Community care is often viewed as care being provided by the family, which tends to amount to care by women, and common ideology, leads us to believe that it is ‘natural’ for women to be carers. Stereotypical expectations of women are reinforced by society’s perceived idea of the ‘normal’ woman, i.e. wife and mother as nurturer and carer and the male breadwinner as provider. This ideology is promoted by the concept of patriarchy, literally ‘the law of the father’ which is reflected in Michele Barratt and Helen Robert’s observation of GP’s working with their patients: Working with GP’s over some time it became clear to us that our respondents made certain unspoken assumptions about the ‘nature’ of men and women. Men, it was clear, had a primary, natural ‘drive’ to work to support their wife and family. Women had a similar ‘drive’ to nourish and cherish their husband and family. These assumptions, so fundamental to the ideological structure of patriarchal capitalism (and evident constantly in the media, religion, political discourse and so on), are not merely reflected in the practice of medicine but are actively endorsed and sanctioned with medical authority.

Patriarchy links to capitalism and the Marxist notion of men as producers and women as reproducers. This is illustrated also in Carlen & Worrall’s comments on the expectations of a ‘normal’ woman: Being a normal woman means coping, caring, nurturing and sacrificing self-interest to the needs of others. It also means being more than man, in order to support and embrace man. On the other hand, femininity is characterised by lack of control and dependence. Being a normal woman means needing protection……It means being childlike, fragile and capricious. It is being less than man in order to serve and defer to man.

Existing values and images of women are reinforced daily through the norms of our culture and our roles become internalised. Through the media, magazines and the society within which we live women inherit expectations and anxieties, based on a mixture of tradition, myth and reality about what her role is to be.