Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Let’s raise our children to know these things in their bones and cells, their meat and marrow, have it be part of them. For that understanding to be so strong that it cannot be undone by the colonial and capitalist systems that will insist their worth is how much they can produce, how thin their bodies are, how dedicated to work they are. So strong

Mothers’ work outside the home, whatever form that takes, is directly tied to their participation in public life.

Reproductive labor is all the work needed to sustain a productive workforce for generations. It includes caring for children, adults, and the elderly; household chores; and keeping everyone in the household emotionally and physically healthy.

Domestication moved people away from communal living and removed the social and connective aspects of all labor.

I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.

It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help.

Rather than viewing care work as characteristic of the noun “motherhood,” I now see it as the action of mothering, which includes anyone who is engaged in “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life.”

We are caught between how we were raised and how we really want to live. We should feel free rather than limited.

What if every child believed that being “good” at a sport or activity—football, badminton, or ballet; break dancing, skateboarding, or curling; fencing, jumping rope, or juggling—means that you enjoy doing it?