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The social organization of care has many important implications for economic inequality in the U.S. today. In this paper, three dimensions are discussed: 1) Care affects standards of living. Flows of money and time within the family have profound impacts on relative standards of riving. Standard measures of poverty and inequality generally understate the needs of dependents, and therefore overstate the well-being of families caring for children, the elderly, or the sick or disabled. 2) Care affects political alignments. The costs of providing family care represent an increasingly important component of earnings inequality between men and women. Opportunities to »outsource« care services intensify differences based on citizenship, race/ethnicity and class. Yet the growing importance of outsourcing may also foster alliances between producers and consumers who share an interest in maintaining and improving care quality 3) Care inequalities reproduce income inequalities. Differences in the quantity and quality of care that children receive have a significant impact on their future earnings. Women are particularly vulnerable to poverty in old age because they accumulate fewer Social Security and pension credits in the labor market. Growing recognition of these dynamics is generating support for new public policies focusing on investments in human capital that could potentially reduce inequality among children and among caregivers or carers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical Whiteness Studies, as they emerged in the U. S., attempt a critical understanding of whiteness as unmarked yet dominating social category and position. In many instances, authors who are engaged in this field of scholarship are convinced that color-blind patterns of argumentation, whether in academic work or in politics, foster racism -- and that addressing issues of »race«, especially addressing issues of whiteness, is therefore an appropriate tool of antiracism. In this essay, Ina Kerner assesses strengths and limits of this project for critiquing racism in contemporary Germany. Drawing on the current critical whiteness debate and on critical whiteness scholarship in that country, she suggests ways in which the core insights of Critical Whiteness Studies might be adapted to also fulfill their normative tasks in a context that historically differs from the one this field of inquiry was developed in. She also points to self-limitations of the current German debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was the largest international women's organization of the post- 1945 period and contributed significantly to the international women's rights agenda, but is not yet part of the historiography of inter/transnational women's movements and feminisms. This article provides a basic outline of the organization in its early years. Who were involved, and what did they believe in? It uses personal accounts to convey some impressions of the WIDF's founding congress in Paris. As an example of the work and impact of an organization affiliated with the WIDF, the article then briefly discusses the Congress of American Women (CAW), a grassroots organization that united women of different backgrounds and addressed gender, class and racial inequalities. In the context of the Communist witch hunt in the USA in the late-1940s and 1950s, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) accused the CAW of being a Communist organization that aimed at undermining the United States. In 1950 the CAW was forced to disband - which makes it a striking case of the impact of Cold War politics on women's activism. The article ends with a broader assessment of the impact of the early Cold War on the WIDF and its utopian potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]