Pregnant at Work - (Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Pra) by Elise Andaya (Paperback)

About the Book

"A compelling analysis of time, care, and social inequality told through the lens of pregnant low-wage service workers and their efforts to access safety net prenatal care in New York City"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology

A compelling analysis of social inequality through the perspective of pregnant, low-wage service workers

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers' ability to care for themselves and their dependents.

Pregnant at Work examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers' struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor--a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people's time is less valuable than that of other people.

Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.

Review Quotes

"Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century."-- "New Books in Public Policy"

"Accounts for the heartbreaking, health-breaking disharmonies of what Andaya calls temporal governance: that the time demands of the public clinic, the low-wage workplace, and the growing realities of women's pregnant bodies cannot be aligned and accommodated. Pregnant women's experiences in a Brooklyn safety-net OB/GYN clinic take place inside state labor regulations (and lack of enforcement), and Andaya talks back with creative organizing and policy suggestions. This is a sensitive, timely ethnography of the politics of urban American reproduction in the richest sense of that term."-- "Rayna Rapp, coauthor of Disability Worlds"

"Andaya's rich ethnographic account of the cultural politics of reproductive time enlivens the incongruent and disjunctive relationship between institutional temporal governance and the differential lived time of reproduction. Her page-turning account of the racialized, classed, and gendered politics of pregnancy makes urgent the need for temporal justice to be written policy. Her account will alter the lens through which one considers what it actually means to produce just futures."-- "Sarah Sharma, author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics"

"Enriches our understanding of one of the most pernicious aspects of racial capitalism in the United States: temporal inequality. For those whose stories are told in the book, pregnant people of color who live in Brooklyn and are employed in the service sector, wages are low and time is short. Navigating an inadequate social safety net, their time is not viewed as valuable. Having to constantly struggle to make their work and prenatal care schedules line up and expected always to push the caregiving of their own families to the wee hours of the morning or late in the evening, they are obliged to rush, wait, and waste their time, always accommodating the needs and schedules of others. A book that resonates deeply while also novel and fresh in its analysis, Pregnant at Work is a must-read."-- "Alyshia Gálvez, author of Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers"

About the Author

Elise Andaya is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany and author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era.