![]() ![]() I would remember this term, life worker, months later when I saw video footage of the Wall of Moms in Portland, women who were leveraging the symbolic power of motherhood in support of Black Lives Matter protesters, chanting, “Feds stay clear, the moms are here!” In her 1986 introduction to Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich warns of a tendency, particularly among white women, to idealize motherhood, to conflate motherhood with moral authority, and to participate in the kind of thinking once used to justify a “separate sphere” for women. ![]() You’re a life worker, like a teacher or a doctor.” He had heard about “essential workers” in the news, I realized, and he was telling me that, from his point of view, I was an essential worker. I asked what he meant and he said, “You make food for me and you go outside with me and you take care of my life. We were jogging along a sidewalk when he said this, out for the hour of exercise that became our daily routine after the Covid-19 pandemic closed his elementary school. “You’re a life worker,” my child recently said to me. ![]()
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