The Club as a Trench. An Ethnography of Community Care among Elderly Women in Independencia (Chile)

Abstract

The article presents the results of an anthropological research that addressed the nexus between aging, gender and inequality in caregiving and caregiving practices among older women. Between 2016 and 2017, we carried out an ethnography in the ladies’ club El Rosal, situated in one of the districts that has higher levels of old population and feminization in the Metropolitan Region of Chile: Independencia. We departed from the assumption that the club expresses a continuum in the care practices that the women shared years before, in the so-called Mothers’ Centers. The research confirms this appreciation and suggests that both spaces represented places of female sociability and resistance. Thus, our analyzes show the care practices that currently occur in the club as an expression of community care. We conclude that these practices transcend the lives of the women of the El Rosal club, allowing them to resist the multiple careless to which they are exposed in the environment where they live, and providing them with a specific form of well-being that emerges in community life.