Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

I want to drill down on one aspect of the intro, too, because I think it’s essential: how has care “curdled,” for lack of a better word, in our minds? And what have been the implications of that degradation?

Definitely curdled. When I say the word “care” I think it often brings to mind the smell of diapers or that unpleasant combo of urine and disi... See more

we all have needs that need to be tended to. I always wonder, what if care is the work? What if caring for ourselves is the revolution, meaning, what would happen if we divested from dismantling white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and invested our energy in equitizing the care we are able to provide one another?

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

caretaking is a kind of liberation