On the rationality of caring

The feminist critique of sociological conceptualizations and theories that do not adequately reflect the position of women in society is highly relevant for understanding this shift or change of direction in social policy thinking. The new ideology that informal care is better than public care contributes to reinforce these problems. The recent trend in favour of more community care is at least in part a consequence of many people feeling that the public care system lacks the very qualities necessary to transform ‘services’ into ‘caring’. The traditional arguments for ascribing caring functions to women, in addition to the unquestionable fact that only women give birth to children, is also founded on a perception of women as more intuitive and emotional than men. The scientification of reproductive work, which in the Scandinavian countries started in the second part of the nineteenth century, meant that women became subordinated to a new kind of male authority – the authority of scientific knowledge.