“Households had never held my interest,” writes Megan Stack, the former Pulitzer Prize international reporting finalist who reported from 22 countries in a single decade. You can almost see her shrug. She hadn’t yet realised, she goes on to admit, that “households are life itself”.
In 2011, following the success of her debut book, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, Stack began a novel. Pregnant with her first child, she decided to leave her job as a war reporter, planning to combine motherhood with writing. Early in Women’s Work, she recalls, “I imagined long, silent afternoons in spotless rooms, typing clean lines of prose while the baby napped beatifically in a sunbeam.” Even putting the wry, self-deprecating tone to one side, it’s clear the fall was always going to be long and painful.
Stack and her husband, Tom – also a journalist – were living in Beijing, and hired a young woman, Xiao Li, as housekeeper and babyminder so Megan could write. Two years later, her book still unfinished, she was pregnant with their second child when Tom took a job in Delhi.
There, they hired Mary and Pooja, both from a mountainous area between Bhutan and Nepal. All three women had children of their own being raised by relatives in distant towns.
This situation is not uncommon by any means: the International Labour Organization estimates there are as many as 100 million domestic workers in the world: 80 per cent are women, 17 per cent are migrants.
Women’s Work is Stack’s reckoning with this arrangement, both in her own household and in society. It opens as a memoir before moving into the individual stories of Xiao Li, Mary and Pooja – three complex realities that feature anxiety, loneliness, domestic abuse, alcoholism and unplanned pregnancy – and then, finally, Stack’s grim realisation that, “ad hoc domestic labor is, ultimately, a bunk system. It’s a jerry-rigged, flaw-riddled compromise that will never live up to its promise of upward mobility for one woman and personalized childcare for another.”
In Beijing, Stack struggles to come to terms with two new roles simultaneously: she is a new mother and a first-time employer. She is exhausted and emotional, worn out by a difficult birth and a colicky baby. In this “claustrophobic domestic universe” managing the labour she depends on is difficult: “You are in a condition of intimate emotional disarray, but you’re also in the midst of a professional situation, and it’s all happening in your kitchen.”
Grim reading
Tom’s life is entirely unaffected: “My husband came and went for work, traveling the way I had once traveled, the way we had once traveled together – across the country, around the world, bringing back the grains of roads I’d never walked, the fading ghosts of spice and smoke rising from his skin.”
He apparently neither offers (nor is he asked) to change his behaviour. It seems as though there is a tacit agreement that by paying for it he is contributing more than enough.
“He had become a parent and kept his career without making any degrading compromises. He didn’t count his minutes and hours the way I did, with desperation, like a beggar reviewing a dwindling pocket of coins.”
I assume Tom is a good bloke: he’s effusively thanked in the acknowledgements, after all. But his patriarchal and almost feudal attitude to their employees – Stack notes how much she disliked his constant use of the term “maid” – makes for grim reading. (Looking back at my notes, an early one was: “Tom sounds like a shit.”) Whenever Stack complains about Xiao Li, his response inevitably is “fire her”. Pooja and Mary get slightly better treatment – he organises an AC unit for Mary during a heatwave; he wants to help Pooja when her husband assaults her – but it comes across as a decision made because he liked them, not because he respected them as either people or as employees. When he gives, it’s because he is a benign patron; when he withholds, it’s because he can.
Stack acknowledges both her helpless dependence on these women and her abdication of power (“ ‘I like you,’ I told Pooja one day. ‘But if Tom decides he doesn’t like you, I can’t help’ ”) yet struggles with it too. She refers to Pooja – unfairly – as playing “a bit part in raising my children” yet panics when it appears Pooja has left them without warning.
Stack is admirably honest about her reactions and responses. Her prose is often a joy to read: sharp and full of insight. She lands her punches swiftly – “you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest” – and moves on. Yet, when she finally concludes “The answer is the men”, I really wanted her to go back to the beginning and ask her question again. At home.
