Women Labour Under the Grip of Neoliberal/Conservative Care Policies: An Assessment on Home Care Practices

Abstract

We witness that women labour has been rendered worthless and secondary against that of men's.This however has also gained acceptance as a norm and within the historical process of articulation of patriarchy as a set of social relations to capitalism. Hence, these social relations to capitalism has an embedded masculine types of solidarity as well as unequal power relationships between women and men. Being a system of this historical process, gendered division of labour in patriarchal capitalism serves to render women responsible primarily with reproductive works, whereas rendering men as actors of the social and economic system. Cooperation of capitalism with patriarchy generally shapes policies with neoliberal economy, enabling inclusion of conservative discourse and practices. Therefore, with respect to care policies, there is the state's withdrawal on public services and marketisation of care services on one hand and the idealisation of the family on the other which is also the dissemination of practices that transfer all the load to the household, at the absence of related public services. These care policies in question lock women indoors, and are reflected as women to be recognized as relatives and to undertake the heavy burden of care, unpaid and unshared. In Turkey, usually care services are conceptualised as an inherent responsibility of the family; thus, with the overt articulation of conservative policies to neoliberal economic policies, presently, care responsibility has moved out of political arena and completely become a private practice, rather than being societal. Therefore, in a male dominant society, locking care labour in the household leads to consolidated dependency of women to the household rather than equally sharing of the load together by women and men, as the latter being the 'breadwinner'. ....