Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?

“The terrain of mothering is not limited to the people who give birth to children,” Angela Garbes writes in her new book, “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.” Raising kids is “not a private hobby, not an individual duty,” she goes on. “It is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support. The pandemic revealed that mo... See more

In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it,” the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote, in 2018. 

My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bu... See more

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.