Are women naturally better caregivers than men? Can paid care in an institutuion be good care? Can voluntary community care replace government welfare? Is the caring family disappearing? What role should government play in supporting or regulating families? Is day care for children as good as home care? Using engaging case studies and research findings, this lively new book from the Gender Lens Series explores these and other questions and controversies, challenging the notion that caregiving is a "natural" pattern and demonstrating how it is thoroughly social. Written in an inviting and readable style, the authors address complex issues about caring, making them accessible to undergraduate students and lay people. The book shows those who will enter diverse caregiving professions how to see their particular occupation as influenced by the larger society and broader social relations of caring. It also shows how beliefs about gender and family shape caregiving, and how caregiving affects gender inequality.

This work investigates four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship examining the relationship between theory and practice in feminist ethics.

Provides a unique theorization of the nature of selfhood, drawing on developmental and object relations psychoanalysis, philosophical and feminist literatures.

This book explores how around the world, women’s increased presence in the labor force has reorganized the division of labor in households, affecting different regions depending on their cultures, economies, and politics; as well as the nature and size of their welfare states and the gendering of employment opportunities. As one result, the authors find, women are increasingly migrating from the global south to become care workers in the global north. This volume focuses on changing patterns of family and gender relations, migration, and care work in the countries surrounding the Pacific Rim—a global epicenter of transnational care migration. Using a multi-scalar approach that addresses micro, meso, and macro levels, chapters examine three domains: care provisioning, the supply of and demand for care work, and the shaping and framing of care. The analysis reveals that multiple forms of global inequalities are now playing out in the most intimate of spaces.

How does caregiving affect health and well-being and what resources help caregivers? This book provides a synthesis of psychological research on caregiver stress and brings attention to the personal, social and structural factors that affect caregivers' well-being and as well as recent behavioral interventions to enhance health.

The word “mother” traditionally meant a woman who bears and nurtures a child. In recent decades, changes in social norms and public policy as well as advances in reproductive technologies and the development of markets for procreation and care have radically expanded definitions of motherhood. But while maternity has become a matter of choice for more women, the freedom to make reproductive decisions is unevenly distributed. Restrictive policies, socioeconomic disadvantages, cultural mores, and discrimination force some women into motherhood and prevent others from caring for their children. Reassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how the processes of bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe. The authors examine issues such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, fetal ultrasounds, adoption, nonparental care, and the legal status of kinship, showing how complex chains of procreation and childcare have simultaneously generated greater liberty and new forms of constraint. Emphasizing the tension between the liberalization of procreation and care on the one hand, and the limits to their democratization due to race, class, and global inequality on the other, the book highlights debates that have emerged as these multifaceted changes have led to both the fragmentation and reassembling of motherhood.

Care Work is a collection of original essays on the complexities of providing care. These essays emphasize how social policies intersect with gender, race, and class to alternately compel women to perform care work and to constrain their ability to do so. Leading international scholars from a range of disciplines provide a groundbreaking analysis of the work of caring in the context of the family, the market, and the welfare state.