• Table of Contents


• Illustrations


• Abbreviations


• Acknowledgments


• Preface: The Personal Is Prologue


• Introduction: Making the Private Public


• Chapter 1: Neither Nurses nor Maids


• Chapter 2: Rehabilitative Missions


• Chapter 3: Caring for the Great Society


• Chapter 4: Welfare Wars, Seventies Style


• Chapter 5: "Take Us Out of Slavery "


• Chapter 6: "The Union Is Us "


• Chapter 7: "We Were the Invisible Workforce "


• Epilogue: Challenging Care

Eileen Boris is Professor of History and Women's Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Jennifer Klein is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University

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. The authors 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.