AGING AND THE FAMILY-WORK LINK: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TWO GENERATIONS OF MEXICAN WOMEN (1936–1938 AND 1951–1953)

Mexico has no genuine state public policies designed to ensure the treatment, everyday care and well-being of senior citizens. In view of this discouraging outlook, it is families, mainly women, who continue to be responsible for looking after senior citizens thereby increasing these women’s workloads. The previous situation leads directly to the theme of the work-family link, as a result of which this paper contains a proposal constituting an exploratory approach that attempts the simultaneous use of data sources clearly identified with qualitative and quantitative research styles. One of the main objectives of the paper is to analyze the interrelationship between several of the life trajectories (work, school, conjugal and reproductive ) comprising women’s life courses. A typology was drawn up to describe the link between family and work. In order to achieve this, the problem has been inscribed within the life-course approach that rejects homogeneity and temporal linearity and assumes a multidimensional conception of time. Our starting point has been a purely qualitative study of a group of women from the urban middle class in Mexico. The source of information comprises the Retrospective Demographic Survey taken by the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics in 1998.