ABSTRACT
Health is an issue of central concern to women. Women form the majority of health care workers; are responsible, in the family, for the health of others, and are the major consumers of formal health care. However, until the development of feminist sociology little attention was paid to gender as a key variable in understanding health. Feminists have reopened the history of women healers, explored the roles that women play in the health care system, analysed the ways in which health inequalities affect women, pointed to the ways in which medical power is used to control women and the ways in which doctors have taken away control over pregnancy and childbirth from women and medicalised what women have perceived as a natural process. More recently, feminists have focused on the informal health care work done by women, pointing out that much of the caring work women do in the domestic sphere is concerned with promoting the health of household members. Women also play a key role in the lay referral system – the system in which decisions are made about whether to visit the doctor or not, or what other action should be taken. In the process of highlighting the key role that women play as unpaid health care workers, feminists have also drawn attention to the ways in which conflicts develop between informal and paid providers, and the extent to which paid providers are unaware of the needs of the unpaid carer. The unpaid carer is often invisible, the focus of attention being the patient, so that the needs of a woman caring, for example, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for an ill or disabled relative are often ignored (see e.g. Lewis, 2003). A key point here is that the paid providers are themselves often women, yet because they work within the dominant medical paradigm they fail to identify with the unpaid carers and assume that women are ready, willing and able to provide the constant care demanded of them. Indeed, it may be argued that woman are ‘coerced’ into caring. The implementation of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990 in Britain reinforced this view of women as carers, with its emphasis on the role of informal care.
