Gender and Community Care

This book takes the experiences of users of community care services as its starting-point. Drawing on feminist theory, it documents the gender assumptions behind social work practice and community care policies, and reveals how these impact on women and men as both providers and recipients of community care. In doing so it provides an outline of the developments in practice and policy, and illustrates how particular constructions of gender have influenced both. This important text challenges assumptions that caring is always a positive experience for women and men.
To conclude, a comprehensive overview of the literature about user groups is provided. This informs the author's argument that practitioners in social work and social care have to be attentive in their interventions to the way that identities are constructed and experienced in order to ensure that services are both caring and just.

Joan Orme is Chair of Social Work at the University of Glasgow.