Above all, it is an argument that care should be public and universal—that the grace and affirmation that women are asked to bestow on their children should not be limited to mothers, or to parents, or to the private sphere. The book is warm, raw, and occasionally scattered; some sections feel inchoate, animated by a diaristic desire to get longing on the page before it evaporates. Yet, as a lived-in argument for radicalized parenting, Essential Labor is a landmark and a lightning storm, a gift that will be passed hand to hand for years ... Garbes bends the narrative trajectory of her lineage with loving, wincing ambivalence ... I have made Garbes’s book sound like an earnest anti-capitalist, anti-racist manifesto—and it is that. But it often reads more like a paean to the strange pleasures of nurturing a young life. Garbes goes straight to the register of the animal and of the erotic, in the Audre Lorde sense—a link between our sense of self and our strongest unexpressed feelings ... serves as a corrective to the kind of dead-end consciousness-raising that flourishes in the mom-centered corners of Instagram, where life-style accounts feature memes about maternal exhaustion and infographics detailing various reasons a woman raising a child might crumble under her several thousand daily tasks.
Garbes swoops from the universal to the personal to the downright intimate, offering an all-encompassing vision of a more socially and economically just way of caring for one another that, de facto, would improve our individual and collective lives ... There is a great deal to digest here, and Garbes’ analyses will certainly resonate with people whose caregiving responsibilities increased during the pandemic. Yet by identifying the inherent power of mothering as a force for change, Garbes makes her message relevant to a broader audience. Indeed, as Essential Labor makes clear, all our fates are intertwined.
Part of what distinguishes Garbes’ treatment of the subject is a question of genre. Essential Labor is a mix of political manifesto, memoir, philosophy, and cultural critique, and the writing moves with both urgency and thoughtfulness ... highly interdisciplinary ... There is perhaps some overlap here with gentle parenting edicts, but Garbes writes honestly about the difficult work of slowing down and making the time, something that is often missing from more rote advice.
Equal parts manifesto, love letter, personal narrative and cultural history, Garbes’s book grounds itself in the day-to-day realities of parenting, that most constant job of caring. But by tying together the factors that brought us to where we are — colonialism and its afterlives, lack of support for caregivers, racial disparities — Garbes also looks beyond the individual to the wider webs enmeshing us all.
... slim and affirming ... Garbes thoughtfully but not bitterly critiques the twin forces of capitalism and colonialism that render care work invisible, especially devaluing the women and people of color who shoulder so much of it in and out of the home. Maintaining an inclusive premise for the book, Garbes defines mothering as an action not confined to gender or biology. Topical reflections from a diversity of authors further lend to the book’s inclusive vision of care work and nourishing community—a vision Garbes commits to raising her own two daughters toward with sincerity.
Garbes draws on decades of insights from Black, Indigenous, and queer feminists ... Garbes, in particular, venerates the messiness of bodies—feeding, grasping, undulating—in a manner that would have made the maternalist feminists of the late 19th century shudder.
... probing if uneven ... Though the segues from personal reflection to social criticism can be awkward at times, as in the chapter on disability, aging, and the 'inherent worth' of human bodies, Garbes’s call for care work to be more valued in American culture is persuasive and well rendered. This encomium to mothers and caregivers hits home.
