Introduction

Encouraging and supporting mothers to cross the boundary between family and work to become workers is increasingly seen as a way to reduce poverty and address gender inequality (Folbre, 1994; Lister, 1999). In this chapter we explore the issues currently facing parents in low income households in the UK, where the state plays a significant role in the resources that parents have for managing the transitions between the worlds of work and family (Sainsbury, 1994; Gardiner, 1997; Bang et al, 2000; Scott and McKay, 2001; Williams, 2001; McKie et al, 2002). In doing so we draw upon data from a case study on gender, care, poverty and transitions conducted in a community-based lifelong learning centre and a project that is largely resourced by the European Social Fund (Innes and Scott, 2002). We draw upon the notion of boundary maintenance and management so as to highlight the need to conceptualise care as involving the act of provisioning for care as well as its delivery. We also examine how these are negotiated by those most affected by state intervention. The range of active labour market policies currently being used in the UK as a way of reducing poverty is based on a limited view of a transition across home and work boundaries, that is, from ‘mother’ to ‘worker/breadwinner’. It is a view that oversimplifies the boundaries that have to be negotiated. Thus we explore the transitions that low income mothers manage, and examine evidence of active negotiation of caring roles. In doing so we explore the issues of demarcation and boundaries – of the limits in familial relationships, the goals that individuals are prepared to accept and the material limits on change.

Care: the changing policy context

Care, when considered at both the micro and macro levels of economic and social organisation, and at the boundaries between them, is a highly controversial topic. Its conceptualisation is historic, subject to norms and culture, places and time. Mary Daly (2001, p 36) comments that “care began life as a woman specific concept” but that the “relationship between public policy on care and the wider societal settlements around family and ‘private’ relations remains unexplored”.