Making invisible labor visible with Elissa Strauss

A Q&A about how to bring attention to caregiving crisis

Elissa Strauss is a journalist, essayist and cultural critic who has been writing about the politics and culture of parenting and caregiving for more than fifteen years. Her work appears in publications like the Atlantic, The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and elsewhere, and she was a former contributing writer at CNN.com and Slate. Her book, "When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others," is out now from Gallery Books.

Your book invites us to take a deep look at the power and value of caregiving and parenting in our lives and in our societies. Why do you think care is so invisible?

There’s the top line answer, obvious but no less true for it: the patriarchy. Care, in most of modern history at least, was seen as women’s work and therefore not seen as valuable, interesting, or heroic. In the patriarchy, care is seen as simple, sentimental work, not worthy of support or curiosity.

Though there’s more to the story. When we think hard about parenting and caregiving, it is hard to ignore human dependency and vulnerability. And guess what our culture really doesn’t want to acknowledge? Dependency and vulnerability. Care reminds us that we all need and bleed, but our individualistic, productivity-obsessed culture prefers to ignore that.

Lastly, there is a very long history of people thinking that true wisdom is something we discover on our own; that it is our destiny to “self-actualize.” But the reality is we are deeply social, relational creatures. American literary giant Henry David Thoreau famously went to Walden alone to avoid a fate of being a boring normie/leading a life of quiet desperation, as he described it. But guess what Thoreau? Many of us find deep, rich, complicated truths at home, through our relationships with the people who rely on us, and the people we rely on.

How has caring for your kids changed you?

I became a parent in 2010, the decade of a robust, and decently paying, feminist blogosphere. At the time, my job was to come up with hard-edged opinions on a daily basis, and write them up as fast as I could.

My first big “Whoa, who am I?” moment as a parent was when I realized that it was not at all cool to parent with the same mix of speed and certainty that I approached the news cycle. I needed to make space for my kid, and later kids, to see the world as it is through their eyes, and not force them to live under the umbrella of mommy’s hot takes. I needed to be less certain with them. To leave more space for not knowing, self-doubt and wonder in them and, ultimately, me.

Eventually I saw how while being certain was good for a particular type of writing, it wasn’t really who I wanted to be, or making room for me to write the kind of work I really wanted to do.

I know a lot of folks alight on similar epiphanies through meditation, psychedelics, or long solo trips in the woods. I got there through care.

And, like care, and like life, this change is ongoing. I have yet to become exactly who I want to be or think I should be. But I appreciate the dance and the role care plays in this process.

You present yourself as a cultural expert on the care crisis. What kind of culture change do you think needs to happen in order for us to become a culture that values care, supports parents and caregivers, and finally passes policies that help them out?

Before I wrote this book I wrote often about how poorly supported parents and caregivers are in the United States by government policies. I covered the fight for universal paid leave, affordable and reliable childcare, quality maternity care, and so on.

I reached a point when I felt like I couldn’t write another story. How, why, could the United States be the only industrialized nation in the world without paid leave? One of the most intuitive policies imaginable!?! I realized this wasn’t just a policy failure, but a cultural failure, so I became determined to pull the care crisis up by its roots.

I thought back to all the 101 classes I took in college: economics 101, philosophy 101, religion 101, American history, English literature, and so on. None of them mentioned ongoing dependency care, like caring for a child or an old or disabled individual! They sometimes mentioned the importance of caring for one another in a general sense, but not the kind of care when one human depends on another to live.

I realized how parenting and caregiving was missing from the human story as I learned it as an undergrad. Care, without which humans would not survive, wasn’t being taught.

There is a care-shaped hole in all of our meaning making systems. Changing this, centering care in the human story, is our job as culture-change activists. We need pastors to preach about care as a deep theological experience, philosophers to put care at the center of their definition of “the good life”, economists to find ways to count care's immense value in the economy, and so on. The more we do this, the more we will see how care works and why parents and caregivers need support.

