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 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.
