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All the big reads informing the Mommy Wars, from Joan Williams' Unbending Gender to Juliet Shor's The Overworked American and Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, endeavor to retrieve the unpaid realm of life from the jaws of work. Wallace treads previously covered ground carefully, though, resisting the elevation of all unpaid activities to the status of "family work." As feminists have been saying for decades now, tasks such as toilet-cleaning are drudgery, Wallace argues. Just because such work occurs under the same roof as interaction with a child does not make the two commensurate. Wallace borrows Miroslav Volf's definition: Work is something we do for a purpose outside the activity itself, such as for a paycheck or to keep the Health Department out of our bathrooms. Toilet-cleaning is an admirably clear example.

Non-work tasks that maintain a family, whether reading to a child or tucking that child into bed, are also valuable. But they do not become valuable only if or when they are financially compensated, however indirect the "compensation." So, while reading to a child might be passing on "middle class capital" (Joan Williams), Wallace resists the assumption that such calculating cost-benefit analyses go into every human endeavor. Instead, she categorizes reading to a child together with tucking in that child. Such tasks are part of "life": activities that are intrinsically valuable.

By clumping intimate relations and childrearing in one camp, and toilet cleaning and paychecks in the other, Wallace does not mean to oppose the two realms. Life is distinct from, but not the opposite of, work. It is not merely snoozing on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, to use her example. Nor does it occupy a separate sphere, presided over by the morally sacrosanct wife/mother. Life—caring for our children into self-sufficient adulthood, maintaining intimacy with our loved ones, getting to know our neighbors—takes the same amount of energy as the many other important things we do. It is, well … work.

But why is it, wonders Wallace, that signifying something as "work" is the only way—or the easiest way—to say it has value? In the realm of relationships, the equation is often uttered in surprise: This is work! We are conditioned to think that if an activity doesn't conform to the structure of the marketplace, if it doesn't earn a paycheck, it shouldn't demand as much time, sacrifice, and skill, despite all evidence to the contrary. Wallace's thoroughgoing analysis of this historical hang-up about valuing life, especially compassionate life, makes her argument stand out from others.

But Wallace does not want to denigrate work, or the potential of the workplace. The fact that we do something for a purpose outside itself does not make it problematic, per se, she argues. Such activities can be engaged in honestly, with a sense of purpose and with satisfying results. Plus, work is necessary, and earning a living is a form of care. It is when work is seen in terms of the quasi-religious obligation to make the most money possible that it becomes problematic. When we identify ourselves with and work for spending capital alone, we "sell ourselves short"—or perhaps the metaphor should be "buy ourselves out." The workplace becomes humanly uninhabitable, and nothing is left over for life.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48