The independent quarterly journal Kill Your Darlings has published a thought-provoking essay on Australia’s ‘hidden women’: carers.

The independent quarterly journal Kill Your Darlings has published a thought-provoking essay on Australia’s ‘hidden women’: carers.

Researcher and writer Emily Maguire profiled four women carers, some of whom were the second generation of carers in their families, sharing their daily struggles – personal and financial. Some wives, daughters, and granddaughters shared the burden of care for violent, alcoholic, or misogynistic husbands, fathers, and grandfathers – willingly, in spite of past abuse.

Other women become carers when their parents become sick, e.g., with cancer or Parkinson’s disease, taking on not only domestic work but also nursing tasks such as cleaning tubes and delivering parenteral nutrition.

‘Wendy’ spoke of her alcoholic father: “Whatever he’d done the night before, I’d get up, have a boiled egg ready, pack his bag with food and give him a hug. I’d come home from school, peel the potatoes and soak the beans. Mum was at work and Dad at the pub.” Her grandfather “had a set against women. He didn’t like Mum, didn’t like me. Wouldn’t let us in the house. He lived till he was 93. When he got sick in his eighties, me and Mum’d go down there to look after him. We’d take stews and soups. The old bugger would eat it, but reluctantly.”

Maguire’s interviews revealed that women carers shared a sentiment that their lives were “nothing to talk about” – they took their relentless care work for granted, arguably as does society at large. Maguire refers to nursing historian Marie-Françoise Collière, who argues that, as medicine became professionalised, “anything related to care became taken for granted, considered unworthy... Non-professional, unpaid carework became ‘invisible work done by invisible women.’... 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.”

Maguire joins Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ross Gittins in arguing that the unequal burden of care on women is a feminist political issue. She writes: “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 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.’”

Another obstacle faced by women carers lobbying for fair pay for their work is the public perception (often shared by carers themselves) that caring, as an altruistic act driven by love, is just what comes naturally to women and therefore shouldn’t be financially compensated.

Maguire notes that even though many women “are physically exhausted from getting up every two hours throughout the night, lifting, carrying, bathing and dressing wounds... emotionally exhausted from the stress of considering the wellbeing of another person 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year, without relief”, their political cause for fair pay and respite support is undermined by the stereotype that prevents care from being considered a political rather than private issue.

The stereotype is “that carers are naturally altruistic, don’t need to be paid, compensated or assisted because they are doing what comes innately. Caring is seen as a moral chore or obligation more than it is seen as work.” She notes that family carers “do what they do out of love or familial duty. They’re often reluctant to complain about their financial status precisely because they fear people will think they expect to be paid for taking care of a loved one.”

Maguire’s essay, which won coverage on ABC Radio National, is a descriptive and important addition to the debate about the political implications of women’s hidden work as carers.

The full text is available free online here