'He’s just as tired as I am!'
An interview with academic Laura Basu on parenting in capitalism.
I first came across the writer and academic Dr. Laura Basu through Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom, who shared Basu’s writing back in May.
I was blown away by Basu’s ability to combine the personal and the political, especially in this post about how capitalism tries to control women’s bodies whenever it’s in crisis that she wrote when 27 weeks pregnant. I was also struck by how clearly she connects the brutal, violent history of capitalism to the problems we face today, from crackdowns on reproductive rights to the climate crisis.
So, I was pumped when she reached out about collaborating. We emailed back and forth about capitalism’s gendered division of labor, “the third shift,” and how to make parenting as fair and equal as we can. I hope you find this helpful in thinking about how to organize your relationships and life within a society prone to constant crisis.
In our little back and forth prep for this, you mentioned we could talk about why women seem so much better adapted to raising children. That it's not because of biological or natural reasons ("maternal instinct") but because women work really hard at it. Could you expand on that?
Basu: There’s this pervasive idea that women are just naturally better at raising children than men and just instinctively know what to do. That we have some in-built ‘maternal instinct’ that kicks in when we become mothers that effortlessly guides us.
This strikes me as a pile of baloney. Moreover, it can be a harmful narrative because it downplays all the hard work that goes into raising kids—hard work mostly done by women. Not only that, it can make men feel disempowered and that it’s not worth putting their full backs into learning how to be parents because their biology has already ordained that they will never be as good as a woman.
This framing gives men an excuse not to pull their full weight in the home, which can be convenient but can also mean that men don’t get to experience the full intensity and joy of raising a tiny luminous being.
Adrienne Rich wrote a seminal book about motherhood called Of Woman Born back in the 1970s, and it’s shocking to see how little has changed since then. She calls motherhood an ‘institution,’ highlighting that motherhood isn’t just a biological state but very much political and social—it’s a socially constructed category that, in our societies, is patriarchal. Recently, Lucy Jones has written beautifully about this in her book Matrescence. I’ve written here about my own experience becoming a mama.
The fact is that women can often be better at parenting but that isn’t due to our biology. It’s because a) we’re socialized from birth to take on caring roles. And b) we work bloody hard at it.
In my own case, I guess I wasn’t socialised into patriarchy very well because I didn’t have a single clue about how to raise a kid before I had my daughter. Neither me nor my husband had ever changed a diaper before or babysat or really even spent much time with a child. Since giving birth to Esmeralda, I’ve studied like a demon to fill the gaping void where this knowledge was supposed to be. And I work super hard to tune into her, listen to her teeny voice, and connect to her.
It’s not instinct, it’s graft. And to be frank, it can be hella draining. But that attunement is also what gets the oxytocin pumping and makes me feel deeply connected with this wild spirit and, hopefully, will set her up for an emotionally healthy life.
I've heard of the "second shift," the idea that a ton of unpaid housework often falls on women because of patriarchal capitalism. What's the third shift?
Basu: The “second shift” is a term coined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild to describe all the unpaid care work and housework that usually women do. Most women have to work for a living. Then around that we do this entire second shift, which is barely visible. Worldwide, women do 75 percent of this unpaid work. Oxfam estimates that women do $11 trillion of this work every year—three times the size of the global tech industry. And Oxfam acknowledges that this likely a big underestimate.
That’s the second shift. The third shift is a term developed by several feminist thinkers to describe a whole additional set of work that gets even less recognition. As if two shifts weren’t enough!
The third shift is all the mental and emotional work that goes into keeping a family going. It’s the planning and logistics, the prep work and the forward-thinking. The doctor’s appointments, meal prep, and school logistics. And all that research that I mentioned above. I joke that I have a PhD and two postdocs but had to study harder than I have ever studied in my life after Essie was born, all while my body was a train wreck and I was flailing around trying to meet her immediate needs and keep her floppy purple self alive.
I’m not saying that women do all of this work, but we certainly tend to do most of it. We’re usually the default ones to do it.
In my writing I show how all of this unpaid labor is a core engine of profit for capitalists. Even though we may be doing it out of a fountain of love gushing out of our hearts, under capitalism we can’t disentangle that from exploitation—because our unpaid labors of love end up generating mountains of profit for CEOs and shareholders whose wealth can soar into the tens or even hundreds of billions.
Patriarchy is integral to capitalism—unpaid care and housework done mostly by women forms the basis of the profits that are the driving force and entire point of this economic system.
How does your analysis of capitalism inform your personal life as a mother?
Basu: I won’t try to claim that my household is a beacon of feminist liberation. I would say that my husband and I probably have a fairer division of labor than most. On paper, we split childcare 50/50, and we are getting closer and closer to that actually being 50/50 in reality (as opposed to the split where the man thinks he’s doing 50 percent when he is actually doing 20 percent!).
My husband and I have got to this place through lots of practice in communicating openly with each other—communicating from the place of what our needs are (rather than what we’ve contributed or what we’re “owed”), and then seeing how we can put arrangements in place to meet those needs. The result is that he’s just as tired as I am! But he also gets to have a magical, whole, bond with our toddler, and I’m not a seething bag of resentment.
I’m also trying to take baby steps to break down the walls of the nuclear family and build community. The nuclear family is where a lot of the exploitation of women takes place, in the sense of unpaid care and housework. It does not make sense to raise children in tiny, isolated units, especially when capitalism is making us do more and more hours of paid work while gutting child services.
I’ve found the book Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, inspiring, as it shows how mothers and other mothering people (not necessarily only cisgendered biological mothers) who have faced oppression have built community in different ways. On Substack, I love the work of Robina Khalid, Adriana DiFazio, and Nergiz on building community as caregivers and making the home a site of political liberation.
I’ve found it hard to break out of the confines of the nuclear family, because it goes against the grain of society, which means that it takes a lot of effort. And this is at a period in your life (having young children) when you have very little extra effort, time, and energy to give.
But I do things like spending as much time as I can in London to be close to my parents, being part of a grassroots playgroup, investing consciously in relationships with friends who have shown that they want to be genuinely close (as opposed to just meeting a few times a year for brunch). It takes time, but I do feel that we are gradually building something together and this constellation of relationships does lift me up and give me a warm fuzzy feeling—and that’s a good place to start!
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—how do you handle household labor in your relationship? How does it impact your relationship? What are you struggling with?
— Jeremy
My 94 year-old grandmother is always telling me how shocked she is whenever she sees a kid out playing in the park with their Dad. She lives next to a park, so she's shocked quite often. She spent her life raising younger siblings, children and grandchildren believing firmly that men were not biologically capable of caring for children. The evidence to the contrary both creates feelings of pleasant surprise and deep deep resentment. So yes, it's good to not tie child rearing to any kind of biological trait. We all are able to care for our children and to receive the consequential emotional rewards.
I also want to point out that my grandmother did not raise any children in a capitalist society. Women's labor is subject to exploitation not just by capitalism. Doesn't mean that capitalism doesn't add it's own flavor to it, but it may also be responsible for pushing more men to take interest in raising their children to help maximize the earning potential of their spouses and therefore their family's as a whole.
Laura, I so resonate with the postpartum period being the most intense physical and mental learning curve of my life (all the while feeling like I just ran a marathon). So appreciate both you and Jeremy and your work! xx