Essential Labor Mothering as Social Change

And then the other book is more recent. It's Angela Garbus' Essential Labor.

Her argument is essentially that taking care of children is the work of a society. This is straightforward, but I think we've forgotten it. It's an incredibly readable book as well.

I wrote this book, part of it came out of the grief and loss that I felt at the start of the pandemic.

But it also, I felt like I wasn't getting any recognition for it. We were hearing about essential workers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers who are yes essential but we were never hearing about parents and we were hearing about the 24-7 trying to take care of their families trying to keep communities safe.

The idea that domestic labor is somehow less valuable than quote unquote professional work is that it's not just about the child care crisis. It's about the child care crisis and the child care crisis. And I just think it's a myth.

if women in America were paid for domestic labor that they do unpaid right now it would be worth $1.9 trillion per year.

Our country American capitalism relies just as much on the labor that happens in the home as any other labor that happens in the office or on a job site.

Yeah, I think that's a review of Angela Garbus' great book, Essential Labor.

And it's about what I think many of us hoped would be a larger reconsideration of labor and what is actually, what kind of work is valuable that seemed like it would have had to come from 2020, right?

And I think that, you know, the thing about childcare has this unique lever into that is that taking care of a child, having children, this is kind of a crucible and experience through which almost everybody passes, right?

It seemed to me so incomprehensible that anyone could pass through the experience of early parenthood and not think that childcare, childcare workers should be paid $100,000 a year, you know?

And I think that's what needs to happen. Like I think it just seemed so, you know, because I think there's maybe some plausible excuse for not knowing how hard and important farm work is maybe or something like that, right?