End points and starting points: some critical remarks on Janet Finch, Community care: developing non-sexist alternatives

TLDR: No non-sexist version of community care seems possible, but Finch believes it possible to envisage forms of residential provision which do not, ’violate the relational aspects of caring, nor individual autonomy and identity, and would actually be popular with those for whom it was provided’.

Abstract: are possible she raises an important question. In answering it, she analyses community care in terms of what is done and where it is done. Her initial conclusions are firstly, that what is done, ie ’caring’, ’Will remain women’s work for the foreseeable future, for both economic and ideological reasons. ’(2) Secondly, where it is done ‘the community’, is not just ’women’s space, but it must necessarily be so’. Following Wilson, she sees community ’as fundamentally a gendered concept’, at least ’as it is utilized’ by those who define community in terms of ’networks’. From this she concludes, ’no non-sexist version of community care seems possible.’~3> This creates a problem for Finch because she is unwilling forthrightly to recommend shunting dependent people into institutions as they have existed historically. The work of Hilary Graham and Clare Ungerson opens up to Finch the complexities of caring and the fact that ’caring means caring about as well as for in our culture’. (4) However, she believes it possible to envisage forms of residential provision which do not, ’violate the relational aspects of caring, nor individual autonomy and identity, and would actually be popular with those for whom it was provided’. (5) She provides