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A review by annmaries
Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home by Megan K. Stack
4.0
"Still I wondered: Why was it that, whatever you desired, you could find a poor woman to sell it? ... Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate [the different things women sell] into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. But, in one sense, all of those transactions exist along the same continuum--you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.
I'm complicit. ... And so, reader, are you. You may think you aren't, but you probably are. Those clothes and the food you buy cheap, do you know the supply chain, can you trace them back to their raw materials? You can't, and you don't want to. I promise you: Nothing is cheap by accident. You've eaten slavery and worn it against your skin; you've slept in its embrace. I don't mean metaphorical slavery. I mean plain slavery, the kind that was supposed to be abolished long ago."
I'm not totally sure how to feel about this book, let alone how to rate it. On the one hand, it is very much written from a perspective of privilege--something that Stack freely acknowledges and grapples with throughout the book. The stories of the women who worked in her home are all told through Stack's point of view, not their own. On the other hand, Stack sheds light on something we (and by this I mean, generally, middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people in the US) definitely have not confronted about the realities and expectations of gender roles and domestic work.
I'm complicit. ... And so, reader, are you. You may think you aren't, but you probably are. Those clothes and the food you buy cheap, do you know the supply chain, can you trace them back to their raw materials? You can't, and you don't want to. I promise you: Nothing is cheap by accident. You've eaten slavery and worn it against your skin; you've slept in its embrace. I don't mean metaphorical slavery. I mean plain slavery, the kind that was supposed to be abolished long ago."
I'm not totally sure how to feel about this book, let alone how to rate it. On the one hand, it is very much written from a perspective of privilege--something that Stack freely acknowledges and grapples with throughout the book. The stories of the women who worked in her home are all told through Stack's point of view, not their own. On the other hand, Stack sheds light on something we (and by this I mean, generally, middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people in the US) definitely have not confronted about the realities and expectations of gender roles and domestic work.