Mother. Nurse. Housewife. Maid.
Gender, Race, and Care Justice in America.

My next book—based on my dissertation, “Mother. Nurse. Housewife. Maid.: Gender, Race, and Care Justice in America”—is about care politics in the 20th- and 21st-century United States. Using journalism, archival research, and cultural analysis, I argue that the work of caring for others has been at the center of enduring American political struggle. On the one hand, women of all races have been subjugated by care labors, and this gendered subjugation has spurred feminist resistance. Yet white women’s care has also been culturally elevated, and white women and men across the political spectrum take up this elevation in ways that serve their political interests. Meanwhile Black and brown women’s care is denigrated, except when it serves whiteness. My book makes sense of, and traces struggle over, this racialization of women’s care.