Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College) will be joined by Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania) to discuss her new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023), a powerful critique of capitalist care relations and the economic profit extracted from care.
Care traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit.
Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future.
About the speakers
Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the Society of American Historians. She has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005), Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015), and Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023). She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.
Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. An internationally acclaimed reproductive justice scholar and activist, she is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book. Recent recognitions of her work include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine; Black Feminist Future North Star Award; Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; Abortion Liberation Fund of PA Rosie Jimenez Award; New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; and Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award.
Accessibility
ASL Interpretation will be provided. For additional accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an in-person event, free and open to all. Please review our COVID safety guidelines. Registration is preferred.