Lauren Flores

“I was ready for all of that. I wanted the baby so hungrily I'd shorten my life or wreck my body. I was prepared to complete one less book than I might otherwise have published over my lifetime. I wanted the baby, and I would make the trade. No woman needs to convince me that she would give her life for her children, because every mother has already given her life for her children. That is the first thing that happens.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure every thing, but which had been followed by so many, many years of divisions and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it ha been first projected; more tender, more tired, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“No matter how much time I spent with the subject, no matter how intimate the interviews became, a yawning pace separated me from the people I wrote about. They had one kind of life, and I had another. I was tethered to the concreteness of the newspaper, and to the abstractions of journalism.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“The cost was not, as I have been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: we have been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.

Somebody, after all, must wash and feed and train the kids and get the food and clean the house and care for the sick and elderly. That work is physically depleting, logistically daunting, and relentless. It is not a job, but a constant gaping demand for labor. It's a ceaseless work that has gobbled up our energy and stamina, eroded our collective health, and starved our communal mind of oxygen for generations.

We did the work, taught our daughters to do the work (assuming we survive their births), and then we died. That was it. Domestic toil had ground us, one after the next, to dust. We have not been educated because then, naturally, we might balk at the work. We might have the audacity to point out that we were doing all the work. We might ask the man to do some of the work, themselves. And they didn't want to do that work. Nobody wants to do the work, if they can escape it.

Still we go around thinking about our primary problem, the essence of our position, is that men explain things to us or that we make less money for the same job. but, most basically, it's the work —the work that we still, somehow, have not managed to escape. It is the work we pretend doesn't exist.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home