Who Cares Wins? Women, Caring and Disability

ABSTRACT

This article is an attempt to open up some of the unexplored issues in the ‘carer's debate’. The interest in carers started receiving Government funding in the early 1970s as a response to community care policies. It also received interest from carers themselves and from feminist researchers concerned with the position of women in the family and the labour market. However, in wanting to show the difficult and often unrecognised work of the carer, the debate, in both academic and popular presentation, has often emphasised the public's perception of disabled people as passive, helpless and demanding. Feminist research on carers, it is argued, has ignored women who may need care and the principle of the ‘personal is political’ has failed to identify with the lives of disabled people. It is both unhelpful and unproductive to polarise the needs of disabled people and their carers and treat them as if they are mutually exclusive. We need research which does not alienate disabled people by defining concepts like rights, independence and power in ways which exclude, making disabled people the problem rather than the focus of the research. We need to move forward in the debate, making sure that we give a voice to all those involved in the giving and receiving of personal care. The concept of citizenship with its association with universal human rights may be a way to look concurrently at these needs.