Making Care Count

There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families.Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a ""care crisis,"" this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.

"Making Care Count packs a lot of data and analysis into a concise form. It is a great volume for feminist scholars and activists that want to contribute to social change through academic work. It challenges us to rally around the emotional and relational aspects of care work as essential at a time when austerity and cost-cutting put them at risk."-- "Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare", "Duffy brings careworkers to the foreground through detailed analyses of census and other data from 1900 to 2007. Her extensive use of scholarship on careworkers' functions and others' attitudes toward them adeptly provides historical and social explanations for the numbers. A valuable, informative, historical overview of an important issue. Recommended."-- "Choice", "Duffy offers a sweeping history of paid care work, from the hired girls of the pre-industrial period through nannies, maids, and home care workers, to today's doctors, teachers, and nurses. -- "Women's Review of Books", "Mignon Duffy has written a pathbreaking and foundational work in the study of the place of care in American society. Making Care Count provides the most detailed and most nuanced account to date about how care work has been performed in the United States over thepast century. Duffy debunks several leading care narratives and offers a more complex view of caring and its relationship to class, racial-ethnic categories, and gender. The book is thus important both for its empirical analysis and its conceptual challenges to existing ways to think about care."-- "American Journal of Sociology"

Mignon Duffy is an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty associate of the Center for Women and Work at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.