Hi! My Washington Post piece last week was about babies; I had a riot calling them the most powerful lobby in America. You can read it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/04/27/natality-jennifer-banks-without-children-peggy-odonnell-heffington/. My next one is out on Thursday. The one after that will be out two weeks later because it will be longer and I’ll do more reading for it. I’m
Loved this essay. I'll say though that there's something very meaningful about taking care of people. Like during the pandemic our mother in law moved in with us. She has dementia and is a mess and was frequently hysterical, and it was meaningful to be like, yes she would be dead if we didn't take care of her. It was probably the most meaningful thing I've done.
But it's one thing to find something meaningful and another to make it policy. There will always be people we love who need care, and we will always need to care for them. To pointlessly increase the amount of care people need, and decrease the help people get, is just silly. Moreover, for women to take on domestic labor that is unnecessary or doesn't need to be done would be just as meaningless as capitalist work. And I think, like Selena joy in the handmaid's tale, the trad wife's are really deriving their meaning not from the domestic sphere but from the political one, from what they think of as the revolutionary aspect of what they are doing. Once that disappeared the work would just seem as stupid as it did to the readers of the Feminine Mystique.
Loved this essay. I'll say though that there's something very meaningful about taking care of people. Like during the pandemic our mother in law moved in with us. She has dementia and is a mess and was frequently hysterical, and it was meaningful to be like, yes she would be dead if we didn't take care of her. It was probably the most meaningful thing I've done.
But it's one thing to find something meaningful and another to make it policy. There will always be people we love who need care, and we will always need to care for them. To pointlessly increase the amount of care people need, and decrease the help people get, is just silly. Moreover, for women to take on domestic labor that is unnecessary or doesn't need to be done would be just as meaningless as capitalist work. And I think, like Selena joy in the handmaid's tale, the trad wife's are really deriving their meaning not from the domestic sphere but from the political one, from what they think of as the revolutionary aspect of what they are doing. Once that disappeared the work would just seem as stupid as it did to the readers of the Feminine Mystique.