Dulcie Groves

By women for women: Caring for the frail elderly

Abstract The care of the frail elderly should be a subject of especial and growing importance to the womens movement. Two-thirds of the 75+ age group in England and Wales are women, who, when subject to the disabilities of advancing age, are usually assisted or cared for by other women. Current government policies emphasize care at home and assume the availability of unpaid female labour. Care in residential institutions depends largely upon the low paid labour of women. How can the dilemmas posed by different policy options be resolved? Can modes of care be devised which do not rely on exploiting womens labour and which offer choice to elderly women?

Dear Mum and Dad: letters home from a women's hall of residence at the University of Nottingham 1952‐55

Editors note: ’Dear Mum and Dad’ is rather different from the kind of academic article that the Journal usually publishes, in that it is an autobiographical account of one persons educational experiences. The paper tells the story of a young womans three years as a student at Nottingham University through her letters to her parents written between 1952 and 1955. Memory and reflection engage with this contemporary source to produce both a vivid and humorous reconstruction of student life in the 1950s, and the identification of a set of serious issues concerning gender and higher education. Young middle‐class women at university were involved in learning financial independence, developing communal life in their halls of residence, investigating relationships with male students individually and collectively, and making subject and career choices. This subjective account reminds us that the parameters of the feminine norm were not cultural fixtures of the higher education institutions of the 1950s, to be p...

Book reviews : Growing Old in the Twentieth Century Margot Jefferys (ed) Routledge, London and New York, 256pp, £35.00 hbk

explored to allow us to judge how far the patterning depicted applies to the country’s many ethnic minority groups. Thirdly, although lip service is paid by the various authors to the social heterogeneity of those aged 65 and over, socio-economic differentiation among that population is virtually ignored. So too, are the causes and health care consequences of the substantial gender differences in survival and living circumstan-

Ageing and Social Policy Chris Phillipson and Alan Walker (eds) Gower Publishing Company Ltd, 1986, £9.95 pbk:

economic construction of dependency in old age, a second set of chapters which critically evaluate some major relevant fields of welfare provision and a final section which offers comparative perspectives on the USA and France. In their introduction, Phillipson and Walker show how demographic change in the late 20th century has resulted not only in a big increase in the number and proportion of elderly people in the British population but also a major growth in the number of ’very old’ (75 plus), most of whom are women. The editors explain how, in the context of Conservative government ideologies and policies which seek to cut public expenditure and ’privatise’ welfare, this upswing in the elderly population has been construed as a ’crisis’ and elderly people themselves as a ’burden’. Ageing and Social Policy sets out to look into and beyond this ’moral panic’ so as to uncover the actual experiences of old age and the ways in which social policies structure the lives of older people ’effectively producing many of the characteristics associated with old age’. Phillipson and Walker are arguing the case for the creation of a ’political economy of old age’ out of which social policies may be devised which reflect the needs and wishes of older people themselves. In their concluding editorial commentary, they outline possible alternative forms of policy and practice. Readers might find it useful to turn first to Robin Means’ historical perspectives on policy debates of the 1950s and 60s. This pinpoints the heavy emphasis on residential care implicit within the 1948 National Assistance Act and the subsequent shift to public policies which advocated ’domiciliary care’ as a cost-effective alternative. However, as Means reveals, the reluctance of welfare providers to ’develop domiciliary services that might delay the point at which institutional care is the only feasible option for many elderly people’ had much to do with fears of undermining ‘family’ care for elderly relatives, that is, care by women. Peter Townsend’s chapter addresses the extent to which long-term economic and social policies have constructed older people as more ’dependent’ than need be. thus institutionalising ’ageism’ via state regulations and provisions. A useful feature of this contribution is its discussion of theories of ageing, followed by analysis of retirement from paid work, retire-