Women's Work
a personal reckoning with labour, motherhood, and privilege
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
‘The cold reality of my gender was dawning on me. It was motherhood that forced me to understand the timeless horror of our position. The reason women had not written novels or commanded armies or banked or doctored or explored or painted at the same rate as men. The cause was not, as I had been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: We had been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.’
After her first book was published to acclaim, journalist Megan K. Stack got pregnant and quit her job to write. She pictured herself pen in hand while the baby napped, but instead found herself traumatised by a difficult birth and shell-shocked by the start of motherhood.
Living abroad provided her with access to affordable domestic labour, and, sure enough, hiring a nanny gave her back the ability to work. At first, Megan thought she had little in common with the women she hired. They were important to her because they made her free. She wanted them to be happy, but she didn’t want to know the details of their lives. That didn’t work for long.
When Pooja, an Indian nanny who had been absorbed into the family, disappeared one night with no explanation, Megan was forced to confront the truth: these women were not replaceable, and her life had become inextricably intertwined with theirs. She set off on a journey to find out where they really come from and understand the global and personal implications of wages paid, services received, and emotional boundaries drawn in the home. As she writes herself: ‘Somebody should investigate. Somebody should write about all of this. But this is my life. If I investigate, I must stand for examination. If I interrogate, I’ll be the one who has to answer.’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Stack (Every Man in This Village Is a Liar) reflects in this painfully forthcoming memoir about her own domestic employees. From her position as a white American expat in Beijing and Delhi, Stack documents the trade-offs, exploitative dynamics, and conflicts that arise when the home is also a workplace. After leaving her job as a foreign correspondent, she hired local women to perform the domestic work that would otherwise keep her from freelance writing, including watching her child. The first two sections of the book record in punctilious detail the draining physical labor of childbirth and new motherhood (C-sections, sleep training) and Stack's interactions with Chinese and Indian nannies cropping them out of photographs and treating their personal problems callously (later in the book, she acknowledges one nanny's sick daughter as "the girl whose rightful allotment of nurturing care I had rented and whose brush with death had been a household inconvenience"). In part three, Stack activates her journalistic lens, exploring the nannies' lives and the sacrifices they made to work for her. Stack indicts this system and her family's participation in it ("I can't shake the feeling that I bought something... that should not be for sale") but shies away from actually considering any alternatives. This memoir will appeal more to parents in similar situations than to readers seeking ideas for social change.