Intergenerational Care Crisis: How Neoliberalism and Gender Norms Trap Daughters in Abusive Parent Care Burdens
Original framing: “Before I Forget by Anne Pauly: a touching and surprisingly funny meditation on caring for ageing abusive parents” — The Conversation - Global
The modern caregiving crisis echoes 19th-century English poor laws, which compelled daughters to care for impoverished parents or risk losing state support—a policy that disproportionately targeted working-class women. Post-WWII welfare states briefly mitigated this through social housing and pensions, but neoliberal reforms since the 1980s dismantled these safeguards, reviving the 'daughter as caregiver' trope. The 2008 financial crisis accelerated this, with austerity measures in Europe and North America shifting elder care from public to private (i.e., familial) domains, often onto abused women.
The original framing traps readers in a *false binary*: either endure abuse as a moral duty or abandon parents as a selfish act.
This obscures how neoliberalism and patriarchy *collude* to turn care into a punitive obligation, while historical precedents (like poor laws) and Indigenous practices (like Māori *whakapapa*) prove alternatives exist. The trickster here is the system itself—masking its failure to provide care as a 'personal journey,' while marginalized women bear the cost. Solutions require dismantling the *care economy’s* gendered and racialized underpinnings: universal stipends to decouple care from coercion, communal hubs to replace forced family bonds, and media reforms to expose how narratives like this one *enable* the system’s exploitation. The path forward isn’t 'putting the past aside' but *rewriting the script*—starting with who gets to define care as love, and who pays the price.