NYMA:
Mother Always Said
Sheri Lynch (2006) writes in Be Happy or I’ll Scream:
I work and then come home and I feel like a bad mother because I work, and then I feel like a bad wife because I’m always tired ... I feel guilty (p. 127).
Because it chronicles the various tugs on the threads that bind the life of working mothers, my favorite comic strip most days, Terri Libenson’s The Pajama Diaries, isn’t necessarily funny. But I cut the strips out and tape them to my office door because they are an invitation to see some other woman’s life that is similar to mine. It creates a space for collective identity (Sonja K. Foss & Karen A. Foss, 2009) and that collective identity actuates possible collective activity.
“Women’s so-called innate, instinctual desire to nurture and care for others brings to them a psychic income—personal fulfillment and satisfaction—yet that psychic income is the blood at the root (A. Ferguson) of women’s exploitation as underpaid workers.” (Eileen Schell, 1998, p. 83)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The high cost of earning an income
