Women have been catapulted into picking up the pieces over the pandemic

My five year journey researching care began in a very specific – and unlikely – place. A neighbour suggested that I join a group of women who swam every Sunday morning in Hampstead ponds. My first swim was on Christmas Eve and the temperature was well below five degrees; it felt like an act of complete insanity and as I gasped for breath, and the nearest ladder to get out, I swore I would never do it again.

But I did, and it is now a regular fixture of my week (Covid permitting). Buoyed by the group of 10 women, we gave each other courage and inspiration not just to plunge into the icy water, but to navigate the complexity of our mid-life.

Gulping coffee afterwards to warm up, we shared crises – of marriage, of teenage and young adult children, of stricken friends and elderly parents. We all had demanding careers but, in much of our conversation, they were the backdrop – far less demanding than the relationships we were managing every day.

Two things struck me; firstly, that this stage of life required a resourcefulness and wisdom – there is no other word – to face the multiple challenges and, secondly, how little recognition or value is attached to this vital emotional labour of care, of nurturing troubled adolescents, providing back up for young adult children and supporting frail parents.

All the attention is focused on that tumultuous early stage of parenthood – babies and toddlers. I was once the same; I thought the intensive demands for care was a tough sprint of 4-6 years of early parenthood, then things would settle down again. I’d be able to put in more time at work and enjoy evenings out again.

I laugh now at the memory, because I have learnt from experience that the need to provide care erupts repeatedly – and often unexpectedly – throughout life - and it can prove just as all consuming as those early years. I’ve seen friends whose lives and careers have been upended by the need to care for a child, sick partner or dying parent, and I look at the generation ahead of me (I am in my mid 50s) and see how the requirement to care can intensify even further. More than 1.3 million people aged over 65 are dedicated carers.

I was of a generation of women who believed that our lives would be dominated by a career and that everything else would be squeezed into a "private life" in the evenings and weekends. It was summed up for me when I was 23, studying in America, by an advertising campaign for a women’s brand of cigarette. An image of a glamorous woman was superimposed over a black and white photo of women scrubbing floors, with the strapline: "You’ve come a long way!" We had been freed by technology of dishwashers and microwaves, and a new world awaited us.

But the expectations to provide care crept up on us, just as they had done for our mothers. Only this time with the added complications of the prolonged dependence of offspring who can’t afford to move out of the family home, and parents’ lengthening life expectancy which is creating an entirely new need for care, involving multiple healthcare appointments and slowly increasing frailty. Not to mention how much-needed services such as mental health and social care, which might have been able to offer support, are desperately under resourced.

This midlife reckoning prompted two types of question at the heart of my book. Firstly, why does the enormous task of care throughout life, from birth to death, so often get ignored, taken for granted or pushed down the political agenda? Secondly, why aren’t we even curious about what care is, what it entails, how people learn (or don’t) to do it, and who supports the carer, financially or emotionally?

Answering the first led me into the history of care and its invisibility as women’s work, and how centuries of philosophical and economic thinking has routinely omitted any reference to the essential activities which sustain human beings. Only in the last few decades have philosophers and economists begun to seriously correct this distortion embedded into the traditions of Western thought.

Answering the second set of questions entailed criss-crossing the country to interview and shadow all kinds of people for whom care is their job or a huge part of their lives. From GPs to nurses, from care workers, to parents of children with disabilities, and those caring for the dying, I started every interview with the same simple question: what exactly is care?

What emerged was a rich variety: take the decades-long care worker who described to me how she had put all her effort and commitment into the job to ensure care passes, like a baton in a relay race, from one generation to the next, and would be there when her time came to need it. Or the young woman who had shifted from working in a beauty parlour to care, and argued that her life had far more meaning and purpose, knowing that she made a difference to her clients’ lives.

Or take the professor of nursing and mathematician, Alison Leary, who argued that only through complexity theory could we begin to grasp the multiple issues that a nurse juggles as she allocates her time, emotional engagement and clinical expertise on a busy ward. Or the foster parent who described the attentiveness required to interpret what her troubled charge is not saying as much as what they are. Or the doctor who knew there was nothing he could do to help a patient in intense mental and physical pain, but offer some time and patience.

The roots of the current crisis of care go back many decades. Rising female employment has diverted time and energy into the labour market, divesting the household economy of vital capacity, while often men have showed little inclination to step up. Instead of the state stepping into the gap – as in some Scandinavian countries – public services have been cut to the bone.

Too many parts of the care infrastructure in this country were desperately precarious long before Covid: social care so tightly rationed that it excluded over a million vulnerable elderly, care homes which tottered under a huge weight of debt, a childcare system built on the worst levels of pay in the labour market.

Meanwhile, in the private sphere of friends and family, too often women were left to stretch themselves to cover gaps, cobbling together solutions. Early this year as I finished the book, I wrote that "care was a quiet crisis buried in individual lives". Two months later, Covid ripped into all the care system’s shortcomings accumulated over decades of botching with utterly tragic consequences and an estimated 19,000 deaths in care homes, one of the highest tolls in the world.

In lockdown, women were often catapulted back into picking up the pieces after schools and nurseries closed their doors, undertaking the bulk of childcare on top of their own jobs. Suddenly, the headlines were dominated by the subject of care in one form or another: it became starkly visible as the essential barricade protecting our health and dignity. My hope is that once glimpsed, that truth will be hard to forget and that, out of the pandemic, we might see a shift in which the labours of love are finally recognised.

Madeleine Bunting is the author of Labours of Love, The Crisis of Care (Granta). Buy now for £20 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514.