Gender and Family Care in Crisis Situations in Nineteenth-Century Austria

During the nineteenth century, the great majority of communal and state care institutions in Austria were for ‘emergency’ cases and were dealt with in urban settings only. ² The care of children, of the elderly and the sick, was essentially the responsibility of family, especially female relatives. While the largest part of familial care work was unpaid and done by women, in past centuries there was also paid care work for the home care of the sick, of women who had just given birth, or of those who lay dying. As Angela Groppi has pointed out, seen from a historical perspective, private charity and public welfare services do not belong to two separate, opposite spheres, but ‘are closely connected with and complement each other’ (Groppi 2006: 37, see also Groppi 1996).