Community care for frail elderly people rests heavily on the work of low-status, paraprofessional home care workers. Home care workers describe their work as highly personalized caring labor that often seeps out of its formal boundaries into informal, unpaid activities. Although these activities are valued by workers, their supervisors, elderly clients, and family members, they represent uncompensated and exploited labor. Cost-cutting trends in home care management that seek to depersonalize home care labor are likely to increase its exploitative potential for (...) paid care workers and, simultaneously, to disadvantage and jeopardize elderly home care clients and their unpaid family caregivers. (shrink)

In this study, family- and center-based child care providers participated in day-long research workshops in which they first identified dimensions of an “ideal” caregiving situation and then, using a critical incident technique, explored the meaning and experience of “power” as caregivers. This article is devoted to examining the ways in which child care workers understand the notion of “powerfulness” and “powerlessness” in their work. Themes emerging from critical incidents are considered in light of feminist and caregiving literatures. The article concludes (...) by drawing implications from the project's findings for policy, advocacy, and conceptual development. (shrink)

To redefine work as a concept, the author develops the theoretical contours of a multidimensional continuum model of women's work that moves away from older dual spheres models, using oral histories of older rural white women from Iowa and Missouri. Based on a grounded theory analysis, the author discusses three important dimensions of a continuum model of work: economic benefits, location, and time control characteristics. These dimensions tend to funnel women into multiple work strategies where they combine several labor options (...) to maximize economic benefit. A multidimensional continuum model allows us to observe some of the mechanisms operating in women's labor decision-making process. It suggests new ways of thinking about women's life course patterns. By providing us with a definition of work that more accurately reflects observed experience, it casts doubt on some of our social policies, especially those regarding the care of children and the elderly. (shrink)

"Feminism has been enormously successful since the 1960s in revealing the ways in which exercise over woman. But as feminism has grown, it has become increasingly divided: white from black, first world from third world, working class from middle class, lesbian from heterosexuals. In this thought-provoking book, Caroline Ramazanoglu presents a scholarly but sympathetic evaluation of the problems inherent in feminist theory and politics. She examines the theoretical divisions in feminism with great sensitivity and insight, and concludes that the divisions (...) between women have arisen for good reason: women do have contradictory interests. Ramazanoglu argues clearly and powerfully that an escape from this impasse is possible if feminism can work positively with the contradiction in feminist politics, and focus on liberation rather than oppression." -- Back cover. (shrink)