An aging population portends escalating demands for informal caregiving. In western culture, caregiving is gendered female and informal caregivers are most often elderly female spouses or daughters of those needing care. Thus, women comprise a group who labors to provide a socially ascribed service of social and economic benefit to society. Paradoxically, their work is disvalued as women’s work, while ageist bias in a youth-oriented culture insures it is further disvalued when caregivers are elderly. Caregiving has been positioned in academic literature as burdensome and research suggests that women continue to endure significant burden even when health and well being is seriously jeopardized. The question arises, why? do the values and attitudes of caregivers enable the enduring of burden? how do these values and attitudes both follow from and re-inscribe oppressive gender and ageist social practices? Until such questions are answered, attempts to lessen caregiver burden and protect caregiver health will not be maximally effective. This research questions, using a data set of self-reported caregivng themes, how underlying values and attitudes of caregivers evident in the themes enable and perpetuate the enduring of burden and its self-destructive consequences. Thirty-five female caregivers of cognitively impaired, ADL dependent, care recipients provided and expounded upon a theme descriptive of their caregiving experience. Themes were elicited following a conversational interview that fully explored care provision. Analysis of themes was guided by assumptions consistent with critical feminist thought. Results suggest that shifts in gender and self-identity patterns and self-valuing in women caregivers are fundamental to balancing burden with self-preservation and growth. The mitigation of caregiver burden needs to begin with a radical revision of values that create societal patterns of gender as well as attitudes toward youth and elders. Supported by a grant from NINR, 5K01NR00146
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