Care work—caring for children, the sick and infirm, the elderly—has long been an unpaid or underpaid role, assumed most often by women (and in the U.S., by immigrants and/ or people of color) whose own struggles often go unnoticed. Those struggles have also often been overlooked by historians. Our panel illuminates key moments in the past when care work became crucial to community survival as well as political and economic discussions about the future. Above all, our panel seeks to illuminate how we might go further: how historians might find broader ways to understand shifts in the nature, practice, and understanding of care work over time.

Our panel covers a broad time period and subject matter. Carolyn Eastman examines New York City’s surprising investment in hiring care workers during the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, specifically to assist the city’s poorest residents. She gives equal weight to uncovering the experiences of those workers as well as to understanding how this massive effort and financial outlay reflected an abrupt change in city practices of addressing this dangerous disease.

Frederick Knight examines an aspect of African American history often overlooked: the care of the elderly, and how that care in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected an ethic of family and community that knit together the generations. Although they sometimes were able to create lasting institutions to provide care or pensions for elderly African Americans, Knight also uncovers fragmentary evidence from a wide range of sources to reveal other forms of care within these communities.

Jocelyn Olcott brings us to the 1970s and 80s by examining the rise of feminist groups across the Global South (in Africa, India, and Mexico) who offered remarkably prescient progressive ideas about women’s roles in care work. Criticizing the prevailing tendency of international economists and NGOs to push all women into wage work and professional positions as a means of enhancing their earning potential, these feminists argued for a political economic model grounded in wellbeing and sustainability.

Chaired by Jim Downs, this panel ultimately seeks to illuminate how the scrutiny of care work not only uncovers the important work of figures often overlooked by history, but speaks more broadly to consider how care work reveals cultural, political, and economic priorities and their contestation.