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3.65 AVERAGE
3.65 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
What a great read! I thought this was going to be more of a treatise sort of book but instead was delighted to find it reads like a well written memoir. Really enjoyed every single page and I am already looking forward to this author's other book. Don't skip this one!
Memoirs about motherhood are exceedingly common, but Women’s Work dares to explore the labor arrangements that often make such books possible ... Stack writes sharp, pointed sentences that flash with dark insight ... ruthlessly self-aware [and] fearless.
Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
Women’s Work hit me where I live, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The discomforting truths Stack reveals about caretaking and labor transcend cultural and national boundaries; this book is relevant to everyone, no matter how or where they live. Stack uses her reporting acumen to illuminate domestic workers' struggles, but also fearlessly reveals the most vulnerable details of her own life in order to make her point. The masterfulness with which she tells these intertwined stories makes this book not just a work of brilliant journalism but a work of art.
Emily Gould, Author of Friendship: A Novel and And the Heart Says Whatever
If Karl Ove Knausgaard himself were a woman and had given birth, he might have written a book a little like Women’s Work. Megan Stack’s mastery of language and attention to detail make magic of the most quotidian aspects of life. But the subject matter here is hardly banal. Stack goes beyond her own experience of motherhood to focus on the Chinese and Indian nannies who helped her raise her children at the expense of their own. She brilliantly dissects the contradictions of motherhood by analyzing how motherly love becomes a commodity in this modern, globalized word.
Barbara Demick, Author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Megan Stack is willing to confront hard questions that so many of us flinch from: the relationships between women and the women we hire to take care of our houses and our children, to do the traditional women’s work that gives “liberated women” the time to do traditional men's work. Women’s Work is a book of vivid characters, engrossing stories, shrewd insights, and uncomfortable reflections.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO of New America, and author of Unfinished Business
Women’s Work is an incredible follow-up to Megan Stack’s celebrated book of war reportage, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar. It is a fierce and furious and darkly funny book about the costs of motherhood: the psychological costs, the costs in time and energy and spirit, and finally the costs imposed on other women, most of them also mothers, who leave their own children so they can take care of ours. I can’t think of a work that speaks more directly to our age of increasing inequality, starting with housework and child care, the oldest inequalities of all.
Keith Gessen, Author of A Terrible Country
A self-critical and heartfelt narrative ... beautifully written, informative, and sometimes harrowing as she recounts the joy, fear, and exhaustion of becoming a mother. What women — and men — can learn from Stack's story is that “women's work”, in all of its complexity and construction, should not be only for women. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus
Megan Stack obliterates the silence that upholds one of our greatest taboos: our universal reliance on domestic labor that women — women of colour especially — are expected to supply freely or cheaply. With journalistic rigor, Stack centres the complicated lives of women who clean our homes and care for our children, but it’s her willingness to shine a light into the dark, typically untouched corners of her own family, privilege, and ambition that makes this book soar.
Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother
Stack writes, unflinchingly, about what it was like for her world to shrink and her life to entwine with the lives of her hired help — who left their own kids behind in order to work in her home ... Stack’s writing is sharp and lovely, especially in the first section of the book as she deftly describes her plunge into new motherhood and year-long journey to find herself again.
Erica Pearson, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection … Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.
Amy Scribner, BookPage
Stack’s engaging style will have women everywhere nodding in recognition. FIVE STARS
Robyn Douglas, Adelaide Advertiser
Stack, who had stints in Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow and Beijing for the Los Angeles Times, is a natural storyteller with an eye for detail ... This is a painfully honest investigation of what kind of compromises women make by hiring other women to do the grunt work ... Stack confronts a reality that many try not to think about: Who are the women who care for my children and clean my house? ... a double-edged indictment: of those, including Stack, who exploit domestic helpers in their desire to remain relevant in work but also of the men who abdicate responsibility ... In an unflinching way, Stack pulls the curtain back on the truths of women’s lives, especially the domestic part: how women make it work.
Debra Bruno, The Washington Post
Stack is admirably honest about her reactions and responses. Her prose is often a joy to read: sharp and full of insight.
Henrietta McKervey, The Irish Times
Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
Women’s Work hit me where I live, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The discomforting truths Stack reveals about caretaking and labor transcend cultural and national boundaries; this book is relevant to everyone, no matter how or where they live. Stack uses her reporting acumen to illuminate domestic workers' struggles, but also fearlessly reveals the most vulnerable details of her own life in order to make her point. The masterfulness with which she tells these intertwined stories makes this book not just a work of brilliant journalism but a work of art.
Emily Gould, Author of Friendship: A Novel and And the Heart Says Whatever
If Karl Ove Knausgaard himself were a woman and had given birth, he might have written a book a little like Women’s Work. Megan Stack’s mastery of language and attention to detail make magic of the most quotidian aspects of life. But the subject matter here is hardly banal. Stack goes beyond her own experience of motherhood to focus on the Chinese and Indian nannies who helped her raise her children at the expense of their own. She brilliantly dissects the contradictions of motherhood by analyzing how motherly love becomes a commodity in this modern, globalized word.
