How the Pinch of Capitalism Could Change Mothering
A conversation with Angela Garbes on domestic labor, and rethinking what work means
Growing up, my parents were nomads, traversing the country and the globe, fighting for the rights of working-class people. I was raised by my maternal grandparents in a three-family house also inhabited by my grandmother’s sisters, with more sisters just a stone’s throw away. On Sundays, we got in the car and drove across Brooklyn to spend the day surrounded by all of my grandfather’s sisters and their children. And in the summer, I was put on a plane to California, and my caretaking was done by my paternal grandmother and her sister. My mother was absent, but in her place a dozen other mothers stepped in. For this reason, though I myself don’t have children, I’ve always seen mothering as a collective concern.
This pandemic has laid bare the fact that mothers in America—and particularly low-income mothers of color—are in crisis. So a few months ago, when I received a copy of Angela Garbes’ second book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, despite not being a mother myself, I picked it up with great interest. I’ve been watching up close and personally as too many women who are dear to me have struggled these past two-plus years, attempting to juggle child care, Zoom school, work responsibilities, and a semblance of sanity. Garbes’ book—a mix of personal essays and deeply researched analysis about mothering and the economy—dives headfirst into the complicated thicket of mothering in America today with humor and heart and, above all, intention to help us do better as a society.
Last week I spoke with Angela in my Brooklyn apartment, in a conversation that was livestreamed for the Marlene Meyerson JCC, and it touched on so many things that I am fascinated with here in this space. This conversation has been edited and condensed, but the full version is available to stream here.
Xochitl Gonzalez: First-wave feminism: We get this chance to finally leave the house. And then second wave it’s like: And now how successful can you be when you’re outside of the house? Being a stay-at-home mother becomes looked down on for a number of reasons. What role do you think the stigma of succeeding as a woman under these second- and third-wave feminist terms has played on poisoning that perception amongst women ourselves—this idea that we look down on it, we discounted the social value of being “just a mom"?
Angela Garbes: We used to raise children communally around the world for centuries. We privatized labor, so then a man went out [of the house to work]. And the reason why women were confined to the home was biological, right? Our great power is that we can reproduce the human race. But it also makes it convenient, if you’re seeing us as the people who are birthing the next generation of workers. And then, “Oh, well, as long as you’re taking care of the baby, you might as well stay there and make sure that the man who’s going out and working can be comforted at home so he doesn’t start a rebellion in the workforce.” And employers can keep more money.
As far as mainstream white feminism at the turn of the century, it was like, “Find meaning outside of the home. Find fulfillment and satisfaction outside of the home.” And many people were like, “Yes, I want to do that.” And now it’s an economic necessity. But domestic labor never went away. What we did was carry on the tradition of our country: enslavement, confining Black women to the home. For centuries—let’s say from the ’60s on—it’s predominantly Black women, Latino women, and now Asian women who are doing that labor for poverty wages. I think a lot of people are waking up to this [idea of feminism as]: You were sold a bill of goods. The whole concept of having it all is impossible because having it all means you’re going to have to do it all.
And this is what the pandemic showed us. When nannies couldn’t come, when babysitters couldn’t come, when house cleaners couldn’t come, you could be the CEO of a company—and many women are—and then they were like, “Oh.” In terms of the patriarchal world, women are still defined by servitude. All of that domestic labor—when your support infrastructure goes away, you are still responsible for it.
Gonzalez: There are so many college-educated women who, in the pandemic, are in lower wage, even white-collar professions, and have been like, This [job] isn’t worth the money if I’m thinking about what I have to pay in child care.
Garbes: If I’m barely making that, or if I’m only making that, why would I do it?
Gonzalez: Yeah. And I do think that some women came out of the pandemic with a new love of mothering, realizing that it is valuable labor. There’s this idea of finding some new reward in their mothering, but also the exhaustion of the scramble for child care while continuing to face wage inequality as women. How do you think all of this—the pinch of capitalism—might change the face of mothering? And would you see women choosing to not work because it’s not economically viable as a step backward?
Garbes: No! In America we have decided we won’t guarantee health care or paid leave or affordable child care or early-childhood education. These are not radical ideas. These are human rights. And what we have normalized as American modern life is deeply inhumane.
That’s my starting point, and I think many people feel that. In my ideal view of the world, our work does not define us. It’s wonderful to take meaning and satisfaction from a professional career. But I really, fundamentally believe that the only work that humans really have to do is care work and keeping ourselves alive. I understand that’s a total reversal of how we live, but that’s something that I think about.
In terms of intersectional feminism—Kimberlé Crenshaw coined that term, but intersectional feminism has been going on for a very long time—the [National Welfare Rights Organization] was mostly Black women, were Native leaders, Latino women. And they saw the same problems that Betty Friedan was talking about: of being trapped in the home, being dependent. Their solution—intersectional feminism and the Black feminism of the 1960s and ’70s—was not “lean into work.” Their conclusion was a guaranteed income for everyone, for all people. It’s the opposite of capitalism, right? It is that what is best for our country is what is best for everyone. They were on to something.
Gonzalez: You do a very good job of calling this what it is and implicating white feminism. In your book, you talk about Deb Perelman’s New York Times op-ed where she wrote, “In the Covid-19 economy, you’re allowed only a kid or a job.” You write about your experience of reading it, and you remember “feeling cynical and petty, wondering if Perelman had ever considered her nanny’s children before, what daily life was like for that family.” So my mind immediately went to social-media culture and influencer culture.
