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Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers— immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs—Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work.
Stacey draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others.
In a world that is often ruled by buyers and sellers, those things that are often considered priceless become objects to be marketed and from which to earn a profit.
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 chi...
And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers is a history of state oppression of gay and lesbian citizens during the Cold War and the dynamic set of responses it ignited. Focusing on Florida's purge of gay and lesbian teachers from 1956 to 1965, this study explores how the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, commonly known as the Johns Committee, investigated and discharged dozens of teachers on the basis of sexuality. Karen L. Graves details how teachers were targeted, interrogated, and stripped of their professional credentials, and she examines the extent to which these teachers resisted the invasion of their personal lives. She contrasts the expe...
Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism—the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters—in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event—the full-form materialization—and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.
In Grandmothering While Black, sociologist LaShawnDa L. Pittman explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren). She prioritizes the voices of Black grandmothers through in-depth interviews and ethnographic research at various sites--doctor's visits, welfare offices, school and day care center appointments, caseworker meetings, and more. Through careful examination, she explores the various forces that compel, constrain, and support Black grandmothers' caregiving. Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. Grandmothering While Black illuminates the strategies used by grandmothers to manage their legal marginalization vis-à-vis parents and the state across a range of caregiving arrangements. In doing so, it reveals the overwhelming and painful decisions Black grandmothers must make to ensure the safety and well-being of the next generation.
"This innovative book offers a discussion of how memoirs might be useful for sociologists. By reading the guide, students and teachers alike will gain an understanding of how they might approach the current outpouring of memoirs and incorporate them into their teaching, learning, writing and research"--
No Place Like Home examines the emergence of home-based women workers as paradigmatic figures of contemporary capitalism, neoliberal governmentality, and socio-political contestation. Far from an isolated or contingent situation, home-based work constitutes today an enormous arena of 'invisible' social and political struggles of subaltern and ethno-racially subordinated women.
Class is a particularly troublesome issue in the United States and other rich capitalist societies. In this feminist analysis of class, noted sociologist Joan Acker examines and assesses feminist attempts to include white women and people of color in discussions of class. She argues that class processes are shaped through gender, race, and other forms of domination and inequality. Class Questions: Feminist Answers outlines a theory of class as a set of gendered and racialized processes in which people have unequal control over and access to the necessities of life-processes including production, distribution, and paid and unpaid labor. Historically, gender and race-based inequalities were in...