Nomination for Entry Into The Feminist Canon No. 2 "Essential Labor"
Reviewing Angela Garbes's "Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change"
Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life. Sorry for the past several weeks of no newsletters, I’ve been sick, and traveling, and recording my audiobook and it turns out these things took me away from this other work! I’m thinking about and exploring capitalism and economics as they relate to feminism with this month-ish of newsletters, including the last one I sent. So “Essential Labor” by Angela Garbes felt like a perfect text to consider for nomination to entry to the feminist canon this month. (No, I am in no way in charge of the “feminist canon.” Nor is, really, anyone. Maybe we all are?)
As always: I do encourage you to feel free to share your own thoughts on the texts or topics in the comments. Conversation (that remains respectful) is encouraged. Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Love,
Maggie
Nomination for Entry to the Feminist Canon No. 2
Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change by Angela Garbes
I’m kind of a bummer at parties because of the way my brain tries to solve every problem on the largest possible societal level. No matter what kind of casual conversation I find myself a part of, I somehow always figure out how to end the conversation with a sigh, “it all comes back to capitalism/misogyny/white supremacy, doesn’t it?” Yes, this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, including me, when I realize I have nothing else to say, and my conversation partner and I just stand there blinking at one another until we die.
Angela Garbes’s Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change called out to me for its title and author alone as I considered the ways feminism intersects with economics. I read Garbes’s revolutionary first book Like A Mother, right after I had my first child and answered many of the questions I’d had while pregnant about why being pregnant still felt so weird and dangerous and unknown.
Garbes wrote Essential Labor during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment when it felt as though the world would, finally, wake up to the free labor parents—and mostly mothers—had been providing our economy for centuries. “Placing reproductive labor outside the capitalist sphere is what upholds the entire system,” Garbes writes. So when the whole sphere shattered during the pandemic, it seemed motherhood’s invisible and undervalued labor might finally be recognized.
Moms, mostly, were trying to keep their children safe, suddenly responsible for their education, their entertainment, their mental health conditions, as well as all of the other work they’d been doing in and outside of the home. Something had to give. And a lot did. It’s hard and depressing to remember from here, in 2024, when we’ve basically returned to business as usual, but the economy was literally on the brink of collapse—then the government swooped in. Remember those payments? The checks they sent to everyone, with money included for each child in a family? Because so many of us were out of work. So many of us left paid work to do this unpaid and undervalued work of home life and caretaking. And the government HAD to recognize it, or else there would have been large-scale economic disaster. Essentially we experienced—on a very small scale—a glimpse of socialism. A glimpse of a Universal Basic Income. A glimpse of, perhaps, payment for care work done in our own homes and families. And it helped. Children in America weren’t going hungry, they weren’t living in poverty. Of course, we ended those programs and have gone back to pushing reproductive labor outside of the capitalist sphere once more.
Garbes’ book has a specific power because of this moment in which it was written. When care work and mothering shifted economically for just a moment. Because of this, I kept waiting for more of a clarion call, an answer (because, yes, I’m that person at the party that just wants the answer, damnit). She had some answers. Small-scale answers. She delves into research and interviews with other families also going through the same difficult moments of isolation. She explains how her family came to depend on their “pod,” another family they decided to remain in contact with during lockdown, so they could share childcare, and eventually, community, meals, and parenting with. “The meals with our friends fueled a sense of abundance, a new iteration of family.” But I felt like I was missing the roadmap, the big picture of HOW DO WE GET OUT OF THIS MESS.
The book pivots in the second half, Part II, “Exploring Mothering as Social Change,” away from the economic, and at first I wondered about this choice, what part did the messages we give our children about body size and food and sex matter when it came to the concept of labor and how we value it and pay for it? But by the end, I realized I had been falling into my own capitalist trap to think this should be what the book is about. Garbes was writing the part I hadn’t been thinking about at all because the economic question eclipsed it: the value of parenting, of mothering, of being responsible for raising the next generation. She is able to step beyond the exhaustion of the strictly economic questions that go in circles: Who do we pay? How much do we pay them? Why aren’t we paid? How do we make any money and pay others equitably? She asks instead: why does this work of mothering matter so very very much? What is its value beyond the scope of capitalism? Not that any of this means we shouldn’t pay care workers, but that care work is so vast, so beautiful, so important, that we must also remember that simply boiling care work down in our society to a dollar figure for keeping a child alive, we will never ever solve this problem.
In the final chapter, Garbes somehow seamlessly connects the messages she’s shared about teaching her children how to respect bodies, their own and others’, how to speak honestly and openly about sex for pleasure, and how to recognize the harms of being surrounded by European beauty standards to an entire chapter about being connected to the natural world, via the deep curiosity one of her children has for botany. It’s just at this moment that she reminds the reader how mothering experience relates to that pesky question of labor economics. “As much as some of us might hope to burn down the capitalist system we operate within, we don’t need to wait for revolution to incorporate principles of abundance into our lives,” she writes. “Most of us can’t afford to stop thinking about money, but if we changed our relationship to it—even ever so slightly—yes, our finances might contract, but our emotional lives might expand in ways we can’t yet measure or know.”
This book was a stark reminder that even when some of us want to solve the big picture problems, boiling everything down to the big bad guys: “capitalism” or “misogyny,” for example, can often mean we overlook what is truly important: making our lives and the lives of our children more livable, beautiful, and interconnected.
Find Me Elsewhere!
Book Tour Dates
Book tour for BETTER FASTER FARTHER is rapidly approaching! If you’re on the West coast this June, come find me!
Tuesday, June 18
Seattle, WA - Elliott Bay Book Company, talk & signing, in-conversation with Elise Hooper, author of Fast Girls
Thursday, June 20
Bellingham, WA - Village Books, talk & signing, in-conversation with Megan Burbank
Monday, June 24
Portland, OR - Powell’s Books, talk & signing, in-conversation with Sarah Marshall, of You’re Wrong About
Tuesday, June 25
Corte Madera, CA - Book Passage, talk & signing, in-conversation with Rahawa Haile
Wednesday, June 26
West Hollywood, CA - Book Soup, talk & signing, in-conversation with Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
Thursday, June 27
La Jolla, CA - Warwick’s, talk & signing
**If you haven’t yet pre-ordered BETTER FASTER FARTHER, Hudson Booksellers, the airport bookstores, are running a sale in honor of Boston Marathon weekend, 30% off cover price — pretty good!
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens
Pre-order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 18, 2024) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick pre-order button from Bookshop.org