I’m working my way slowly through Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision when I’m not being distracted by people—girls mostly—who have essays and assignments due about which they neglected to give me any warning. Goodness, I was so annoyed yesterday to discover that multiple things were due right at the end of the break and that little or no time had been spent on accomplishing them during the seven days off. The fruit of my own wicked procrastination as a student is flourishing on the tree of my mediocre motherhood. The larger question, of course, is should we even educate our children, be they daughters or sons? —Just kidding, of course will spend all our money for them to become less incompetent and inconsiderate.
Bachiochi’s task is to work systematically through the history of women’s rights in the United States. I have finally gotten to the suffrage movement, in chapter four, but I want to go back to chapter three, to the question of what is the proper valuation of the work that women do. Being a post-post-modern person, and educated in the usual way, I had wrongly assumed that the effort to determine the worth of what women do, in economic terms, was something that began in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that the question, whatever that question was, was solidly answered in the 90s, though I, and apparently everyone else, can’t recall what that answer was. Or maybe we didn’t like whatever was decided. Either way, we’re arguing it out again.
I suppose I had in mind those memes where you tot up jobs like Laundry Expert, Administrator, Master Chef, Early Childhood Educator, and Chauffeur and then conclude that the stay-at-home mom should be paid 400,000 dollars quarterly.
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