The Most Underpaid Job in America
After welcoming my second child, I’ve been thinking about why we call the hardest, most essential work “leave.”
“Leave” is a funny word for the work one does when welcoming a child.
We call it “leave” because we have no economic language for what parenting actually is. It is the most important labor in the country, the most necessary, and the least accounted for.
I didn’t “leave” when I had my second child in May. I embraced the opportunity to nurture new life, with all the work and sacrifice and joy that entails. That meant taking a short break from other duties, like writing, but also it meant real work that will last a lifetime.
As I return to writing I’m grateful to my readers for hanging with me through the months I paused. Babies need their mothers, their caregivers, for sustenance, for soothing, for survival, and this time I wanted to be there, fully. And while I was doing so, I watched the whole subject of motherhood get politicized yet again.
A different pregnancy
I had my first baby 14 years ago. The last time I welcomed a child, in March 2012, it was the middle of a Presidential reelection campaign. I was working for the White House, as Director of Press Advance, one of the few people who could legally work on the President’s political and official business. I felt like I had two missions at once.
Within a few weeks of my first son’s birth, I was back at the White House. He sat with me in the White House Situation Room and spit up on a senior colleague’s shoulder. Joe Biden joked that he was the youngest baby to have security clearance. Seven weeks after he was born, I was in Afghanistan overseeing the President’s live address to the nation, because the mission seemed critical.
“Leave” for a woman working at the White House at that time, 14 years ago, at my level, was relatively new and untested. First Lady Michelle Obama had helped ensure a leave policy was in place for Presidential staff during the first term. But no one really knew what that looked like.
Years later I look back at how quickly I went back on the road, the sacrifices I asked of my newborn — not least to tolerate his dad feeding him a bottle and having his mom gone on long trips — and I wonder about the sacrifices I asked of myself: not seeing the earliest moments of his life. Behind the scenes for new parents, there’s always the shuffling, figuring out who’s watching the child, the fear that something could happen to you or to them.
It’s not as glamorous as some White House selfies may make it seem. I wanted this time to be different, and in so many ways it has been.
Another debate about motherhood
With that background, and as I welcomed new life, I watched White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt navigate her return to the podium ten weeks after having her second child. It’s far more than the four days she took off to welcome the first, and I’m glad she had the time. But I also know the pressure she must have felt, returning with an upcoming midterm election, with a President who said he needed her.
I saw Second Lady Usha Vance welcome her fourth child this summer. She is the first wife of the Vice President to give birth in office in more than 150 years and was judged on everything from what she wore to what she said.
I watched Katie Miller, wife of senior White House aide Stephen Miller and now podcast host, spend months online urging women toward the same path: have babies, you can do it all.
I know that path and I’m not willing to tell another woman what’s right for her.
Then as I got ready to write this I saw that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted about freezing her eggs, tying it explicitly to this administration’s politics, which ignited another debate about motherhood, parenthood, and even the age at which it happens.
All of this politicization is so far from the point. We criticize mothers way too much and provide way too little support.
No price on motherhood
If moms were like venture capitalists, expecting a return on the investment they put into their children — the capital, the sleepless nights, the income sacrificed, the bodies and careers remade — they would be rich. Mothers would collectively own most of the capital on the planet.
Instead we’ve built an entire economy that fundamentally needs our products (our children) but serially undervalues the contributions of women. It treats parenting as a free investment, one that has an epic cost. And in this economy, it calls in debts later: By underpaying women. we create poverty cycles that follow.
I’m not presenting a new argument. Selma James has been making this argument since the 1970s, demanding wages for unpaid work women did raising children, running households. The demands have largely gone nowhere. What limited maternity “leave” we have is largely based on the wages women had before becoming pregnant, or the generosity of their employer. Meanwhile Oxfam estimates the work of homemakers is worth $10.8 trillion a year globally, more than three times the tech industry, using minimum wage as the baseline. That’s not what it’s actually worth, that’s the floor.
Some countries have tried to close the gap with limited “leave” or in some countries compensation in retirement. Germany, France, and Norway give parents pension credits for years spent raising children, quietly conceding decades later that there was labor unaccounted for.
So while this debate on what age to welcome a child rages on in America, or how many children to have, we’re not actually talking about the real benefits of motherhood to our society, how we should compensate for it. Instead we call welcoming a child, and that work associated with it, “leave” when it’s the most active, present part of a parent’s life.
I fear we’ve watched what happens to our children when that labor goes unsupported, when we only count women’s labor when they work outside of the home. For so long women’s labor in the home was taken for granted; and now it’s hard for any to raise children without two incomes, which requires outside employment.
In this new reality, we’ve seen the lack of value we place on child rearing manifest in problems in our schools, with mental health statistics, in headlines none of us want to keep reading. So maybe it’s time the conversation about motherhood stopped being about when to start, and instead be about how to value the most important job in our society: raising our next generation.
In the meantime, my readers, I’m so grateful for you. I guess this means I’m back from “leave,” though I never really felt like I left. But I am back to writing. And mothering: the best, most underpaid job in the world.