Barbara Demick, Author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Megan Stack is willing to confront hard questions that so many of us flinch from: the relationships between women and the women we hire to take care of our houses and our children, to do the traditional women’s work that gives “liberated women” the time to do traditional men's work. Women’s Work is a book of vivid characters, engrossing stories, shrewd insights, and uncomfortable reflections.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO of New America, and author of Unfinished Business
Women’s Work is an incredible follow-up to Megan Stack’s celebrated book of war reportage, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar. It is a fierce and furious and darkly funny book about the costs of motherhood: the psychological costs, the costs in time and energy and spirit, and finally the costs imposed on other women, most of them also mothers, who leave their own children so they can take care of ours. I can’t think of a work that speaks more directly to our age of increasing inequality, starting with housework and child care, the oldest inequalities of all.
Keith Gessen, Author of A Terrible Country
A self-critical and heartfelt narrative ... beautifully written, informative, and sometimes harrowing as she recounts the joy, fear, and exhaustion of becoming a mother. What women — and men — can learn from Stack's story is that “women's work”, in all of its complexity and construction, should not be only for women. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus
Megan Stack obliterates the silence that upholds one of our greatest taboos: our universal reliance on domestic labor that women — women of colour especially — are expected to supply freely or cheaply. With journalistic rigor, Stack centres the complicated lives of women who clean our homes and care for our children, but it’s her willingness to shine a light into the dark, typically untouched corners of her own family, privilege, and ambition that makes this book soar.
Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother
Stack writes, unflinchingly, about what it was like for her world to shrink and her life to entwine with the lives of her hired help — who left their own kids behind in order to work in her home ... Stack’s writing is sharp and lovely, especially in the first section of the book as she deftly describes her plunge into new motherhood and year-long journey to find herself again.
Erica Pearson, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stack truly becomes aware of the hardships facing the women she employs: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty. She delves into their stories with searing honesty and self-reflection … Women’s Work is a brave book, an unflinching examination of privilege and the tradeoffs all women make in the name of family.
Amy Scribner, BookPage
Stack’s engaging style will have women everywhere nodding in recognition. FIVE STARS
Robyn Douglas, Adelaide Advertiser
Stack, who had stints in Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow and Beijing for the Los Angeles Times, is a natural storyteller with an eye for detail ... This is a painfully honest investigation of what kind of compromises women make by hiring other women to do the grunt work ... Stack confronts a reality that many try not to think about: Who are the women who care for my children and clean my house? ... a double-edged indictment: of those, including Stack, who exploit domestic helpers in their desire to remain relevant in work but also of the men who abdicate responsibility ... In an unflinching way, Stack pulls the curtain back on the truths of women’s lives, especially the domestic part: how women make it work.
Debra Bruno, The Washington Post
Stack is admirably honest about her reactions and responses. Her prose is often a joy to read: sharp and full of insight.
Henrietta McKervey, The Irish Times
This is way more of a memoir than Fed Up was, though there is a lot of crossover and the heavy memoir content is maybe what Fed Up lacked. Extremely readable, definitely a "do you like to be mad" book, no real suggestions but that's not what we're here for, how are they still married? The eternal question.
medium-paced
The book was very well written and I found it to be a page turner. The author however is simply not a good person. She exploits people of color as her domestic “help” and write a book complaining about how hard it all is for her. Common themes of classism, racism, privilege, white feminism and general aloofness persist. If I was rating a book on quality of writing it’s 5 stars. If I rate it on value of message it’s 0.5 stars at best.
"I think about all the houses I've known since withdrawing from the world to work at home. I remember the scenes and the stories. And I think, somebody should investigate. Somebody should write about all of this. But this is my life. If I investigate, I must stand for examination. If I interrogate, I'll be the one who has to answer."
"Women's Work" takes on the important topic of white working women who juggle career and motherhood primarily through the cheap labor of other working mothers, usually women of color. Examining, in effect, the systems and conditions that made it possible for her to write this very book. Given many reviews, I expected this to be a more sociological examination of that topic, examining patterns, perhaps alongside personal encounters with these situations, and proposing researched solutions. While the writing was gorgeous and the project of personally examining one's own privilege is admirable, the book's refrain of "I don't have the answers" for a variety of problems became frustrating, and the work could have benefitted greatly from the attempt to find some. As well as greater focus on the women she purports to write about, instead of lengthy narratives about going into labor or breastfeeding: while these nannies are characters in the broader narrative of her own motherhood, their lives and perspectives are largely relegated to the final and shortest section of the book.
