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I was going to send out a mean-spirited retweet to express my frustration with academics from one field refusing to engage with history while implying mastery of related topics. I am not but I am really annoyed. So here are some books instead!
Let's start with Heroes of Their Own Lives. Gordon's brilliant and challenging work on poor women and welfare. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/45bky7nz9780252070792.html
Then there's Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein with Caring for America about homecare workers and welfare.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195329117.001.0001/acprof-9780195329117
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195329117.001.0001/acprof-9780195329117
Megan Elias explores the surprising gendered family dynamics at the heart of home economics in Stir It Up.
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14441.html
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14441.html
Of course, women staying at home is a privilege tied to race and class. Keona Ervin shows the political and social struggles of women fighting for justice. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813168838/gateway-to-equality/
Black women also had to work in other women's kitchens, as Rebecca Sharpless deftly explains why they fled domestic work for those unjust jobs. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469606866/cooking-in-other-womens-kitchens/
Women and their role in the family was the heart of the welfare project. As my PhD advisor Catherine Rymph shows, replacing women with paid parents underscored social policy. (I love this book but I'm biased.) https://uncpress.org/book/9781469635644/raising-government-children/
We'll end with two of the most insightful books. To Have and To Hold by Jessica Weiss explains the baby boom and the postwar nuclear family of the upper middle class better than anyone else. Brilliant social and cultural history. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3683241.html
Finally, Stephany Coontz. All of her work. No scholar has done as much to advance family history. Her classic work, The Way We Never Were, marshals social statistics, cultural trends, and personal insights to blow apart myths about the nuclear family. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/stephanie-coontz/the-way-we-never-were/9780465098835/
As you might have noticed, a scholar offering a noxious opinion about women and families set me off. I hate that these scholars ate ignored and their insights disregarded out of hand. If you have a professional opinion of the family amd mothers, read their work first.
