In Sickness and in Health’: Care-giving, Gender and the Independence of Elderly People

Abstract

In sociology, research on the family and the distribution of labour and resources within the household has tended to ignore elderly people, focusing on younger people’s changing patterns of employment and domestic work. Feminist sociologists, who might have recognised a parallel between the long neglect of gender and the current invisibility of elderly people in sociology, have stopped short of later life (Arber and Ginn, 1991). Elderly people have figured primarily as another unfairly shared burden on younger women as carers.

This paper is based on a project on Community Care and the Elderly funded by the ESRC (Grant No. R000231458). We are indebted to the ESRC Data Archive, University of Essex, and to the University of London Computing Centre for access to the 1985 General Household Survey, and to the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys for permission to use the GHS data.