the feminist librarian reads

reading books about wage-work care-giving and motherhood …

… always brings up really complicated feelings about parenting practices, gender, and my own experiences of care-giving and being mothered. I suppose this is true for most people, since motherhood, childcare, family life, are all highly moralized life choices.

But recently I’ve read a couple of books regarding the ethics and practices of parenting, hiring care-givers, and the place of out-sourcing care in the global marketplace.

As a white woman who grew up in a middle class family, I am certainly part of the demographic from which the employers of caregivers are drawn. But my most intimate experience of care for hire is a) my own work as a nanny, and b) my mother’s wage-work doing childcare for a neighborhood family, where she was basically a live-out nanny for the past five years.

Obviously, my mother’s experience of care-giving work is worlds apart from the experience of an immigrant woman who has left her children behind in another country in order to provide for them financially. My mother was our primary care-giver when we were growing up, and didn’t move back into wage-work until my little sister was in college. She never had to choose between parenting her own children and care-giving for someone else’s. Her family isn’t depending on her income, and she has a high level of autonomy when it comes to her workplace environment.

But all of this doesn’t change the fact that when I read about the outsourcing of emotional labor, my most immediate experiences are of being on the supply side of that economy, rather than the demand side. 

And I am also fascinated by the pervasive notion that feminism is somehow about rejecting motherhood/parenting and care-giving, when I’ve been surrounded all my life by incredibly feminist women who saw no contradiction between their parenting practices and their politics of equality.

More coherent thoughts coming in a couple of book reviews.