Words&Dirt

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling––a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”

––Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pg. 41

“The person in a couple who stays home will be valued less than the person who goes to the office. Again, when gender is removed from the equation, it’s not longer possible to insist that discrimination against caregivers is just another way of describing discrimination against women. The truth is that we value people of either gender who invest in themselves more than we value people who invest in others.

I said in the last chapter that the women’s problem well-meaning executives want to solve is actually a care problem, a problem of not making it possible for workers with family responsibilities to work more flexibly and still stay on a leadership track. But the problem of care––or more precisely, of not valuing care––is much bigger and deeper than the challenges facing companies who want to promote women.

Fifty years ago middle-class women stayed home, cared for their families, and were manifestly unequal to their breadwinning husbands. To make them equal, we liberated women to be breadwinners too and fought for equality in the workplace. But along the way, we left caregiving behind, valuing it less and less as a meaningful and important human endeavor.”

––Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, pg. 78-9