• 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 Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and Professor of History, Black Studies, and Global Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Jennifer Klein is Professor of History at Yale University.

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.