Angela Garbes and Jenny Odell: Essential Labor, Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes, the acclaimed author of Like a Mother, reflects on the state of caregiving in America. In her new book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is and can be. She places mothering in a global context to critically examine her perspectives of the complicated relationship to care work as a first-generation Filipino-American. Despite the mentally and physically demanding work mothers must endure in the absence of a social safety net to support them, she reframes caregiving as an opportunity to find meaning, to nurture a more profound sense of self, pleasure and belonging.

Join Angela Garbes and Jenny Odell for a powerful conversation on mothering as social change and how the act of caregiving offers the potential to create a more equitable society.

NOTES

This program is part of The Commonwealth Club's Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

 

Bernard Osher Foundation

Garbes photo by Elizabeth Rudge.

Speakers
Image - Angela Garbes

Angela Garbes

Author, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change; Twitter @agarbes

Image - Jenny Odell

In Conversation with Jenny Odell

Multi Disciplinary Artist; Writer; Twitter @the_jennitaur