Making Care Count

Cloth Price: $72.00
Paper Price: $24.95 

Subtitle: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work
Author: Mignon Duffy
Subject: Sociology/Anthropology>Sociology, Gender Studies>Women's Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4960-6
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4961-3
Pages: 192 pages
Publication Date: March 2011

Praise:

"At last, a great 'big picture' book on paid care! Based on census data, Mignon Duffy traces the mid-century rise in nurturant care-teachers, nurses, social workers, childcare workers, and others. She shows how despite-and partly due to-the women's movement, such jobs became ever more feminized. Along with that, she also traces abiding patterns of race and ethnicity. All told, Duffy gives us a fascinating read and a new basic text." —Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift and The Commercialization of Intimate Life

"This book provides a brilliant and beautiful account of the ways in which social inequalities have fractured care provision in the United States." —Nancy Folbre, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Duffy's work provides a valuable framework for understanding the organization of care work over time and its connection to larger patterns of inequality."—Julia Wrigley, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Description:

There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families.

Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a "care crisis," this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.

MIGNON DUFFY is an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty associate of the Center for Women and Work at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.