Invisible Care: An Urgent Call for Gendered Recognition of Grandmother Care

The normalisation and consequent invisibility of women's care work is well-studied and interrogated critically. However, a subset of women (older women in particular), have been left out of this critical engagement, and rendered even more invisible in an arrangement that benefits the state, society and the community. Custodial grandmothers, as kin carers, take on the responsibility of care for their grandchildren for a range of reasons and varied lengths of time, with or without the involvement of the state. In this article, we reflect on the various explorations and constructions of grandmother carers in the grandparent carer literature and argue for more purposeful and consistent engagement with the gendered nature of custodial grandmothering that advocates for appropriate recognition of this care. We acknowledge our complicity in not adequately addressing the topic of gender in our previous research and reflect on the implications of this neglect on a vulnerable population group. We argue that the gendered normalisation of care as women's work is inadvertently reflected and reinforced in much of the literature on custodial grandparenting. The absence of an intersectional gendered analysis of grandmothers’ caregiving happens through, and as a result of, the ubiquitous taken-for-granted care work performed by women in general and a focus on the grandchild's well-being. We propose that without purposeful feminist engagement with this intersectional disadvantage, injustices experienced by this group will continue to grow and amplify.