Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion

Abstract

Past Caring? Women, Work and Emotion focuses on the history of women’s care work in New Zealand and on how women’s association with, and responsibility for, care shape their lives and social status. It presents a variety of historical case studies which collectively document shifting concepts and practices about care, unpaid and paid, familial and professional, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editors note that it “seeks to make care and care work in New Zealand’s past visible,” offering “different vantage points on women’s history and its resonances now” in public debates about issues such as child poverty, pay equity, and parental leaves (7).