Having read several recent books surrounding the topic of women's labor and domestic work back-to-back for a class I'm about to teach, I would recommend "Fed Up" much more highly, as an examination of a woman's life personally dealing with some core gendered issues that this book (perhaps it's unfair to say) can only imagine as solvable through outsourcing. If you're interested in the lives of domestic workers, "Maid" or "In A Day's Work."
"Women's Work" takes on the important topic of white working women who juggle career and motherhood primarily through the cheap labor of other working mothers, usually women of color. Examining, in effect, the systems and conditions that made it possible for her to write this very book. Given many reviews, I expected this to be a more sociological examination of that topic, examining patterns, perhaps alongside personal encounters with these situations, and proposing researched solutions. While the writing was gorgeous and the project of personally examining one's own privilege is admirable, the book's refrain of "I don't have the answers" for a variety of problems became frustrating, and the work could have benefitted greatly from the attempt to find some. As well as greater focus on the women she purports to write about, instead of lengthy narratives about going into labor or breastfeeding: while these nannies are characters in the broader narrative of her own motherhood, their lives and perspectives are largely relegated to the final and shortest section of the book.
Having read several recent books surrounding the topic of women's labor and domestic work back-to-back for a class I'm about to teach, I would recommend "Fed Up" much more highly, as an examination of a woman's life personally dealing with some core gendered issues that this book (perhaps it's unfair to say) can only imagine as solvable through outsourcing. If you're interested in the lives of domestic workers, "Maid" or "In A Day's Work."
What do you do when your library loan runs out and you're only 2/3rds the way through with the audiobook? Well, that depends. Are you really enjoying it? And is the next audiobook on your to-be-listened to shelf now available? In this case, no, I'm not enjoying Women's Work that much, and yes, my next book is ready and calling my name. So it looks like I'm calling this one, "good enough, done with that."
Megan Stack, the author and subject of Women's Work is an international journalist who makes the choice to leave her career and be a stay-at-home mom while writing a book on the side. Living in China and then India, where her journalist husband is stationed, she takes advantage of the cheap domestic labor market, and has full-time help. This memoir explores her feelings both about doing women's work and seeing how other women in her home do that work, to the exclusion of caring for their own children.
Having been a full-time mom who takes on outside projects WITHOUT any domestic staff since my first child was born, I was less sympathetic to Megan's lengthy bewailing of how hard it is to take care of babies and run a house and try to write a book at the same time. I was more interested in her insights into the women who worked for her, and what their lives were like. Having just read Invisible Women that deals with the data side of women's work, I thought a lot about the economic value of women's domestic labor internationally and throughout history as Stack told her story. As I read about nannies leaving their kids in small towns with grandparents so they could serve in rich homes I kept thinking, "Maybe they could bring their kids with them and take care of all of then at once?" Maybe I'm naive, but that wouldn't be impossible. Anyway, to me the take-away message of this book is that until you've done it, you don't appreciate what it takes to run a home and raise children. And unless this contribution is fully appreciated, women will always bear the majority of its burden.
3 stars.
Megan Stack, the author and subject of Women's Work is an international journalist who makes the choice to leave her career and be a stay-at-home mom while writing a book on the side. Living in China and then India, where her journalist husband is stationed, she takes advantage of the cheap domestic labor market, and has full-time help. This memoir explores her feelings both about doing women's work and seeing how other women in her home do that work, to the exclusion of caring for their own children.
Having been a full-time mom who takes on outside projects WITHOUT any domestic staff since my first child was born, I was less sympathetic to Megan's lengthy bewailing of how hard it is to take care of babies and run a house and try to write a book at the same time. I was more interested in her insights into the women who worked for her, and what their lives were like. Having just read Invisible Women that deals with the data side of women's work, I thought a lot about the economic value of women's domestic labor internationally and throughout history as Stack told her story. As I read about nannies leaving their kids in small towns with grandparents so they could serve in rich homes I kept thinking, "Maybe they could bring their kids with them and take care of all of then at once?" Maybe I'm naive, but that wouldn't be impossible. Anyway, to me the take-away message of this book is that until you've done it, you don't appreciate what it takes to run a home and raise children. And unless this contribution is fully appreciated, women will always bear the majority of its burden.
3 stars.
The topic of this book is relevant for households with or without children. It feels truthful in that the author and her spouse will at times seem unlikeable. It is cringe worthy when you see your own truths on the page. The last few pages especially made me wonder about myself and the role I accept with sometimes daily resentment in my own household simply because I am a woman.
truly awful classist, narcissistic, privileged perspective of a woman who is unable to see the humanity of the women women working in her home to enable her lifestyle. I will say this: the author does not try to keep you from hating her. She is very transparent (not self-aware, just transparent) about how awful she is. It shows that it is very possible to be fully aware of the hardship and pain and suffering around you and still be a selfish, unsympathetic nightmare of a person. She writes about how the women working as her full-time maids had to leave their own children behind to watch her kid 6 days a week - and then just complains incessantly about them. She resents their humanity.