BiblioVault - Books by Nelson, Margaret

Caring on the Clock

The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work

Duffy, Mignon

Rutgers University Press, 2015

A nurse inserts an I.V. A personal care attendant helps a quadriplegic bathe and get dressed. A nanny reads a bedtime story to soothe a child to sleep. Every day, workers like these provide critical support to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Caring on the Clock provides a wealth of insight into these workers, who take care of our most fundamental needs, often at risk to their own economic and physical well-being.

Caring on the Clock is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research on a wide range of paid care occupations, and to place the various fields within a comprehensive and comparative framework across occupational boundaries. The book includes twenty-two original essays by leading researchers across a range of disciplines—including sociology, psychology, social work, and public health. They examine the history of the paid care sector in America, reveal why paid-care work can be both personally fulfilling but also make workers vulnerable to burnout, emotional fatigue, physical injuries, and wage exploitation. Finally, the editors outline many innovative ideas for reform, including top-down and grassroots efforts to improve recognition, remuneration, and mobility for care workers.

As America faces a series of challenges to providing care for its citizens, including the many aging baby boomers, this volume offers a wealth of information and insight for policymakers, scholars, advocates, and the general public.

[more]

The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

Emily K. Abel

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Although summer camps profoundly impact children, they have received little attention from scholars. The well-known Farm & Wilderness (F&W) camps, founded in 1939 by Ken and Susan Webb, resembled most other private camps of the same period in many ways, but F&W also had some distinctive features. Campers and staff took pride in the special ruggedness of the surrounding environment, and delighted in the exceptional rigor of the camping trips and the work projects. Importantly, the Farm & Wilderness camps were some of the first private camps to become racially integrated.The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century traces these camps, both unique and emblematic of American youth culture of the twentieth century, from their establishment in the late 1930s to the end of the twentieth century. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured by the camps to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understandings of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity. To illustrate this change, the authors draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crises of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

[more]

Like Family

Narratives of Fictive Kinship

Margaret K. Nelson

Rutgers University Press, 2020

For decades, social scientists have assumed that “fictive kinship” is a phenomenon associated only with marginal peoples and people of color in the United States. In this innovative book, Nelson reveals the frequency, texture and dynamics of relationships which are felt to be “like family” among the white middle-class. Drawing on extensive, in-depth interviews, Nelson describes the quandaries and contradictions, delight and anxiety, benefits and costs, choice and obligation in these relationships. She shows the ways these fictive kinships are similar to one another as well as the ways they vary—whether around age or generation, co-residence, or the possibility of becoming “real” families. Moreover she shows that different parties to the same relationship understand them in some similar – and some very different – ways. Theoretically rich and beautifully written, the book is accessible to the general public while breaking new ground for scholars in the field of family studies.

[more]

Mimbres during the Twelfth Century

Abandonment, Continuity, and Reorganization

Margaret C. Nelson

University of Arizona Press, 1999

During the mid twelfth century, villages that had been occupied by the Mimbres people in what is now southwestern New Mexico were depopulated and new settlements were formed. While most scholars view abandonment in terms of failed settlements, Margaret Nelson shows that, for the Mimbres, abandonment of individual communities did not necessarily imply abandonment of regions. By examining the economic and social reasons for change among the Mimbres, Nelson reconstructs a process of shifting residence as people spent more time in field camps and gradually transformed them into small hamlets while continuing to farm their old fields. Challenging current interpretations of abandonment of the Mimbres area through archaeological excavation and survey, she suggests that agricultural practices evolved toward the farming of multiple fields among which families moved, with small social groups traveling frequently between small pueblos rather than being aggregated in large villages. Mimbres during the Twelfth Century is the first book-length contribution on this topic for the Classic Mimbres period and also addresses current debates on the role of Casas Grandes in these changes. By rethinking abandonment, Nelson shows how movement by prehistoric cultivators maintained continuity of occupation within a region and invites us to reconsider the dynamic relationship between people and their land.

[more]

Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change in the Ancient Southwest

Margaret C. Nelson

University Press of Colorado, 2011

A collection of the papers presented at the Twentieth Anniversary Southwest Symposium, Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change in the Ancient Southwest looks back at the issues raised in the first symposium in 1988 and tackles three contemporary domains in archaeology: landscape use and ecological change, movement and ethnogenesis, and connectivity among social groups through time and space. Across these sections the authors address the relevance of archaeology in the modern world; new approaches and concerns about collaboration across disciplines, communities, and subgroups; and the importance of multiple perspectives.

Particular attention is paid to the various ways that archaeology can and should contribute to contemporary social and environmental issues. Contributors come together to provide a synthetic volume on current research and possibilities for future explorations. Moving forward, they argue that archaeologists must continue to include researchers from across political and disciplinary boundaries and enhance collaboration with Native American groups.

This book will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as students working in the field of the American Southwest.

[more]

Negotiated Care

The Experience of Family Day Care Providers

Margaret K. Nelson

Temple University Press, 1991

Weaving together numerous richly detailed interviews and surveys with recent feminist literature on the role of caregiving in women’s lives and investigations of women’s involvement in home-based work, this book explores the daily lives of family day care providers. Margaret K. Nelson uncovers the dilemmas providers face in their relationships with parents who bring children to them, with the children themselves, with the providers’ family members, and with representatives of the state’s regulatory system. She links these dilemmas to the contradiction between an increasing demand for personalized, cheap, informal child care services and a public policy that subjects child care providers to public scrutiny while giving them limited material and ideological support.

Nelson’s discussions with day care providers reveal considerable tensions that emerge over issues of control and intimacy. The dual motivation of business and family gives rise to problems, such as how to maintain enough distance from the parents to set limits on hours while providing personal service in a family setting. Family day care providers often enter this occupation as a way to engage in paid work and meet their own child care responsibilities. This book looks at how they manage to negotiate a setting that simultaneously involves money, trust, and caring.

Family day care represents one of the most prevalent sources of child care for working parents. It is an especially common form of care for very young children, yet it remains little studied. In the popular press, stereotypes—many of them negative—prevail. This book substitutes a thorough, detailed examination of this child care setting from a perspective that has generally been ignored-that of the caregiver. While providing useful insights into the role of caregiving in women’s lives and the phenomenon of home-based work, it contributes to the ongoing policy debates about child care.

In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

[more]