Getting Ambitious about Carework

Author Elissa Strauss on care feminism and human dignity

Left: Elissa Strauss. Right: When You Care. Get it from the public library, your local independent bookseller, or buy it online at Bookshop.org. 10% of your purchase price will go to Treehouse Foundation, an organization that builds intergenerational communities for foster kids, families, and elders.

Today, I’m so excited to share with you an excerpt from Elissa Strauss’s wonderful book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. It has totally influenced the way I think about carework this year and helped me put words to my experience as an Auntie. Elissa is a journalist and a mom, and her book complicates our oversimplified and politically polarized narratives about care.

Let’s remind ourselves of the dominant narratives about carework, most often mobilized in debates about the meaning and value of motherhood. From one major perspective (particularly common on the left), motherhood is a slog, an impediment to professional success, and a key mechanism by which women – especially women of color and poor women – remain exploited and oppressed. From the other major perspective (common on the right), motherhood is a woman’s highest calling and the only truly fulfilling purpose of her life.

Elissa has a much more nuanced take, and although she writes specifically about her experience of motherhood, her book is for all of us who care – Aunties, parents, and all kinds of alloparents, as well as those who provide eldercare and healthcare and support for people who are sick or disabled. She argues that care work is indeed very challenging and structurally unsupported, but it is also often meaningful and joyful.

I particularly love Elissa’s call, at the end of today’s excerpt, to reimagine the idea of “ambition” so that it encompasses carework. So often, ambition is framed as antithetical to care: according to the dominant narrative, carework gets in the way of our ambition; there is no reason or room to be ambitious about care. Elissa turns this thinking on its head: what if, instead, we could actually locate our personal ambition in the domain of care? What if we could be ambitious about the care we provide in our daily lives, in addition to having high expectations for the infrastructures of care we expect policymakers to supply? I find this idea totally intriguing and I think about it all the time.

I want you to get to think about it too. So I asked Elissa if she’d be willing to share a lightly adapted excerpt from her book, and she agreed. If you like her work – and you will – do pick up a copy of When You Care. You can get it from your public library, local independent bookseller, or buy it online from Bookshop.org. She also has a terrific newsletter called Made With Care, which I highly recommend.

Here’s Elissa

I went into motherhood determined not to lose myself in it. The obliteration of who I was, or thought I was, who I could be, or thought I could be, all felt inevitable without a conscious defense. When my first son was born in 2012, I thought I was ready.

By then, I had spent over a decade reading, admiring, and aggressively underlining many feminist, marquee-name books, by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Virginia Woolf. They were all different thinkers with different agendas, living in different times and circumstances. But it didn’t take a particularly careful reader to detect a common thread among them: Caregiving gets in women’s way. A woman must find a way out of the home, away from the kids and older parents and anyone else who depends on her. Only then will she have a chance to find deep fulfillment and enlightenment.

Shame and fear about letting motherhood get the best of me in my own life metabolized into rage in my essays and blog posts. I became one of those journalists whose work filled me with guilt, writing often and furiously about the perils of caregiving and the ways women suffered as a result of doing it. I pushed for changes to individuals, men in particular, governments, workplaces, school schedules, and whatever else stood in the way of women freeing themselves from the grip of care. I raged about the way mothers were discriminated against when seeking out paid work, and how the demands of motherhood made it hard for women, from all income brackets, to achieve financial independence. I called for better policies, things like paid family leave and universal childcare, in order to free mothers to pursue financial security alongside other ambitions.

On top of this, I wrote about the internal experience, encouraging women not to let motherhood colonize their otherwise wild and interesting minds. My overarching thesis, the spirit behind much of my work at the time, was that motherhood is perfectly fine as long as it fits neatly into the gaps of a noble and multifaceted life. In a perfect world, a woman would be able to be a mother without sacrificing whatever splendid existence she had long imagined for herself. We didn’t have to let motherhood change us or alter our fate if we didn’t want to. We just needed to make sure the gaps into which we placed motherhood remained separate from everything else, distinct and well maintained, so we could physically or psychologically step away whenever we needed to go and live freely. My pieces on the subject received lots of page views, comments, likes, and tweets, and I got the smug satisfaction from believing these web metrics meant I was right.

