I was hearing all this talk about essential workers-health care workers, sanitation workers, who, yes, are absolutely essential-but I felt like, Who’s talking about moms? Who’s talking about parents? Because we’re all working all the time right now. I felt my ability to be a writer sort of slipping away there’s a lot of grief and frustration tied up in that. I wasn’t planning to write about mothers-I wanted to write about human bodies-but then I was home with my children 24/7 for four months, and I just became a caretaker. Read the full interview below.Īngela Garbes: The sort of secret history is that I was already under contract for a second book that I had sold in 2018, which I had not finished writing as of 2020. Vogue recently spoke to Garbes about the book and the lessons she’s learned from her own mother.

Frequently left out of that conversation, though, are domestic workers, whose labor is often rendered invisible, while a parallel conversation has been going on about the ways that we, as a society, have ignored the experiences of mothers trying to navigate work and family responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.Īuthor Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, deftly and empathetically analyzes the experiences of mothers and caregivers during COVID-19 and long before, interspersing her own experience as the mother of two small children and the daughter of Filipino immigrants with a rigorous examination of precisely why and how the work of women-and women of color in particular-is systematically devalued.

We’ve been living through a sea change in how organized labor is discussed, with workers from Starbucks, Amazon, and other major companies demanding that their employers value and fairly compensate the labor that they perform.

Angela garbes books