This Woman’s Work

My kid starts seventh grade today. I did not go back to school shopping for the first time in 21 years. There’s no squeaky new tennis shoes. No stiff new jeans. No new t-shirts or zipper jackets. Instead, he will return to class while sitting at a small make-shift desk in my parent’s dining room. We have been staying with them due to an ill-timed kitchen remodeling project. (When is a good time to remodel the kitchen?)

I start classes tomorrow. But this year, unlike in years past, I feel like I have been doing the same kind of work all year–without my usual shift during the summer break. Generally I write in the summer. I did spend a lot of time writing this summer but the nature of the projects changed. The extended argument has given way to shorter, crisper statements that can be said while I am being pulled in many directions.

I learned more than twenty years ago while still in graduate school that if I were to ever become a researcher, I would have to turn my attention to the things that hampered my focus. That is why I started studying home. I was a wife and would give birth to one and then another baby while still in school. Studying home enabled me to remain psychically connected to my academic work while being pressed by the immediacy of home and family.

As time passed, my writing has become increasing local. I was working from home even before COVID 19. These days many are experiencing the disorientation that can occur when the physical boundaries that usually distinguish our identities–as professor, writer, mother, daughter, and so forth–have become increasingly blurred.

Recently articles have been appearing about the inequities which have emerged in the quarantined world–as the productivity of women professors declines and that of men professors increases. Further calls for social justice around matters of race and policing have been met with the counter cry for law and order. There is, of course, a market opportunity connected with the thirst for information in these destabilizing conditions. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, sales of Black books spiked and I can’t count the number of times I saw Ibram Kendi on tv with his daughter in his lap talking about raising anti-racist children. (That girl is too young for him to be carting her out like that and talking about her like she’s already fully formed. Children have a way of turning parents into liars.) But the industries managing the distribution of that knowledge are driven not only by old structures that assign value in society in racialized and gendered terms but also by neoliberal forces that seek to leave the welfare of the populace to the management of market forces.

What that means is that “work” is assigned value in ways that may not reflect its practical significance, which is why during this pandemic so many of the world’s essential workers are among the lowest paid. And it is also why women can be seen as “less productive,” while carrying a larger burden of the responsibilities required to ensure functional households. Yet, if I choose to write about such things, there is the question of distribution that remains. Distribution ties into media outlets that prioritize appetites over the more intrinsic value of writing–the refinement of thought for the larger benefit of society. What then would happen if all of the work of women professors could be recognized as significant and designated professional value?