Book ReviewsNursing before Nightingale, 1815–1899James Young Simpson: Lad o’ PairtsDevenir infirmière en France, une histoire atlantique? (1854–1938)Florence Nightingale: The Crimean War—Volume 14 of the Collected Works of Florence NightingaleOn the Field of Mercy: Women Medical Volunteers from the Civil War to the First World WarThe Ailing City: Health, Tuberculosis, and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950Nurses on the Front Line: When

Abstract

Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work By Mignon Duffy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011) (192 pages, $72.00 cloth; $24.95 paper)In her study of the paid care workforce in the United States, Mignon Duffy declares that there is a care in this country today, which can only be resolved by understanding its historical roots and its contemporary causes (p. 3). According to Duffy, the low wages and difficult, stressful working conditions that beset laborers in care-related fields ( including not only nursing and other health occupations, but also education and social services) have negatively affected the quality of care for those on the receiving end. Popular explanations for this state of affairs generally blame women's entrance into the labor force-a trend that supposedly shifted the burden of care from families to either impersonal institutions or to exploited minority workers, but Duffy finds both of these narratives too simplistic. In Making Care Count, she demonstrates the complex historical and structural factors that, over the last century, gave rise to the current care environment. Although other scholars have called attention to gender, racial-ethnic, or class inequalities in paid care, they have tended to analyze these as separate variables. Duffy, however, acknowledges these issues as interrelated and therefore analyzes them concurrently. The resulting book is a historically grounded sociology that investigates the care crisis through multiple theoretical lenses.In six concise chapters, Duffy presents a coherent, impassioned study of U.S. paid care workers. Chapter 1 provides the book's conceptual and theoretical foundations. In this chapter, Duffy distinguishes between nurturant and care. The former category includes occupations with a relational component between care worker and client, such as nurses and nurse's aides. The latter refers to behind-the-scenes jobs, such as hospital cooks and launderers, which tend to be the least economically rewarding. Examining both classes is essential, Duffy argues, to achieve a full picture of the care field and its problems. Long-standing cultural constructions of nurturing as a feminized activity have contributed to significant inequalities within the care field, but racial-ethnic and class hierarchies create further stratification, with minorities relegated largely to low-status and non-nurturant jobs. Duffy next provides historical background. Chapter 2 traces domestic service in the United States from its ubiquity in the 19th century to its decline in the 20th century, whereas Chapter 3 examines the parallel rise of paid care occupations, which expanded as domestic service contracted. …