The concrete reality of women’s daily lives, and the importance they place on
responsibility or a rationality of caring, has led me to try and extend our
theoretical understanding of timespace from a feminist perspective. The first part
of this chapter will attempt to show why gender needs to be incorporated into
discussions of spacetime and takes as its starting point a critique of the standard
time-geography approach. With an emphasis upon an atomistic and resourcebased
notion of time, the approach fails to fully account for a relational construction
of time that lies at the heart of (women’s) everyday life as shaped by a
rationality of caring. The temporal and spatial implications that arise from women
taking care of others in both the public and private spheres results in difficulties in
carving a space for a ‘pause’ – the focus of the second part of the chapter. A major
characteristic of present-day society is argued by postmodern or late modern
theorists to be reflexivity. Yet reflexivity in the late modern age requires time – or
a ‘pause’ – for self-reflection and for women this may well be difficult due to the nature of women’s work and by the ways in which timespace is gendered.
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