Exploring depoliticization discourses of women's multiple caregiving roles: Implications of economic decline and public policy change for women in rural northern British Columbia.

This thesis explores discourses of reprivatization and depoliticization of women's caregiving. The research is set in the context of a twenty year period of economic decline in British Columbia. In 2002, the newly elected provincial government restructured health and social services, significantly changing access to the social safety net. The study explores the experiences of women who are multiple role caregivers in two small communities in northern British Columbia, and more particularly examines the meanings women make of the caregiving they do. Women in this study understand caregiving as both a duty and an honour, but most significantly as a delicately balanced web of relationships. Their ability to negotiate their movement between the public, private and economic spheres is primarily based on balancing those relationships with their economic needs. In doing so, they contest the state's insistence on defining their role as caregivers and insist that locating caregiving in either the public or private sphere be done by the women themselves, on their own terms. The implication for social work is that of understanding the economic marginalization of caregivers as not strictly an argument for additional resources. The primary theoretical implication suggested by this thesis is the need to examine the structures of power and oppression and the development of agency rather than simply the development of programs and resources in response to perceived or identified need.--P.ii.