This morning on the NYR Daily we published Judith Shulevitz’s essay on Ernestine Rose, a

nineteenth-century agitator for women’s rights and mentor to both Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony, and the third subject in Shulevitz’s “Forgotten Feminisms” series for
the Daily, which she plans to turn into a book. (Johnnie Tillmon, organizer for the 1960s–
1970s National Welfare Rights Organization, and the authors of The Appeal, a nineteenth-
century book-length attack on the patriarchy, are the subjects of her first two pieces.)  
I asked Shulevitz how she came up with the idea. “Ever since I became a mother (years ago
now) and discovered that I really liked motherhood but that it was doing meaningful damage
to my career, social status, and income, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a book
about an idea sometimes called ‘maternal feminism’ and sometimes ‘care feminism,’”
Shulevitz told me. “I didn’t want to write one of those dry public policy books calling for
more family-friendly policies and such. I wanted to write about this old subject in a new way,
and to figure out how to accomplish that quixotic task, I had to start reading. And I discovered
a whole strain of feminist argument that had somehow gotten lost.”
 
“As far as I could tell, the American feminist discussion was
focused entirely on paid work and workplace issues,”
Shulevitz said, “equal pay and glass ceilings and sexual
harassment by bosses or colleagues. These are urgent
problems, and we won’t achieve equality until we solve
them. But it seemed to me that the focus on paid work was
blinding us to what I was starting to see as a more
fundamental basis of gender inequality: the theft of the
value of women’s unpaid work that has been going on for
centuries and centuries.” 

“As it turned out, there are a lot of thinkers, male as well as female, who have fruitfully
analyzed discrimination against care as a human activity, and caregivers in general, and many
of these thinkers have been left out of the feminist canon, in part because they don’t fit into
the narrative of women’s emancipation from the prison of domesticity,” Shulevitz continued.
“And a great number lived in the nineteenth century, perhaps because it wasn’t assumed back
then that domesticity necessarily was a prison.” Ernestine Rose, a Jewish, communitarian
socialist atheist was even more radical in her views on equality than many “ultraists” of the
time, lecturing against the church and in favor of abolition, and lobbying successfully for The
Married Women’s Property Act. Her socialist education helped Rose to see that husbands
grew rich on womens’ unpaid labor. “To the Owenites,” Shulevitz said, “in theory anyway,
domestic labor was just another kind of labor, as important as farm labor or craft work. And to
other reformers, the home was just one part of the general apparatus of female oppression, and
far from the worst part. (Sexual slavery through marriage was.)”
I wondered what more recent feminist actions or movements she felt inspired by. “I love the
1970s feminist Marxist group called Wages for Housework. These women called for the
overthrow of a capitalist order that was subsidized, in their view, by the unpaid slog of
homemaking and, yes, sexual services. ‘Not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation,
can be achieved through work,’ they wrote in their most widely-read manifesto. ‘Slavery to an
assembly line is not liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.’ At the time, liberal feminists
accused them of wanting to push women back into domestic drudgery, but they denied it.”
When Shulevitz asked Silvia Federici, a founder of the New York chapter of Wages for
Housework, what it was the movement actually wanted—wages? in what form?—she said the
real aim of the movement was to make people ask themselves, Why is producing cars more
valuable than producing children?
Shulevitz, like many writers, has also worked as an editor, at Lingua Franca and Slateamong
other publications, and I wondered how she thought of the two activities. “For me, the
relationship between editing and writing is zero-sum. You do one or you do the other. I’m a
very slow and insecure writer and if I’ve turned on my editor brain, I can’t write. All I can
think about is how pathetic my stabs at prose are, and how I’d rather be doing anything other
than sitting at my computer. Dishes. Laundry. Scrubbing grout. My editor self has a very
chilling effect on my writer self. I had to stop editing entirely—at the age of thirty-six—in
order to become a writer. Financially speaking, it was a very poor decision. But as others have
said, though I hate writing, I love having written.”