In other words, if we admit that women are subject to a specific socialization, to specific responsibilities and established taboos, if we admit that "gender ascriptive relations are clearly the fundamental sites of the subordination of women as a gender" (5), how can we presume that the fields of interest, the strategies, and the methods of community integration of women have been the same as those of men? The values transmitted by women cannot be identical, explicitly or implicitly, to those of men when we attribute to the latter aggressiveness and an imposing appearance, for example, and the former self-denial and service to others. How can we suppose that the action of women at the community level is anything like that of men?

We find an example of the "asexual" (and thus masculine) vision of community work in the concept of community itself. The definitions, although very diverse, without exception associate community with the public realm, the domain of "local politics": institutions and their local representatives, official groups working in neighborhoods, problems within the jurisdiction of the public domain. Any activity associated with the private realm (considered by its nature an area of female activity and responsibility) is eliminated: relationships within the neighborhood, within the family and within the community, formal or informal. These relationships are essential to the survival of any community (private and public), essential especially for women who are generally responsible for private life. But because they are maintained, nurtured and sustained by women, community-family relationships and the work necessary to the production-reproduction of a community are unacknowledged.

Who is it who is responsible for establishing and rejuvenating networks and associations, as much within the immediate family as within the extended family, the neighborhood and the workplace? Is this not community work, which requires an investment of energies and whose importance (although not its social recognition) is largely equivalent to that of other formal activities or transactions which are made possible by it? Women make informal networks work, networks through which resources are shared (such as child- care), families are helped to go through good times and bad, and solutions are found when the community is facing a crisis. This work does require time and energy, just as much (or more) as any other work. It involves management, organization, public relations, psychology, caregiving and love.

Could it not be compared to mother work, by which I mean all the activities of material, psychic and emotional maintenance, educational action, organizational and financial considerations which a mother regularly undertakes for the children for whom she is responsible? (6) Are thousands of women not mothering our communities? I mean this in a very positive way. Mother work is work, and can be done outside of the family. I am not suggesting that all women's community work is mother work, nor that all women are doing this. I am suggesting rather that mother work may be a way of seeing that part of women's community work that has remained so difficult to pinpoint and so little valued.

Denyse Côté is a community organizer; she is presently a professor of Social Work at the University of Quebec at Hull. She welcomes comments on this article.

1. See Stephen M. Rose, "Reflections Community Organization Theory" In Armand Lauffer and Edward Newman, eds. "Community Organization for the 1980s", Social Development Issues, vol. 5, nos. 2-3. 152.
   
   
2. Groups servicing women only and where women can be active as volunteers: health clinics, collectives, hostels, etc.
   
   
3. This is a process that has been investigated in the social sciences. As Jean Baker Miller has so rightly said, "Until recently, mankind's understandings have been the only understanding generally available to us. As other perceptions arise-precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position, could NOT perceive-the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed." Toward a New Psychology of Women, Boston, Beacon Press, 1977, 1.
   
   
4. Specific problems women encounter as tenants or as welfare recipients for example.
   
   
5. See Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, "The Subordination of Women and the Internationalization of Factory Production" in Young, Wolkowitz and McCullagh, Of Marriage and the Market, London, CSE Books, 1984.
   
   
6. The definition which I suggest is similar to that proposed in the editorial of Women: A Journal of Liberation, vol. 7, no.2. It refers to mother work: "the labor of birthing, raising, tending, guiding, and caring for children within the home and the extension of this work into the community and labor market. ... Motherwork is one of the most intense and sophisticated forms of choreography in which one must plan and coordinate a series of often simultaneous or disparate movements in both a daily and lifelong pattern."