Reply [to Commentaries on "Race, Gender, Class, and Health" Issue

Abstract

welcome the opportunity to respond to the commentaries directly related to my article on gender and generation poor women's household health production experiences. First, I found Porter's theoretical critique of gender and generation the household production of health both incisive and important to further research and theory building. I echo her concern that ethnic effects must be disentangled from class and status effects. As Rubel and Murray (1993:22) also observe, in failing to consider how social class factors mitigate the influence of ethnicity, the analytic power of the latter is defused. For good reason, the struggle to differentiate between situational contexts (such as degrees of poverty or proximity of kin) contrast to culturally influenced patterns of relationships will continue to consume researchers. I agree with Barbee, however, that for most of us, the relative influence of poverty, proximity of kin, culture, or gender on our behavior cannot be parcelled out experience. My interest was primarily women's experience household health production all its confounded complexity. Future research, my own included, must take careful account of the ways concepts are conceived, linked, and then communicated, order to avoid theoretically unexciting results. Another issue addressed the commentaries is a question of scope or, as Barbee summed it up, problems of ignoring the larger social order the production of poverty for Mexican American women. To clarify, my research was about the production of health, not the production of poverty. Because poverty influences household behaviors affecting health, the research design attempted to control for those effects by selecting households already poverty as participants. Why they lived poverty or how social injustices facilitated a heavier poverty burden among the Mexican American households was beyond the immediate scope of this research.