Lauren Flores

“Every woman who hires another woman for child care must struggle along the continuum. Emotion is injected and then removed from these relationships in a constant and nonsensical flux. At the whim of the employer, family sentiments are first amplified, then denied. Housekeepers and nannies who too aggressively assert the rights of the formal employment relationship tend the be harshly criticized. My thoughts rang with remembered voices of friends. These conversations boiled around me all the time. With the mothers in my building. With the women in our baby group. With my working mother friends.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Successful people are those who have learned how to learn. Whether college-educated or self-educated, successful people depend on themselves, not others, for their own knowledge, skills, and wisdom. People who are committed to life-long learning have everything they need to shape their own.”
― Pat Williams, How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life

“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

“Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else.

Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home