The system is rigged. It's rigged against poor women. It's rigged against women who don't have the resources and who ultimately don't have the choice about whether or not they want to care for their children. A lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like

a lady like a lady like a lady like a lady like.

I've had having love. This is on Lady Like. I'm Kristen. And yes, the system is rigged, so very rigged. This episode, we're getting a crash course in just

how deeply rigged the system is by focusing in on the women it

cares least about, namely poor women of color and

single moms, the same women in fact that the system disproportionately relies on to

care for the rest of us. Domestic workers, home health

AIDS, daycare workers, cleanup crews. These are also though the same women that

today's guest has dedicated her life to as an activist and academic.

My name is Premala Madison. I'm a professor of history at Barnard College and I

co-direct the Barnard Center for Research on Women. I'm a historian and a writer, a

mother, a daughter. I have written about the welfare rights movement, about domestic worker organizing and I just recently published a book

on care called Care the highest stage of capitalism. That's right on unladies. We've got an esteemed professor at the head of class today.

And I don't think Premala would mind me saying she just really, really knows her shit. Her two previous books are welfare

warriors, the welfare rights movement in the United States, and household

workers unite the untold story of African American women who built a movement.

In her latest book, Care, The Highest Stage of Capitalism,

she foregrounds those histories and radical black feminism to lay out how, quote,

the rise of the contemporary care industry parallels that of the military industrial complex during

World War II and the post-war era. Yeah, we're talking military industrial complex size issues, people.

Sound serious, because it is.

And it's not just that often underpaid labor that has mushroomed. It's also the absence of care for people and parents whom American society has never given a choice but to work in substandard

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