“You should write about all of this,” suggests Megan Stack’s husband, Tom, in a well-meaning attempt to defuse yet another argument in the early weeks of their first son’s life. “This” meaning motherhood, domesticity, the perennial subject of a woman’s struggle to find some equilibrium between the old, professional version of herself and the new, dismantled by childbirth.
Stack – a Pulitzer-nominated war reporter for the Los Angeles Times – is scathing about her husband’s ability to understand: “Tom, of course, was still at large in the world… He had become a parent and kept his career without making any degrading compromises.”
The very idea of writing about motherhood appals her, conjuring the image of a “mommy blogger”. “Never would I absent myself from the broader world and its serious abstractions like politics and economics,” she writes. “I had beaten the boys before and I wouldn’t stop now. My writings would not be set among refrigerators and cribs; would not smell of rubber ducks and diaper creams.”
And yet here is Women’s Work, and every woman who has experienced the conflicts of motherhood, or is contemplating them, should be grateful for her unflinching addition to the contemporary literature on the subject.
The landscape of motherhood has changed significantly even in a generation: when Stack is laid low by sleeplessness and suspected postnatal depression after the birth of her first son, she looks to her mother and mother-in-law for advice; both, though sympathetic, tell her they don’t recognise the existential despair she describes. Perhaps it is a question of expectations. Rachel Cusk, in her 2001 memoir A Life’s Work, railed against the ways in which women like her (middle-class, educated) who have been raised to have the same expectations as their brothers are only brought face to face with the brute injustice of biology in motherhood.
Women’s Work owes much to Cusk’s book, and echoes it often, since it is principally an examination of class, privilege and the apportioning of labour, with these distinctions writ larger because of the setting. Tom’s work as a foreign correspondent means that Stack has her first son in Beijing and her second in New Delhi, where – as all the expats keep telling her – “help is cheap”. But the affordability of poor women’s labour does not make the transaction straightforward, as Stack discovers when she employs a succession of nannies and housekeepers to free up time for her own writing, only to find that her home has become a “job site” and she a manager of employees, whom her conscience and gender solidarity will not allow her to disregard as simply “the maid”, the way her husband does.
“A nanny, I was learning… was not a gadget who showed up and simplified life without complication. Xiao Li was a human being, and her problems had become my own.”
All the women Stack employs are mothers themselves, who have left their own children behind in rural villages to earn a living caring for western babies in the city. When Xiao Li’s daughter is hospitalised with a heart condition, Stack, feeling guilty, gives her indefinite leave, while Tom’s instinct is to find another nanny who will turn up to work.
Later, in India, their housekeeper Pooja is beaten up by her husband; again, Tom wants to replace her with someone who will not bring her own mess into the lives of their children, while Stack struggles to find the right balance between authority and empathy when it comes to their servants. “The fragile membrane that had separated the harrowing existence of the vulnerable women we employed from our quiet domestic life had finally burst.”
Stack is brutally honest in these pages, about her own shortcomings, as both mother and employer, her frequent discomfort in both roles, and in the fault lines that parenthood and its inequalities expose in her marriage. Her prose style is elegant, witty, self-lacerating, and she draws the characters of her household with the sharp eye of a novelist.
The final chapter strikes a more sombre, journalistic note; she throws out statistics about women’s domestic labour around the world, and comes to the somewhat banal conclusion that: “In the end, the answer is the men. They have to do the damn work!” Well, duh – this epiphany is not in itself an answer, and she knows it. But Women’s Work adds to the conversation about how we might move towards a better understanding of what that answer might be. The challenge will be getting the men to read it.
This review is from the Observer
• Women’s Work by Megan K Stack is published by Scribe (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
