This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

This is a poignant and revealing book, though not always in ways that the author intends. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is the story of a young, politically active woman writer, whose life was hijacked for three years to look after her mother — who ended up dying of cancer. Kenway had help, of course, from the NHS and some paid carers, and she managed to work and even write a book through most of the period. Nonetheless, it left her broken and exhausted and determined to think through how the country can better manage the rising care burden.

It is impossible not to be moved by her story, which is full of deft reflections on, amongst other things, mother-daughter love. Yet I also found myself unsettled by her rage. What, as Kenway asks herself, are families for? She was just doing what millions of women (and men) have always done for those they love.

Family circumstance partly explains her attitude. Her father left when she and her sister were small, and her mother, a successful lawyer, remained single. Her sister had a small baby when the cancer struck, so Kenway was left to juggle on her own.

Her distinctly modern fury also reflects the expectations of highly-educated women who are less socialised into caring roles and often want the same autonomous, career-focused lives as highly-educated men. When that new cohort meets changes to the family — smaller, looser and more dispersed — and many more people living into their eighties and nineties, it leaves a care gap with which the system is currently struggling.

To put it another way: when we move from a breadwinner-homemaker model to a double-breadwinner model, who will change the nappy of the baby or the incontinent ill, old person? The conventional feminist response is that men must step up.

Men do not come out well from Kenway’s story: she is abandoned by a father and a boyfriend (in the middle of her care nightmare), and on a hiking trip she meets several men who left their wives at home looking after their own elderly parents. Yet, in reality, men are increasing their share of domestic labour: of the 4.2m people in the UK providing informal care of the kind Kenway performed, nearly half are men, often looking after a spouse.

Kenway seems caught somewhere between freedom feminism and care feminism

The post-war, second-wave feminism that Kenway was raised in, which located all agency, power, money and fun in the public sphere and saw the domestic sphere as a prison from which women must escape, is also found wanting.

To her credit, Kenway’s experience of care, its pain and its joy, has evidently caused her to revise her views: she now seems caught (in Mary Harrington’s distinction) somewhere between freedom feminism and care feminism. She believes that the best care comes from those that love you and should not, so far as possible, be delegated to strangers or the state, which is today usually thought of as a conservative view.

Kenway’s remedy is not to strengthen the traditional family, however, albeit rebalanced for our era of gender equality. Instead, she believes that the traditional family is dead and we must learn how to construct “families of choice that are more expansive, imaginative and robust”. Why not both? She seems here to be imposing her own experience onto everyone else.

Kenway sees a tsunami of care needs coming our way because of several factors: the de-institutionalisation of care; hospitals discharging people as soon as they can; the smaller, more geographically dispersed family; the fact that women now work outside the home almost as much as men; the fact that people with severe impairments now survive for much longer, as do the elderly — many with dementia; and cuts in government spending.

Yet many of Kenway’s care tsunami factors have been with us already for several decades, and we muddle through. We would do so even better if we followed some of her policy ideas: shared, non-familial living (balancing autonomy with group support); some basic medical training for family carers; and improved care leave for informal carers (one of the few areas of welfare where the UK lags behind the US).

Technology is mainly our friend, too, from the simple WhatsApp mutual support group in the pandemic, to remote monitoring and carebots. That said, in an excellent chapter on technology, Kenway rightly points to “skin hunger” and the irreducible importance of the human carer — something she learnt the hard way.