Women's Work
A Reckoning with Work and Home
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Narrated by:
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Allyson Ryan
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Written by:
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Megan K. Stack
About this listen
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019
From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers
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 Delhi, 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.
©2019 Megan K. Stack (P)2019 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
“Stack is unflinching in her account.... Her prose is beautiful as she shines a light on the contradictions of her position.... A sharply observed, evocative reckoning with the ways her struggles intersect and diverge with those of the women she employs.” (Lauren Hilgers, The New York Times Book Review)
"A painfully honest investigation...Stack pulls the curtain back on the truths of women's lives, especially the domestic part...[Stack is] a natural storyteller with an eye for detail." (Debra Bruno, The Washington Post)
“Megan Stack is willing to confront hard questions that many of us flinch from: about the relationships between women and the women we hire to take care of our houses and our children, to do the traditional women’s work that gives ‘liberated women’ the time to do traditional men’s work. Women’s Work is a book of vivid characters, engrossing stories, shrewd insights, and uncomfortable reflections.” (Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business and president and CEO of New America)