Review: Women's Work by Megan K. Stack

Women's Work by Megan K. Stack (April 2, 2019 from Doubleday)

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

Goodreads Summary:
When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming 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 labor. 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 and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made?
Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs 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 an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.

My Review: 

Megan K. Stack and her husband traveled the globe as foreign correspondents. They worked the same hours, slept in the same hostels, interacted with the same contacts--on the whole, they were equals. When they start their family, her husband disappears back out into that "valued" working world while she stays home with their son (and plans to write a book). It is here that the avalanche of inequity begins. Realizing she can't just write while the baby sleeps (do women still believe this?), she employs local Chinese and Indian women to handle the child care, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and the endless list of tasks involved in running a household and raising a family. On the surface this arrangement looks mutually beneficial for all women involved, however, there are often numerous unseen/unspoken tradeoffs. Stack wonders "Who is caring for these workers' children while they care for my children?" and "Where are the lines drawn when you live with someone and they care for your family but they are not your family?" Obviously this book points out the privilege of situations where white foreigners can hire local help from underdeveloped communities in/near where they live, but Stack's openness about her guilt, confusion, and her daily accounts of the complicated relationships makes this less a story of the exploitation of cheap labor and more about why all "women's work" is so undervalued in the first place. 

I'd recommend this as a follow-up to "Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward" by Gemma Hartley and "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive" by Stephanie Land.