What I didn’t say, certainly not in my writing, and not even to myself at first, was that parenthood was far more compelling than I had thought it would be. The older my son Augie got, the truer this felt. And then even more so when my second son, Levi, was born four and a half years later. I always anticipated feeling some amount of joy as a parent, and, after making it through the dark and narrow tunnel of the first four months of parenthood, I found lots of it. Children, in flesh and spirit, can be a wonder. But what I discovered was something more—and more complicated—than just joy.

The world suddenly looked very different. I suddenly looked very different. I saw openings, possibilities, internal and external, and not only could I not look away; I didn’t want to. Keeping parenthood in the gaps isn’t just impossible, I’d come to feel; it’s undesirable. The experience of care had seeped into everything, provoking me and enlightening me, and I liked it. I had put so much energy into figuring out how not to lose myself to caregiving that I completely ignored the possibility that I might, in fact, find some of myself there. That complex, wiser, more interesting person I had wanted to be, the one whose growth I presumed would be impeded by motherhood, was emerging through care. Why did nobody tell me it could be like this?

It wasn’t long before I began to see the power of intimate care in our collective existence as well. The caregiving I gave to my kids was not just good for them, or me; it was good for everyone. Care as a powerful social, economic, and political force was never something I encountered in college courses or, until very recently, political speeches. And yet it requires so little imagination, so little mental energy, to consider a world without care and quickly come to understand that our society and lives depend on it. Care is how future citizens and employees are created. Care is how we maintain dignity.

Aside from these loftier outcomes of care, it’s also a crucial piece of the economic puzzle. If there are children or dependent adults around, some adult has to care for them. Perhaps this adult is paid for providing care, or, as is often the case, perhaps they are doing care work instead of participating in the labor market. Either way, their work has financial worth. Whether I am writing an article for an editor or caring for my children, I am participating in the economy.

Historically speaking, economists only paid attention to the paid labor. Today, largely thanks to the prodding of feminist economists, they’re increasingly putting care into spreadsheets and databases too.

There is, I realized, a clear and reciprocal connection between our inability to really see and acknowledge the complexity and richness of care in our individual lives and our unwillingness to support care and caregivers as a society. If we really valued care as individuals, then we might start valuing it as a society. And if we really valued care as a society, then we might start valuing it as individuals. One by one, we would see how big care is, and, from there, begin to contemplate how it can enrich us and challenge us for the better. We’d also see how easily care

can become too big, too challenging, and, together as a society, commit to providing caregivers with more support. We’d know that caregivers consumed by care may be ruined by it, and the recipient of their care will suffer as well as a result. And we’d know that if we gave burnt-out

caregivers societal support, the potential outcomes would look very different. The caregivers themselves would be positively shaped by care and the people they care for would be positively shaped by care, creating a ripple effect of social, political, and economic benefits for everyone. We all, I promise, want to live in a society where good care is big, possible, and abundant.

The more I began thinking about the home as a place for hero’s journeys and other such epiphanic processes, the more I began to realize that this distinction between what happens inside its walls and what happens outside them is not as firm as I had long imagined. Our domestic and public spaces, our domestic and public selves, have never been and never will be two entirely separate entities but instead are intimately intertwined. Women don’t just live under glass ceilings. They also live behind “glass doors,” as I have come to think of it, invisible barriers standing in the way of women’s full expression of self and full participation in society. We will never value care, we will never solve the riddle that is feminism plus caregiving, until we smash them.

The Glass Doors

At the root of nearly all the tension surrounding women and care sits our inclination to separate the public and private sphere, and our public and private selves. Here’s how the myth of the glass door works: At home we give care, in a realm apart from politics, economics, and ambition. At work and in public, we hustle and compete, separate from our care obligations. Our private selves belong at home and only at home, pure and soft, and shouldn’t expect any help or acknowledgment from entities outside those four walls, like our government or workplaces. Our public selves, on the other hand, the ones who engage in systems of money, politics, and justice, have no place within our homes while we care for our families. They aren’t the ones playing music to a parent with dementia or waking up in the middle of the night to nurse an infant.

These doors convince us that our struggles to care must only be our problem, and that the solution must come from within. They partition care away, leaving us to buy into the myth that caring for another is something one person can, and should, manage on their own rather

than something that requires support. Shatter them and we will see why we need to help caregivers and how helping caregivers has a ripple effect on our society, making it stronger overall.

