The United States population is aging, but our current elder care system is strained and unable to meet our collective care needs. As a society, we turn to women to fill the gaps in this system without offering them structural support through comprehensive care policies, domestic labor protections, or paid family leave (for example, Calarco 2024). Drawing on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic data and 75 in-depth interviews with older adults, family care partners, paid care workers, and aging advocates, I find that in the absence of a meaningful public safety net for elder care, older adults and care partners rely on formal and informal networks to connect with resources for current and future care needs.

By embedding myself in care networks, I witnessed how women creatively leverage their connections to care for themselves, their relatives, and their friends. In old age, women’s invisible labor remains critical in maintaining local care networks. Those with social, cultural, and economic capital are more easily able to tap into these networks and access care resources, even when resources are free and accessible to the general public. Older adults and care partners know that they must piece together their own systems of care because the elder care system structurally devalues disabled older adults and care work. Their actions, however, inadvertently reproduce this system by working within its constraints instead of pushing against them.

My dissertation, Moving with care: Aging without a public safety net for elder care, takes the form of a book-length manuscript that follows elder care through a North Carolina community, from the halls of a senior center to the halls of the state legislature. I use feminist care ethics to analyze care as a fundamental human need constrained by legally-enforced structural inequality. I highlight agency, joy, and meaning in the lives of older adults and care partners, while showing how the structural constraints of elder care limit care possibilities. I argue that the racialized and gendered devaluation of paid and unpaid care work, the privatization of care, and the intersection of systematic ageism and ableism have created an elder care system that fails older adults and those who care for them. Each substantive chapter shows how these forces shape elements of the elder care process, including how older adults: (1) find meaning in their later years, (2) plan for future care, (3) navigate living arrangements and housing transitions, (4) interact with loved ones as they give and receive care, (5) provide care for each other in community, (6) advocate for improved elder care policy, and (7) envision a better future of care.

I expand feminist care scholarship, which focuses on the interdependent nature of care relationships, by emphasizing the interconnectedness of actors in the broader elder care system. I use this interconnectedness to explain how the elder care system has remained so durable, despite widespread recognition that it needs to change. My findings shed light more broadly on the role of women’s invisible caring labor in the reproduction of durable systems of inequality.