Depletion Through Care: Women’s Social Reproductive Labour Over the Life Course

Drawing on the narratives of women between the ages of 30 and 65 in Istanbul, this manuscript explores how social reproductive labour manifests as a form of depletion throughout the gendered life course. Informed by social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya, 2017), our qualitative research employs a feminist methodology that places everyday life at the centre of analysis. Rai and Elias (2019) suggest that a feminist political economy of everyday life helps to illuminate how practices and struggles in private spaces define the boundaries between production and social reproduction. This framework facilitates an understanding of women’s shifting positions throughout the life course, where social reproductive labour, shaped by its temporal dimension, remains a persistent practice central to the reproduction of the household, particularly in times of crisis. Women’s ageing brings new configurations of household life, revealing the shifting terrain of social reproduction. Furthermore, understanding women’s social reproductive labour within a broader crisis framework uncovers how they devise everyday strategies to sustain their households and buffer the effects of crisis through increased reproductive work. Research shows that relying on women’s social reproductive labour to manage economic crises can lead to depletion (Karaağaç 2019). According to Rai et al. (2024), depletion occurs when the outflow of social resources required to sustain social reproduction exceeds their inflow, resulting in harmful conditions for those performing social reproductive labour. Our research findings demonstrate that the set of resources middle-aged women can draw on to mitigate depletion is shaped by their employment trajectories, access to social security, accumulated assets, shifting family arrangements, and intergenerational social support systems. In this context, drawing on Rai et al.’s (2024) framework of “depletion through social reproduction,” this study examines how middle-aged women mitigate income uncertainty, debt, food insecurity, and extended family care through everyday caring practices to sustain their households. Adopting a life course perspective, we conceptualise depletion mitigation as a cognitive process shaped by the accumulation of both securities and insecurities across women’s ageing trajectories. Our analysis is based on qualitative research findings from in-depth interviews with women aged 30–65 living in low socio-economic households in Istanbul.