Essential Labor
Mothering as Social Change
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Angela Garbes has given us the definitive explanation for something we all share: the sense that something is not right about our society’s treatment of parenting. Essential Labor is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and courageously personal book. Garbes reveals the way systems exploit caregiving and shows us how the essential work of mothering can fix not just family life, but society. A timely and unforgettable book.”—Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Sum of Us
From the acclaimed author of Like a Mother comes a reflection on the state of caregiving in America, and an exploration of mothering as a means of social change.
The Covid-19 pandemic shed fresh light on a long-overlooked truth: mothering is among the only essential work humans do. In response to the increasing weight placed on mothers and caregivers—and the lack of a social safety net to support them—writer Angela Garbes found herself pondering a vital question: How, under our current circumstances that leave us lonely, exhausted, and financially strained, might we demand more from American family life?
In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.
Garbes contends that while the labor of raising children is devalued in America, the act of mothering offers the radical potential to create a more equitable society. In Essential Labor, Garbes reframes the physically and mentally draining work of meeting a child's bodily and emotional needs as opportunities to find meaning, to nurture a deeper sense of self, pleasure, and belonging. This is highly skilled labor, work that impacts society at its most foundational level.
Part galvanizing manifesto, part poignant narrative, Essential Labor is a beautifully rendered reflection on care that reminds us of the irrefutable power and beauty of mothering.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Garbes (Like a Mother) mixes memoir and cultural analysis in this probing if uneven look at "the state of caregiving in America." Drawing on her parents' experiences as Filipino immigrants recruited to work in the U.S. healthcare system, she discusses how caregiving in America is "racialized and gendered" and compares the "communal solidarity" of life in the Philippines with how modern American families are "siloed off from one another behind fences, out of sight and out of mind." She also critiques Western culture's prioritization of "the rational, well-contained mind" over "the messy, unruly physical body," and argues that mothering is skilled labor because it "cultivates bodily knowledge that informs how we show up in the world throughout our lives." Elsewhere, recollections of how the differences between her body ("a little too brown, a little too round") and her mother's ("petite, hairless") made "body acceptance a long, emotionally turbulent process" and of the sex talk her parents gave her ("My virginity was a beautiful gift from God—a precious flower—that no matter who asks for it, I should give to just one person. My husband") lead to insightful discussions of how she is raising her daughters differently. Though the segues from personal reflection to social criticism can be awkward at times, as in the chapter on disability, aging, and the "inherent worth" of human bodies, Garbes's call for care work to be more valued in American culture is persuasive and well rendered. This encomium to mothers and caregivers hits home.
