Care plays an important role in family, which is the basic unit of society. Family members take care of each other and the household chores all the time. Within the family, sometimes we are the ones who give care and other times we are the ones to receive it. Care was first studied in relation with the ethics of care and was based on the relationship between mother and child. Although the concept of care has broadened over time and today encompasses much more than just the care of a mother for her child, care tasks are still an important source of the construction of gender identity and gender differences. Today, caring is still very much linked to women and femininity, as women are much more likely to be the caregivers within the family than men. This bachelor’s thesis problematizes the fact that care work is still not sufficiently respected and that it remains in the shadow of the activities of the male population. Care work, which is predominantly being carried out by women, is often ignored, invisible or taken for granted. Thus, the trend of a nuclear family, in which the division of labour is asymmetrical, and the task of care is simply attributed to the bearers of the reproductive role, continues to prevail in society. Recently, society has taken this problem into account and tried to mitigate the hierarchical dimensions in family relationships through various measures of active fatherhood. There will be an increase in the transfer of care, not only from women to men, but also from men to other people and institutions. The values of care are increasingly shifting from the private to the public sphere, which means that care is becoming an important object of political action and is (too) often used for political propaganda. It is important to move beyond the conception of care that is based on the relationship between mother and child, and to think of care as an activity that concerns all individuals, irrespective of gender.
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