The essential labor of care work
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s “Post Reports,” a conversation with author Angela Garbes about her new book, “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.”
Read more:
In 2020, author Angela Garbes found herself at home taking care of her two daughters, clinically depressed and unable to write. It was a time when people were told to stay home, unless you were an essential worker.
“But I remember sitting there being like, ‘What about me?’ ” Garbes told “Post Reports” editor Lexie Diao. “What about parents? What about mothers? Like, what we are doing is nothing less than essential. … The pandemic has exposed that without care, we’re lost.”
Garbes’s new book is called “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.” The book examines the history of caregiving in America through the lens of the author’s own Filipinx identity, and makes the case that caregiving is an undervalued and overlooked labor that disproportionately relies on women of color.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Give a helping hand this Giving Tuesday with the Washington Post Helping Hand. |
| 0:05.0 | This is John Kelly, Post-Local Columnist, and I'm writing columns now and into the new year |
| 0:10.5 | that tell the stories of three amazing helping hand beneficiaries. |
| 0:15.0 | Bread for the City, Friendship Place, and Miriam's Kitchen. |
| 0:19.0 | Go to PostHelpingHand.com to learn about the local families these nonprofits support and donate today. |
| 0:26.0 | Thank you from all of us at the Washington Post. |
| 0:31.0 | I think about how in the summer of 2020, we heard a lot about how America was having a reckoning. |
| 0:38.0 | We were having a racial reckoning. We were having all kinds of reckoning here and there all over the place. |
| 0:42.0 | And I don't think we've actually reckoned with anything deeply in a deep way. |
| 0:49.0 | Care work is the work that makes all other work possible. |
| 0:57.0 | That is Angela Garpus, author of the new book, Essential Leaper, Mothersing as Social Change. |
| 1:04.0 | Angela has been writing about how caring for ourselves and each other is more important than ever. |
| 1:10.0 | We're taught to like hustle, hustle, hustle be productive and to be like efficient. |
| 1:15.0 | And care work is the opposite of that. The pandemic has exposed that without care, we're lost. |
| 1:26.0 | Sometimes I just revisit like the early days of the pandemic in my mind and it's such a like... |
| 1:30.0 | It's a real trip, you know, when we were disinfecting mail and we didn't really understand what was going on. |
| 1:35.0 | I was literally bleaching the outside of my onions. |
| 1:38.0 | See? That was me, that was all of us. |
| 1:41.0 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 1:48.0 | I'm Lexi Diau, in from our teen powers, at Saturday, August 6th. |
| 1:53.0 | Today we're talking with Angela about the essential work of caregiving and why so often that labor falls on women of color. |
| 2:12.0 | During the pandemic, Angela found herself at home caring for her two daughters, clinically depressed and unable to write. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Washington Post, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Washington Post and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.