Can outsourcing of housework liberate women in the workplace?

A well-worn but still unanswered question: After pregnancy and childbirth, how do women balance work and family?

In A Woman's Business, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Megan Stark thought she had found a secret to both: spending affordable money, outsourcing housework and childcare to domestic workers, and buying back freedom.

However, she found that not only was she not free, but she was also troubled by her new role as a "housekeeper": although she was freed from some of the housework, she needed to solve the task of assigning housework, coordinating relationships, dealing with problems, caring for her needs, etc. Nanny is not a tool that can simplify life once it appears, and nannies bring new problems.

The nanny also stirred up a new emotional entanglement in Meghan's heart: Can I fully trust this woman hired with money? When the child shows intimacy with her, what is that irrepressible jealousy? The nanny's family has an urgent matter and needs to take a long vacation, but this will affect my work, should I fire her? She came to take care of my child, so who will take care of her child? Does this employment relationship mean that I am "exploiting" another woman, basing my own liberation on her sacrifice?

These questions aren't just in Meghan's mind. Translator Zhan Juan experienced similar contradictory moments in the first few years of raising children, and in the process of translating "Women's Affairs", she frequently saw her figure and started a female dialogue with the author who understood each other, and the idea she had conceived of writing an "aunt's oral history" was also satisfied in translation.

Afterword to "A Woman's Business"

Text/Zhan Juan

"Master, please hurry up."

Many evenings, I anxiously instructed the taxi driver.

At that time, there was no "Didi taxi", the taxi mainly relied on boldness and careful skin, sometimes I tried my luck at intersection after intersection, and in a trance, it was already twilight.

In the car, I often get caught up in assumptions and panic: Is the baby hungry? At this time, she was just six months old and resolutely did not eat milk powder, was she already crying so that the neighbors on the first floor could not live in peace?

If I walked out of the elevator and didn't hear a single cry, my hands would also be cold in fright: there was only Aunt Liu at home. Xiao Liu was temporarily found from a website near the end of my breastfeeding vacation, and after a day of trial work, I was so impressed by her meal that I asked her to officially take up the job. I only know that she is from Sichuan, a year younger than me, and her daughter is five years old, brought by her grandparents in her hometown. She and her husband live in the north, and it takes an hour and a half each way to my house by bus. I did not ask her to provide any testimonials from her previous employers, did not know exactly where her residence in Beijing was, and although I left a copy of her ID card, I forgot to verify the authenticity. As a journalist who is often exposed to the dark side of society, being easily bought by a good meal is obviously a huge dereliction of duty. Has this extremely difficult baby in my family made her lose patience, did she beat the baby, or worse, abducted the child?

Back home, the child was napping, his little face was clean, the diaper was obviously freshly changed, there were two plates of small dishes on the table, and Xiao Liu was handwashing the baby's clothes in the bathroom not far from the cradle. My breathing slowly returned to calm, and anxiety was instantly replaced by self-blame: Why should I doubt Xiao Liu like this? Already a few neighbors' mothers have mentioned to me that they saw her in the community, singing nursery rhymes while taking their children, very gentle and careful. Even after I delayed her leave work several times because of a bad ride, Xiao Liu still had no complaints.

Every day, our small family relays around the baby in this way. Xiao Liu is 9 to 6, and the baby's most active time is with this aunt; My husband and I took over the job in the evening, mainly to watch the progress and regression of the baby in human development, and her first step was taken with Xiao Liu's encouragement, and when we returned home, we revealed this feat and re-photographed it as evidence, which was the "real first step". She has been a "sleeping scum" since birth, she can't see her mother during the day, and she is particularly attached at night, so she will cry three or five times a night until we struggle to get up and hand her over to Xiao Liu in a trance.

I thought I was close to Xiao Liu, but the separation came by surprise - after the Spring Festival was the baby's first birthday, Xiao Liu suddenly sent a text message informing her that she was two months pregnant and decided to stay in her hometown to raise a baby. I just changed jobs after the holiday, and this time is when the nanny is green and yellow, I am extremely passive, write a severely worded text message, but when I want to send it, I delete it word by word, sigh, as a female employee, what I am most disgusted with is to be knocked on the side to understand the birth plan during the job interview, as an employer, how can I interfere with the childbirth of employees?

After that, the aunts were in a constant stream. Aunt Xiao Li gets along well with the baby, what she is most worried about is that her son, who is already in junior high school, has no intention of studying, and will only ask for money when he calls her, Xiao Li finally decides to go back to his hometown, afraid that if he doesn't care about the child, everything will be irreparable; Aunt Sun is a southerner, used to be an elementary school teacher, her son and daughter-in-law are all graduates of prestigious schools, she came out to be an aunt firstly to help the children pay off the mortgage, and secondly, because she didn't get along well with her daughter-in-law from the north, but after her daughter-in-law became pregnant, she still decided to go home to take care of her; Aunt Wang's pasta is well done, she can speak well, her husband works in another city, she gradually has a relationship with another fellow here, after this man was injured at work, she resigned to serve specially... Each aunt briefly entered my life and that of my baby, and each aunt seemed to be a period song.

I once told friends that it would be very nice to be an oral history of the aunts – but I also have to admit that my relationship with the aunts was not equal, and both sides confided some truths to avoid telling other truths. In our relationship, I was always wary and only hoped that through a good salary and polite relationship, my aunt would treat my children well. In Beijing, the last thing to lack is the working population, and if I want, I can ask the agency to arrange for a new aunt to come for a trial work within a few hours.

My oral history was never done, but when I translated Megan Stark's book "The Woman's Business," I saw myself and my aunts frequently. As a media person who used to work in the Beijing office of a foreign media, Stark and I had an intersection of work, and then she quit after giving birth, and I switched to more regular review and editing after giving birth. How is career weighed against parenting and marriage? Does Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's "step forward" really help women in the workplace juggle everything? Why do only women have to make trade-offs and sacrifices? These problems often bothered me in the two or three years after having a baby, and I know that they also bother many of my female friends. It seems that parenting has become a mother's 24/7 job to some extent, ×but in the first few years of nurturing human cubs, the job was so hard, helpless, and rarely fulfilling. At the same time, we are reluctant to give up our professional status, but often have to temporarily sacrifice our work for the needs of our children and families.

Yes, concern for children and near-animal intensity is in some ways biologically determined, but I do find that the loneliness, frustration, and anxiety in parenting stem in large part from social stereotypes and a lack of supporting measures—we can't even complain openly, which can only be interpreted as weakness or even failure.

The process of translating this book was like a conversation I had with Stark. Although we come from different countries and have experienced different lives, many of our experiences and feelings are common. I believe that this is also a book that will resonate and inspire thinking among readers, regardless of gender.

* Except for the actual images, all images in the article are from Unsplash