Women's Work Quotes

“I was ready for all of that. I wanted the baby so hungrily I'd shorten my life or wreck my body. I was prepared to complete one less book than I might otherwise have published over my lifetime. I wanted the baby, and I would make the trade. No woman needs to convince me that she would give her life for her children, because every mother has already given her life for her children. That is the first thing that happens.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else.

Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else.
Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“We must do the essential work of a species in sickness and in secret. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised: we are still children when we learn to conceal the pain and blood of menstruation. We understand that the denial of our physical shell is the price of admission. We can join the men at work so long as we leave our bodies behind, or pretend that our bodies are just like their bodies. There is quiet sympathy from other women, but you must hide these things from the men because, as soon as they finish nodding gravely and sympathetically, they will remind you that this biological discrepancy was their point all along, and they will show you the door. Biology will be twisted into a rope and used to bind you.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Every woman who hires another woman for child care must struggle along the continuum. Emotion is injected and then removed from these relationships in a constant and nonsensical flux. At the whim of the employer, family sentiments are first amplified, then denied. Housekeepers and nannies who too aggressively assert the rights of the formal employment relationship tend the be harshly criticized. My thoughts rang with remembered voices of friends. These conversations boiled around me all the time. With the mothers in my building. With the women in our baby group. With my working mother friends.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“You should write about all of this,' he told me.
'All of what?'
'Becoming a mother.'
'No!'
This suggestion made me furious, it seemed to me that every college-educated woman with a laptop, a baby, and a sketchy grasp of grammar had reinvented herself as a 'mommy blogger.' Not that, no way—not for me. I had fought too hard and too long to go down like that.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“The cost was not, as I have been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: we have been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.

Somebody, after all, must wash and feed and train the kids and get the food and clean the house and care for the sick and elderly. That work is physically depleting, logistically daunting, and relentless. It is not a job, but a constant gaping demand for labor. It's a ceaseless work that has gobbled up our energy and stamina, eroded our collective health, and starved our communal mind of oxygen for generations.

We did the work, taught our daughters to do the work (assuming we survive their births), and then we died. That was it. Domestic toil had ground us, one after the next, to dust. We have not been educated because then, naturally, we might balk at the work. We might have the audacity to point out that we were doing all the work. We might ask the man to do some of the work, themselves. And they didn't want to do that work. Nobody wants to do the work, if they can escape it.

Still we go around thinking about our primary problem, the essence of our position, is that men explain things to us or that we make less money for the same job. but, most basically, it's the work —the work that we still, somehow, have not managed to escape. It is the work we pretend doesn't exist.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“No matter how much time I spent with the subject, no matter how intimate the interviews became, a yawning pace separated me from the people I wrote about. They had one kind of life, and I had another. I was tethered to the concreteness of the newspaper, and to the abstractions of journalism.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“is happy, then who will know sadness?”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home