Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019

This book explains how the 20th century labor standard regime, forged by the International Labor Organization, cast the woman worker as a special type of worker, but a century later, previously excluded home-based workers placed caring labor at the center of debates over the future of work amid new precarity.

Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, with Jennifer Klein, of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford, 2012), which received the Sara A. Whaley Award from the National Women's Studies Association. She serves as President of the International Federation for Research in Women's History, 2015-2020 and received the 2017 Distinguished Service Award to the Field from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. She comments on women's labor in homes and other workplaces in activist and popular as well as scholarly venues.