Women’s Community Work

Abstract

This chapter evaluates the similarities and differences in women’s community work in Britain and France. Here, we are referring to unpaid work undertaken by household members for members of households other than their own such as kin, friends and neighbours. This is a form of economic activity that up until now has been mostly ignored in mainstream discussions of women’s work, both in cross-national and single-nation studies, but is important if we are to obtain a rounded picture of women’s overall workload and their caring responsibilities. In order to examine this activity, we breakdown our analysis into two principal forms of community economic activity: kinship work and neighbourhood activity. This is because each is based on different principles of exchange. Kinship work is chiefly based on ‘kinship obligation’ while neighbourhood inter-household transfers are primarily based on ‘reciprocal exchange’ (Finch, 1989; Short, 1996; Warde, 1990).