Women's Work: A Reckoning with Home and Help
Author(s): Megan Stack
When Megan Stack left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have a baby and to work from her home in Beijing writing a book, she quickly realised that childcare and housework would consume the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations- she availed herself of cheap Chinese labour. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home, and she grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives - domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies, and medical and family crises. Hiring poor women had given Stack the ability to work while raising her children - but what ethical compromises had she made? Determined to confront the truth, Stack travelled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the trade-offs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility - and on the cost to the children who were left behind. Women's Work is a stunning memoir of four women and an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Scribe Publications
- : Scribe Publications
- : 0.468
- : October 2018
- : 2.4 Centimeters X 15.4 Centimeters X 23.2 Centimeters
- : books
Special Fields
- : 304
- : 3 Biography
- : 3 Biography
- : 362.71/20954
- : English
- : 1905
- : Paperback
- : Megan Stack