10/05/2022
“The terrain of mothering is not limited to the people who give birth to children,” Angela Garbes writes in her new book, “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.” Raising kids is “not a private hobby, not an individual duty,” she goes on. “It is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support..." [...] Garbes, during this period, began to examine how [caregiving] “came to be seen as naturally female, which is to say invisible and undervalued,” and why it’s conceived as “low-wage labor, rather than highly skilled work that is essential, creative, and influential.”
In “Essential Labor,” Angela Garbes argues that care work should be public and universal.