Eileen Boris

In the minds of most people, the home has stood apart from the world of work. Bringing the factory or office into the home challenges this division. From the 1870s, when New York cigarmakers attempted to end tenement competition, to New Deal prohibitions in the 1930s, gender ideologies shaped the battle over homework. But by the 1980s, the middle-class mother at the keyboard replaced the victimized immigrant as the symbol of homework. Home to Work restores the voices of homeworking women to the century-long debate over their labor. The book also provides a historical context to the Reaganite lifting of New Deal bans. Where once men's right to contract precluded regulation, now women's right to employment undermined prohibition. Whether empowerment comes from rights to homework or rights as workers depends on whether homeworkers become visible as workers who happen to mother.

Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

Home to Work

Angelique Janssens

This volume focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. Only recently have historians begun to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. While all three concepts refer to systems of inequality, it remains unclear how these systems of difference relate to each other. Despite a growing body of empirical literature, authors more often connect dyads rather than consider historical phenomenan from the tryad of class, race and gender. This volume highlights attempts to write a richer history that complicates categories, suggesting how class, gender, race and/or ethnicity combine across a wide range of economic and social landscapes.

Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race and Ethnicity

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

What do home health aides, call center operators, prostitutes, sperm donors, nail manicurists, and housecleaners have in common? Around the world, they make their livings through touch, closeness, and personal care. Their labors, both paid and unpaid, sustain the day-to-day work that we require to survive. This book takes a close look at carework, domestic work, and sex work in everyday life and illuminates the juncture where money and intimacy meet. Intimate labor is presented as a comprehensive category of investigation into gender, race, class, and other power relations in the context of global economic transformations. In chronicling the history of intimate labor in light of the rise and devolution of welfare states, women's workforce participation, family formation, the expansion of sex work into new industries, and the development of institutions for dependent people, this wide-ranging reader advances debates over the relationship between care and economy.

Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Intimate Labors

Nelson Lichtenstein

This text, designed for courses in US labor history or the history of American workers, presents a carefully selected group of readings that allow students to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions. Major Problems in the History of American Workers follows the proven Major Problems format, with 14–15 chapters per volume, a combination of documents and essays, chapter introductions, headnotes, and suggested readings.

Documents and Essays

Major Problems in the History of American Workers

Jennifer Klein

In this sweeping narrative history from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of today, Caring for America rethinks both the history of the American welfare state from the perspective of care work and chronicles how home care workers eventually became one of the most vibrant forces in the American labor movement. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein demonstrate the ways in which law and social policy made home care a low-waged job that was stigmatized as welfare and relegated to the bottom of the medical hierarchy. For decades, these front-line caregivers labored in the shadows of a welfare state that shaped the conditions of the occupation. Disparate, often chaotic programs for home care, which allowed needy, elderly, and disabled people to avoid institutionalization, historically paid poverty wages to the African American and immigrant women who constituted the majority of the labor force. Yet policymakers and welfare administrators linked discourses of dependence and independence-claiming that such jobs would end clients' and workers' "dependence" on the state and provide a ticket to economic independence. The history of home care illuminates the fractured evolution of the modern American welfare state since the New Deal and its race, gender, and class fissures. It reveals why there is no adequate long-term care in America. Caring for America is much more than a history of social policy, however; it is also about a powerful contemporary social movement. At the front and center of the narrative are the workers-poor women of color-who have challenged the racial, social, and economic stigmas embedded in the system. Caring for America traces the intertwined, sometimes conflicting search of care providers and receivers for dignity, self-determination, and security. It highlights the senior citizen and independent living movements; the civil rights organizing of women on welfare and domestic workers; the battles of public sector unions; and the unionization of health and service workers. It rethinks the strategies of the U.S. labor movement in terms of a growing care work economy. Finally, it makes a powerful argument that care is a basic right for all and that care work merits a living wage.

Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State

Caring for America

S. J. Kleinberg

In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself. In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights.

Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues

The Practice of U.S. Women's History

Dorothea Hoehtker

Susan Zimmerman

Women’s ILO examines a century-long history of women and their networks involved in and with the ILO, the gendered meaning of labour standards, and the challenges of achieving gender equity through international labour law, transnational campaigns, and local labour policies.

Eileen Boris

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