Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State

Product Description


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.


Review


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


About the Author


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