As Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues in her 2010 book, “Forced to Care,” industrialization caused American families to become increasingly reliant on wages, which had the effect of reducing tasks that usually fell to women (homemaking, cooking, child care) to “moral and spiritual vocations.” “In contrast to men’s paid labor,” Glenn writes, “women’s unpaid caring was simultaneously priceless and worthless — that is, not monetized.” She continues: “To add insult to injury, because they could not live up to the ideal of full-time motherhood, poor women of color were seen as deficient mothers and caregivers.”