Glass doors also convince us that the richness of the experience of care, and the lessons learned from it, have no place in the wider world. Not in political debates, or novels, or large-scale prescriptions of how a human should be. Glass doors are the reason we are still

ashamed of a care gap on a résumé. They are why we hesitate to acknowledge the way caregiving has made us a better manager or writer or artist, and why we continue to denigrate domesticity and raise up professional success, no matter what effect a job has on our souls or the world.

Today a growing number of activists, thinkers, and artists are attempting to smash those glass

doors. They are fighting for and alongside women who give care and are shaped by care, and continue to do so because there is no humanity without care. They want to free women to be their fullest selves, caregiver and non-caregiver, public and private, and, if all goes well, respected for it by everyone else. Not freeing just women either. Every person who cares.

Reimagining Ambition

“Ambition” has always been a barbed concept for women, and asking a woman if she is ambitious almost always feels like a trick question. Am I ambitious? Well, I don’t make serious money, nor have I ever tried to make serious money. When I lived in New York City, the world capital of naked ambition, I failed to schmooze at parties or network in any meaningful way. I never get back on the laptop at 9:30 p.m. or on the weekends. I could absolutely put more effort into building what we today call a platform, courting followers on social media. In short, if I do make it big, it will have a lot more to do with luck than hard work.

And yet look at the terms I, and maybe you too, use to define “ambitious.” I’ve totally discounted that I managed to make a career out of writing. Not to mention the intimate relationships I maintain with my parents, in-laws, siblings, and friends; or that I cook for my family

at least five days a week; or that I’m raising kids who are kind and curious; or that I’ve indulged my younger son Levi’s inborn and surprising passion for the cello and am now a full-on Suzuki mom practicing with him almost every night. You don’t need to reassure me that this is a lot. I know that it’s plenty. Still, when someone asks me about my ambition, the word gets stuck in my throat because the definition of ambition has, for so long, been limited to work. “Women’s professional achievement used to depend on being exactly like men. Female partners in law firms had bow ties; they looked exactly like men and acted like men as much as they could. They had to be ballbusters, tough as nails, and nobody wanted to talk about childcare,”

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, told me. She’s one of a handful of unambiguously ambitious women trying to redefine ambition, a result of her own struggle balancing work and family life and a subsequent questioning of why a perfect balance between the two became the goal in the first place.

In recent years, Slaughter has been self-identifying as a “care feminist,” a pivot from decades as a “career feminist.” For her this includes getting more public investment into care, as well as a wholesale reassessment of feminism and success, or imagining “what the world would be like if women were truly in charge.” She told me that when she first started talking about all this in the mid-2010s she met a lot of resistance. Her Davos-going, TEDtalking peers couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that she now thought care could be just as important as career, and ambition could encompass both. “For my generation” [Slaughter was born in 1958] “embracing care feminism requires a deprogramming and reprogramming. I was programmed to think that my father’s work was important and my mother’s work was not, except for her professional work as an artist. A lot of the women in my generation thought I was betraying the cause when I began talking about care.”

Seeing Slaughter’s mother’s work, and all the other caregivers’ work, as important pushes us to consider, in all its Sisyphean fullness, the task of maintaining a home and family. In the past five years, a lot of women have been talking about this, labeling it as “invisible labor,” “emotional labor,” the “second shift.” Sadly, many buy into the career feminist point of view where only the hard work outside the home should be celebrated and all the birthday party planning, well-visit

booking, and new-shoe buying is a burden. But others, thankfully, find a way to talk about the immensity of caregiving and domestic work without degrading it. They want men to do more care because care is hard and because doing too much care holds women back from engaging

in the world in other ways. But they also want men to take part in care because it’s an important part of a meaningful existence. The moonshot: Convince men to expand their definition of ambition to include care, leading to a rise in men doing more care and advocating on behalf of caregivers.

This is at the heart of a feminism, my feminism, fueled by care. It’s a mixture of reshaping the world so it accommodates the many women who are caregivers and reshaping our collective consciousness to acknowledge the fact that care is a worthwhile, profound experience that deserves our attention and curiosity. This curiosity promises to lead to more respect for caregivers, as the fullness of the experience is explored.

A huge thanks to Elissa for sharing her work with us. Get her book from the public library, your local independent bookstore, or buy it online from Bookshop.org. You can also get more wisdom from Elissa by subscribing to her newsletter, Made With Care.

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