ABSTRACT
Assumptions about the moving of the elderly from domesticity to cared environments or sheltered accommodation—or, more crudely, about their being ‘put in a home’—affect us all, directly and indirectly, (and for most of us in a rather guilty fashion). The linearity of the phrase ‘from domesticity to care’ betrays the assumption that the move to cared environments involves a loss of the capacity to care for oneself and others, as in the frightening words ‘taken into care’. Yet the institutionalised provision of care, whatever anxiety it invokes, is widely considered fundamental to a humane society.
