The country would cease to exist without women’s reproductive labor, yet diminishes it at every turn.
On Sunday afternoon, after speaking to yet another covid positive, triple-vaxxed friend, I decided to end my part-time babysitting job until this latest wave of the pandemic subsides. I’m disabled with a rare immune disorder and couldn’t take the risk. While I rely on my hourly caregiver wage to supplement the bupkis I make as a freelance writer, I’m privileged enough to forgo it without fear that I’ll lose my apartment or health insurance.
Manchin’s middle finger to America’s paid and unpaid caregivers, most of whom are women, was just the latest in a long line of “fuck yous” that powerholders in our imperialist, capitalist, white-supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy have been giving us for centuries. America would cease to exist without women’s reproductive labor, yet diminishes it at every turn.
By “reproductive labor,” I don’t just mean baby-making —I mean the labor we engage in that creates, shapes, and sustains all other forms of work and production. It’s the pregnancies we carry, the childbirth we endure, the care we give to the sick and elderly, the cleaning, cooking, child rearing, organizing, scheduling, teaching, and nurturing we do–whether paid or unpaid, visible or invisible.
We’ve come to colloquially refer to reproductive labor as “women’s work,” but not because women are biologically hardwired to be great at organizing playdates, doing laundry, spending hours a day submitting health insurance reimbursement claims, or having babies, for that matter. American capitalism has always exploited the reproductive labor of women–disproportionately that of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant women–in order to maintain its status quo.
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