Schreuder (1999) has undertaken a policy analysis of the introduction into the curriculum for secondary education in the Netherlands of the subject ‘taking care’. This subject has been introduced because it is assumed in the Netherlands that everyone from the age of 18 years of age has to be self-supporting. That is: everyone should either […]

In this context of fluid and changing definitions of families, a basic core remains which refers to the sharing of resources, caring, responsibilities and obligations. What a family is appears intrin­sically related to what it does. All the studies in this book suggest that while there are new family forms emerging, alongside new normative guidelines […]

As I have indicated, feminist research on the social identity of the person who undertakes and is perceived to be primarily responsible for care in society has, unsurprisingly, focused on its gendered character. In particular, it is women who are the primary care givers. In addition, one of the major landmarks of feminist research into […]

Min (1999: 140) remarks: ‘It is universally acknowledged that the kitchen is the world of women.’ Her research is focused on the changing role of women in twentieth-century China. Her methodology is comprised of a narrative enquiry based on interviews with women from four genera­tions of one Chinese family. These are: ‘Ms Li, a housewife, […]

Tronto (1993) offers an analysis of care that illustrates how the values we associate with care are gendered, hierarchical and cross the public/ private binary. Tronto conceptualizes care in four ways (see also Fisher and Tronto, 1990) (see Table 5.1). The first stage of caring is caring about. This is the initial recognition of a […]

Meyers (2001) comments that the choice of whether or not to have children has the most profound impact on women’s lives. Such choices impact centrally on women’s identity (see also McMahon, 1995) as either mothers or non-mothers. They condition people’s judgements about oneself. They involve legal and social ties. And ‘Through mother­hood decisions. . . […]

Post-structuralist conceptions of the subject have appealed to many because they seem to offer a way through an apparent tension in notions of ‘social construction’: how do we speak about people as constructions of the social order on the one hand, and as con­structing agents or actors on the other, without erring on either side? […]

Early feminist research and campaigning aimed to increase women’s participation in scientific and technological areas of work. One campaign was called Women into Science and Engineering (WISE). This was based on equal opportunities discourses and assumed that the reasons why young women were not choosing scientific careers was because of a lack of relevant information […]

Economics in the twentieth century became increasingly restricted to a theory of rational choice in the context of scarcity. . . Feminist economists have been key critics of the individualism and absence of an ethical dimension within mainstream economics. (Gardiner, 1997: 38) Becker and Coleman’s work evidence something more than gender — blindness. They evidence […]

Since the late 1980s British educational policy has embraced the market through its concern with parental choice and encouraging competition between educational institutions. Rational choice theory provides the centre-piece of this as it is assumed that parents will select the school that is most appropriate to their child’s needs through a rational appraisal of how […]