Abstract
Two books to put on the must-read list this year: Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work and Valuing Care Work: Comparative Perspectives. Both books make compelling arguments that care work needs to be put on the agenda for social action and change. These books are suited to policy analysts, academics, students, and social activists who are interested in changing the ideological and political incongruities that affect caring labor today, since clearly the movement of care from “family to market is linked to a decline in care” (Duffy, p. 4).
Duffy’s Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work presents a historical account of paid labor in the United States over the past century. Using U.S. census data from 1900 to 2007, Duffy tracks the changes in the field of paid care work in which the outsourcing of care has emerged as the norm, brought about by changes in cultural values, advances in technology, and rapid demographic growth. Because “patterns of social inequality are not fixed or predetermined by biology, but are shaped by cultural and economic factors” (Duffy, p. 5), the book offers significant confirmation of the gendered and racial–ethnic division of labor in America. Although Affilia readers would be cognizant that women have been segmented in specific occupational fields, Duffy provides the empirical evidence that women of particular racial–ethnic backgrounds occupy certain positions within the female-oriented hierarchy.
The first chapter begins by framing the discussion, conceptualizing care, and defining nurturant and nonnurturant care work. The following chapters present accounts of the different care fields and their attendant racial and gendered orientations, from domestic workers to child care and social services to the “dirty work” of cleaning and preparing food. Duffy also explores the impact of political retrenchment on care work in the past few decades and how the relational aspects of the work have been jettisoned in favor of routinization and bureaucratization. The final chapter presents implications for “solving the care crisis” with attention to structural barriers and cultural constructions associated with the different arenas of care work. Duffy expresses her ideas well and frequently relies on the use of line or bar graphs to portray the data. Perhaps other forms of charts or diagrams could have been adopted to provide variety in the visual display of the numbers.
The edited volume by Cecilia Benoit and Helga Hallgrímsdóttir is also an important piece on contemporary care work from an international comparative perspective. As is acknowledged in Chapter 13, the book’s “central interest is in highlighting the complex and context-sensitive political and social conditions that provide for—and undermine—dignity in performing care work/intimate labour work or receiving care or intimate services” (p. 269). The book is divided into six cogent parts, each part consisting of a few chapters highlighting a specific area of care work in both paid and unpaid care environments. The topics and populations that are addressed in the book vary, incorporating findings from studies on hospital workers, the mobility of nurses, home care, grandparents raising children, sex workers in nonprofits, maternity care, familial work for separated or divorced parents, Aboriginal prenatal peer support workers, and adults caring for elderly parents. Although the book in its entirety is valuable, readers may also choose to review specific chapters that are of particular interest and relevance to them. One area that could have been further developed in the book was an intersectional lens on the myriad dimensions of the identity of women doing the work, that is, how intersections of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, geography, age, and the like map onto these gendered analyses. Important dialogue in this regard was incorporated into Chapter 7, by Rachel Eni, highlighting the privilege of the medicalized, paternalistic, and Eurocentric nature of health care in her account of Aboriginal peer support workers providing maternal and infant health care in Manitoba First Nations communities. However, more in-depth discussion integrated into each chapter could have enhanced the book overall.
Both books underscore the gendered underpinnings of care work within countries in which diminishing welfare state policies and “neoliberalist economic reforms have meant that initiatives to ensure dignity in work and care … have fallen out of vogue” (Benoit & Hallgrímsdóttir, p. 10). However as Duffy aptly points out, care work is “full of contradictions and complexities. We must resist the urge to simplify this history into neatly tied-up narratives” (p. 145). Addressing the multiplicity of inequalities in care work demands a dialogue and reflection across all strata of society. These books provide fodder for this valuable and necessary discussion.