1st Edition

Care Work Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State

Edited By Madonna Harrington Meyer Copyright 2000
    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    Care Work is a collection of original essays on the complexities of providing care. These essays emphasize how social policies intersect with gender, race, and class to alternately compel women to perform care work and to constrain their ability to do so. Leading international scholars from a range of disciplines provide a groundbreaking analysis of the work of caring in the context of the family, the market, and the welfare state.

    1. Introduction: The Right to - or not to - Care. - Madonna Harrington Meyer, Pam Herd, and Sonya Michel Part I Gendering Care Work 2. A Historical Perspective on Care. - Emily Abel 3. The History of Men's Caring: Evaluating Precedents for Fathers' Family Involvement. - Scott Coltrane and Justin Galt 4. Claiming the Right to Care. - Sonya Michel The Impact of Social Activism on Gender Identity and Care Work: Women's Activism in the Toxic Waste Movement. - Ann Herda-Rapp Part II Public Markets/Private Caring 6. Cash in Care. - Clare Ungerson 7. Care as We Give it, Work as We Know it - Deborah A. Stone 8. The Conflicts of Caring: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Individualism in Family Day Care Work. - Mary Tuominen 9. Paid Emotional Care: Organizing Forms that Encourage Nurturance. - Francesca Cancian 10. The International Division of Caring and Cleaning Work: Transnational Connections or Apartheid Exclusions? - Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Part III Welfare States: Unstable Supports? 11. Examining Care at Welfare's End. - Stacey Oliker 12. Paying for Care: Child Support Policy in the United States - Demie Kurz 13. Filling in the Gaps in Long Term Care Insurance: Policy Implications for Informal Care Providers. - Jennifer Mellor 14. Shifting the Burden Back to Families? How Medicaid Cost-Containment Reshapes Access to Long Term Care in the U.S. - Madonna Harrington Meyer Part IV Organizing and Reorganizing Care Work 15. Marketization and the Struggling Logics of (Home) Care in The Netherlands. - Trudie Knijn 16. Disability Reform and Women's Caring Work. - Rannveig Traustadottir 17. Making a Way Outta No Way: Grandparenting Cocaine Exposed Grandchildren. - Assata Zerai 18. Hope for the Children: Creating a Community of Care for Foster Children. - Brenda Krause Eheart and Martha Bowman Power

    Biography

    Madonna Harrington Meyer is Associate Professor of Sociology, and Senior Research Associate, at the Center for Policy Research, at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on old age policy in the United States and appears in such journals as the American Sociological Review, Journal of Health and Social Policy, Gender and Society, and Social Problems

    "Provides a thorough, informative and well-documented analysis of the critical problems resulting from the relative de-valuation of any work women do and, in particular, the de-valuation of care work in a world where what is valued is product and profit. In bringing this collection together, Harrington Meyer has created a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts: one comes away not only with an intellectual understanding, but also with a visceral sense of the impact of these stubbornly entrenched aspects of our current form of stratification on the lives of real people." -- Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
    "Care Work would be a good addition to courses in family sociology, family studies, gender, life course(s), social and public policy, gerontology, and women's studies. Considered together, the essays in Care Work provide the background for an understanding of the forces that shape the structure and relationships of care across boundaries of history and geography as well as gender, class, race, and policy." -- Contemporary Sociology
    "Care Work is rich in empirical evidence and creative in its conceptual frameworks. It will serve as a valuable resource for scholars in the field of care, and for those teaching gender, work, women's studies, and medical sociology." -- American Journal of Sociology
    "This edited volume makes a tremendous contribution to the emerging care work literature...This book is an excellent resource for scholars doing research on care work and those who would like to incorporate care work issues into their research or courses on gender, family, health, or public policy. The empirical work is compelling, often incorporating care providers' voices, and the overlying analytic framework stimulates new ideas." -- Journal of Marriage and the Family