ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the framework that informs the book. The overriding premise is that gender inequality remains important in advanced liberal nations despite social and political change and indeed that the mixture of progress and conservative elements generates tensions and stresses that are reflected in health and embodiment through the life course. Indeed, the book argues that issues of health and well-being, both in how they are experienced and how they are talked about, open a window through which we might view the complex nature of gendered inequality. In this respect, the life course provides a framework that is mostly lacking from research on gender and health inequalities. However, it provides an important perspective because gendered inequalities are both unique to different life stages and cumulative in their effects. They also combine with age-based (and other) inequalities at each life stage, not just in old age, as is widely presumed. The chapter sets out the theoretical and empirical background to this argument in an overview of the structural elements that underpin age and gender inequality, namely the age and gender ‘systems’ and their intersections. It then reviews gendered inequality as it is manifest over the ages and stages of the life course in concrete areas such as work, employment and retirement, the division of labour between work and home as well as in both locations, attitudes towards the body and sexuality, together with associated health problems and issues. It next discusses key sociological approaches that have attempted to explicate theoretically the connection between embodied health and social structure. In the last section, it introduces the individual chapters that follow in this volume.
