The contribution of Tamara Hareven to the understanding of carework

Abstract

Tamara Hareven was widely recognized for her contribution to the study of the family in the context of economic activity, but she was also a pioneer in developing an understanding of carework, the unpaid work that families, usually women, do for the young, and the dependent elderly. This article reviews her insights from interviews in Manchester and in Kyoto, where she examined family strategies for combining paid work and carework among working class families. She described how women integrated child care and economic activity in the decades when women were expected to be at home and out of the labour force. The Manchester interviews also revealed the role of the adult child providing care for the elderly parent and how this role changed rapidly between early and later cohorts of adult children born in the early 20th century. From this she developed her insights on the importance of the historical context for understanding how transitions to parent care differed for different cohorts. In the early 21st century, carework has become integral to the study of the family and of women's roles in the family. Tamara Hareven's work provides early insights as to how these issues were managed in the context of more traditional family roles in the early 20th century.

Acknowledgement

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference on “The History of the Family: Past, Present and Future: In Memoriam Tamara Hareven,” at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, October 17–19, 2003.The author would like to thank Rebecca Johnson Melvin for her assistance with the Tamara K. Hareven papers, which are available in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.

Notes

1 Even today when general surveys do ask for hours devoted to childcare, few ask about eldercare.

2 African–American married women in the South in 1900 overwhelmingly reported a usual occupation in agriculture, and did not claim to be “housewives.”

3 This was not the case for the wives of pottery workers where the husband’s role was that of craftsperson and hers was that of helper (Hareven, 2002a, p.93).

4 Earlier perspectives on the life course examined different cohorts of young men in the transition to work (cf. Elder, 1974).

5 Women in the United States who are covered for six weeks of paid disability leave are able to use that leave for pregnancy and childbirth through the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 1979.

6 Fathers, both residential and nonresidential, are still rarely involved in heavy childcare, and sons are rarely involved in heavy parent care. There are, of course, exceptions, which Hareven discussed (cf. 1997; 1991).