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tanyarobinson 's review for:
Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home
by Megan K. Stack
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.