Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America - Tapa dura

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America -- Kari O'Driscoll Feminist Review 20100710 [Glenn's] evidence is compelling and deals with a wide variety of examples that proves how coercion and caregiving have gone hand in hand. She uses evidence from the coercion of African-American women in general, slavery, Native-American women, as well as White women. She provides the reader with information on how class, race, and gender have formed the caregiving policies of twenty-first century America and how policies and laws have favored women as carers. -- Elin Weiss Metapsychology 20110426

The United States faces a growing crisis in care. The number of people needing care is growing while the ranks of traditional caregivers have shrunk. The status of care workers is a critical concern. Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers' compensation. Glenn reveals how assumptions about gender, family, home, civilization, and citizenship have shaped the development of care labor and been incorporated into law and social policies. She exposes the underlying systems of control that have resulted in women - especially immigrants and women of color - performing a disproportionate share of caring labor. Finally, she examines strategies for improving the situation of unpaid family caregivers and paid home healthcare workers. This important and timely book illuminates the source of contradictions between American beliefs about the value and importance of caring in a good society and the exploitation and devalued status of those who actually do the caring.