The good news? There are a lot of cool feminist economists, theologians, philosophers and so on doing just this. So I made it my job for this book to write about their incredible work and visions, and combine them with the stories of all different types of parents and caregivers, paid and unpaid, to show just how rich, essential and powerful care is in our individual and collective existence.

I also talk about the way care challenges and enlightened me, in ways I never expected. I had long viewed personal growth through the lens of sex-positive and career feminism. I appreciate elements of both, and love things like birth control and my career. But now I would like to add the lens of care feminism to the mix, and make valuing care part of the feminist project.

Once we really understand how valuable it is, creating policies that support the immense and valuable work of care, and guaranteeing support to parents and caregivers, should be a no-brainer.

How do we talk about both the potential in care to create meaning for both the giver and recipient of care, and the fact that care is a burden for many women and hurts them in numerous ways?

One of the tricks of the patriarchy was to make care seem small, simple—the kind of thing a person could reasonably do on their own. HAHAHAHA.

When we really see care, in all its depth, breadth and might, then it becomes obvious that care isn’t something we can or should be doing on our own. If someone is caring for another—which is a huge project that demands a lot from a person—then that person, the caregiver, needs care, too. We should imagine ourselves living in Russian nesting dolls of care, concentric circles of care, and build a society that reflects this vision through policy and culture change.

Lastly, care should be remunerated. Period. Both of my grandmas died in poverty because they had spent their life dedicated to caregiving.

While care is so much bigger than money in terms of its value, we also need to make sure that caring for others doesn’t threaten the financial security of caregivers. That is exactly what is happening now—which makes us a society that fundamentally devalues care.

Lastly, we need to create a culture and society in which men and women share both the pleasures, growth opportunities, and burdens of care. That’s good for everyone, including the people who receive the care and those who give it.

How do we get men, and society at large, to value care?

Want to hear something unexpected? I have gotten more “fan mail” so to speak—emails from strangers who tell me this book changed their life, or that they finally felt seen, or that I inspired them to see the world anew, etc.—from men more than women. I didn’t expect this, and am still trying to make sense of it.

I think one of the reasons I have heard from more men is that my book made it feel okay for men to view themselves as caregivers.

To back-up: there is tons of research showing that men are doing more care than they have done since the industrialization revolution, both as parents and caregivers. But many of them are reluctant to identify that way. In my book, I include lots of stories about male parents and caregivers who were radically shaped by care, and it's made way for more men to say, “me, too!”

Point being, we need to start by getting men to identify as active parents and caregivers, because the more they embrace that role as part of their identity, the more they will participate, and advocate on behalf of all parents and caregivers.

I also think we need to keep encouraging men to do more care by not shying away from how intellectually and philosophically expansive it is. Of course we also want them to do more care to relieve some of the burden it places on women—it isn’t all expansive. But the more they see care as an opportunity to grow, the more compelled they will be to dive in. Also, as I write about in my chapter on men, parenting and caregiving gives men a chance to explore parts of themselves that traditional masculinity prohibits. Many, many men crave these kinds of opportunities to be soft, goofy, and vulnerable.

Lastly, we need men to take paternity leave, which is both a policy fight and a culture fight. All the data shows that when they take paternity leave, they become more involved parents in the long run. It is one of many solutions to the care crisis that is hiding-in-plain-sight.

If there is one thing you want readers to take away from your book, what would that be?

That we can make invisible labor visible by exploring the full depth and breadth of our care experiences and then…talking about it. I want everyone to be talking about their care experiences all the time as if it is one of the most challenging and interesting things people can do. Because it is!

I want to go to a dinner party where, on one end of the table there is some guy who just hiked Mt. Everest, and on the other is a new mom, or someone who has been caring for a parent with dementia, and everyone turns to hear the wisdom of the parent/caregiver.

Everyone understands that what they have been through is fascinating and important—a sometimes difficult, sometimes rewarding experience that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human. I want us all to be awed and moved by these care stories, and then feel invigorated to build a world in which these parents and caregivers get the support they deserve.

Connect with Elissa: Substack | Instagram | LinkedIn

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