Scholars who debate the cause of and solutions for the decline in civic engagement have suggested that Americans have increasingly withdrawn from community organizations, reducing their political activity such as voting and interest in the political world, and generally failing to place the common good over individual self-interest. Their analyses are steeped in a tradition that is largely gender blind and consequently ignores care work. We infuse feminist analyses of paid labor and citizenship, which emphasize the merits and burdens of (...) care work, into the civic engagement debate. We argue that care work, predominantly performed by women, paradoxically limits, enhances, and even constitutes a vital form of civic activity. We call for a fuller slate of social policies that will both redistribute the burden of care work and reinvigorate civic engagement. (shrink)

Recent changes in access to contraceptive and infertility treatments in the state of Illinois, and across the United States more generally, have heightened class cleavages in access to reproductive health care benefits in the United States. Using data gleaned from government testimonies, public documents, and telephone interviews, the authors found that poor women have broad access to contraceptive coverage but very little access to infertility treatments, while working-and middle-class women have increasingly broad coverage of infertility treatments but spare coverage of (...) contraceptives. These findings suggest that while the extreme measures of the eugenics movement are less frequently in evidence, class differences in access to reproductive services lead to an equally dualistic, albeit unstated, fertility policy in the United States: encouraging births among working- and middle-class families and discouraging births among the poor, particularly those on Medicaid. (shrink)

Class-based theories of the welfare state suggest that welfare states stratify by social class, thus universal benefits are praised for fostering social equality and class solidarity whereas poverty-based benefits are criticized for fostering greater inequality and class conflict. Feminist theorists suggest that, in addition to social class, universal and poverty-based benefits are organized around dimensions of gender and race. I examine these arguments in conjunction with old-age reliance on Medicaid—the poverty-based long-term care system in the United States. Compared to white (...) men, older Blacks, Hispanics, and women of all races have greater long-term care needs and fewer economic resources with which to meet those needs. Even when differences in income, education, age, marital status, and nursing home use are taken into account, gender and race are significantly related to Medicaid use. As Medicaid recipients, Blacks, Hispanics, and women of all races disproportionately face persistent poverty and discrimination. Even when they are not Medicaid beneficiaries, these groups are particularly likely to suffer other consequences of a poverty-based long-term care system related to state variations in coverage, informal care giving, and spousal impoverishment. (shrink)