Caring for America: home health workers in the shadow of the welfare state

This title is the definitive history of care work and its surprisingly central role in the American labour movement and class politics from the New Deal to the present. The authors create a narrative of the home care industry that interweaves four histories and considers their impact on today's most dynamic social movements

Caring for America is the definitive history of care work and its surprisingly central role in the American labor movement and class politics from the New Deal to the present. Authors Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein create a narrative of the home care industry that interweaves four histories--the evolution of the modern American welfare state; the rise of the service sector-based labor movement; the persistence of race, class, and gender-based inequality; and the aging of the American population--and considers their impact on today's most dynamic social movements.

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 o