On the one hand, yes, the pandemic made people aware of the fact that this ecosystem is so fragile. But on the other hand, I still see these Kardashianesque posts where it’s like, “I’m doing it all.” No acknowledgement, visual or otherwise, of the team of people that it takes. How does that reinforce the exploitative aspect of the child-care labor market?
Garbes: When I think about capitalism and colonialism, at the heart of it is extraction: I’m coming to your land to extract whatever resources you have. And capitalism: Let me wring every last bit out of your body that I possibly can. I don’t have any interest in talking about “momfluencers,” but there’s TikTokers and Instagram people who make videos of cleaning the house, and eventually they can get paid for that. These are people trying to monetize this labor, right? Meanwhile, the median wage for every worker in America is about $20, and for domestic workers, it’s $12. So there’s this huge gap. And then for nannies—they’re the lowest paid—it’s $11.60. The majority of these people are women of color. Most of them are moms themselves. Who’s taking care of their kids when they’re taking care of other people’s kids? And so there’s that again: colonial capitalism. “Let’s just take, take, take,” and everyone’s affected by it. I think women of color are affected more deeply, and for a longer period of time, but we all suffer under it. No one is getting ahead.
Gonzalez: It’s the illusion. I think that’s what made me think about social media: It’s the illusion that this is happening. There’s this one exhibit in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. about the money of each of the original colonies before we were states. And the artwork on the money shows these perfectly manicured and groomed plantations, with the white plantation owners standing there with the pitchfork, as though they had done all of this work. So as soon as I read that sentence [about Perelmen’s essay], it replicated that image for me. This perfect household, and it doesn’t showcase all the Black and brown women that are making that household. Do you think that people are ashamed of needing help? Or do you think it’s the pressure to seem like you “have it all”?
Garbes: I think it’s both. That’s why it’s even harder to undo. Every message we get from culture is like, “The home is our private refuge and you don’t show it.” We think of the home like a private space, but the other thing that I’m saying in this book is that the home has always been a site of work, of this essential labor that makes all other work possible. And women of color, especially Black people in America, have always known that.
Because we don’t value this work, I’m asking for us to rethink [the concept of] work. And to realize that our homes are, yes, private refuges, but for those nannies and house cleaners coming from another country and remitting money back home, a kitchen counter is a site of the international global economy. And we don’t think of it that way. I want us to think about the home in a different way, and that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a private refuge as well.
Gonzalez: It’s a vulnerability thing too. What difference would recognizing the labor that goes into keeping your house make? That in and of itself is a first step.
Garbes: This is why I’m trying to talk about mothering as a verb. Because I think raising children is a social responsibility that involves many, many people. You don’t need to have children to care about children.
Gonzalez: Your book seamlessly weaves personal anecdote and family history and personal history with fact and labor-movement history and unbelievable statistics and data.
You started in a very personal place, with your mother being a caregiver, and then the aperture expands and moves. Did you start writing the personal narrative and then find the factual underpinning of what you were thinking? How did the research process start?
Garbes: What happened was, we were living through the pandemic and it was breaking me in every possible way. I’ve always been proud [of] but also struggled with my identity as a child of immigrants. My parents were raised in a colonial education system where they spoke fluent English and were encouraged to pursue these new, flourishing careers.
My mom worked as a hospice nurse for most of her career, so she was taking care of dying patients during the pandemic, which is extremely intimate, beautiful, difficult, and very physical work. So I saw this statistic: Filipinx nurses are 4 percent of the nursing population in the United States, and they account for 34 percent of COVID-related nursing deaths.
I was like, This could be my mother. This could be so many people that I know and love. It also just made clear the reason why Filipinx people occupy these ICU, critical-care positions is because they took jobs that were more intimate with patients than what white nurses were comfortable with. They disproportionately occupy these roles.
There it was. Here’s what I had known my whole life, which is that these women’s lives don’t matter as much and they’re more disposable. It was so devastating to me. Something just clicked: This was how I was going to tell the story of caregiving in America.
I’m going to tell my family’s story because my ancestors were not enslaved; my ancestors were not Latinx. But it’s colonialism. It’s capitalism. It’s white supremacy. They’re the same forces. Our family stories are so different, but they’re the same driving forces.
Nursing is professionalized care work. Compared to the physician who makes a lot of money, nurses are like, “Let me change your bandage. Let me get your bed pan.” It’s much more similar to mothering in that way.
And it’s not on an individual to single-handedly solve the fact that our economy doesn’t value this work. But I do think we have to talk more about how do you, as someone who maybe has class guilt, respect the people doing this work? How do you properly compensate them in a world that doesn’t say that you have to? What’s your moral responsibility to [do] that? That’s just a thornier conversation, but I think we’re overdue to have it.
Gonzalez: I think a lot about the ways language reaffirms lies, like calling Puerto Rico a territory instead of what it really is, a colony. Ana Maria Archila said she dislikes being called “far left.” What is your language irritation? What is that thing, especially around motherhood, that you think is a misnomer?
Garbes: I have a list. The thing that I want to say more than anything is pandemic-specific. Right now, there are 2 million less women in the workforce than there were in March 2020. So that’s like 1986 levels. We’re erasing decades of progress. But the statistic that really sticks with me is that in September 2020, when schools remained closed, 865,000 women “dropped out” of the workforce in one month. We’ve automated this language of they dropped out of the workforce. Like, no. It’s anything but passively dropping out. It’s not even a choice when you cannot be a professional worker, a domestic worker, and an online-school proctor at the same time. You’re being crushed under this. What this pandemic and what this country is doing to women is nothing short of violence. And I’m thinking about that this week in terms of Roe v. Wade.