"Social reproduction, when valued by the market, is gendered, often racialized, and poorly remunerated. Where states no longer provided support and where purchasing services on the market was not feasible, the burden of providing additional care and work fell onto families, especially women. In Ontario under the Conservatives (1995-2003), this familializing and individualizing thrust was underlined by a rhetoric about family values and a nostalgic idealization of motherhood and community. As material supports for communities and families were cut, this family ideology blamed families--and mothers in particular--for failing to take responsibility for their members." p. 6

'At a time when organized feminism concentrated on the Equal Rights Amendment, welfare activists insisted on their right to the resources necessary to mother. They demanded, as a New Jersey activist put it, "help in the areas of emergency food, furniture, moving monies, or help with other normal problems confronting Welfare families, given their inadequate income and circumstances." She exclaimed: "We are not unfit mothers, but neither are we magicians; we do not get adequate monies or supportive services to begin with, in order to have a budget at all."' p. 37

(p.68) to give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny. Because housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood, she is condemned to domestic labor, which locks her into repetition and immanence; day after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it produces nothing new.

(p.129) Maternal energy is the force through which have come into the world both love and industry. It is through the tireless activity of this desire, the mother’s wish to serve the young, that she began the first of the arts and crafts whereby we live. While the male savage was still a mere hunter and fighter, expressing masculine energy, the katabolic force, along its essential line, expanding, scattering, the female savage worked out in equally natural ways the conserving force of female energy. She gathered together and saved nutrition for the child, as the germ-cell gathers and saves nutrition in...

(p.185) Sociologists Hochschild and Machung (1989) used invisible work to refer to labor that was not just socially unacknowledged but also literally invisible. Calling attention to the uncompensated commodification and health risks of invisible work that is required of women in hospitality jobs, Hochschild (1983) coined the term emotion work (i.e., affect performance enacted to fulfill job requirements). Hochschild distinguished emotion work from the physical and mental aspects of a job but did not elaborate on the mental aspects. Studying families’ meal preparation, DeVault (1987, 1991) used the terms invisible labor and mental work interchangeably to describe psychological work that precedes...

(p.187) Mental labor may be experienced, paradoxically, as both empowering and burdensome, and to better understand the role of mental labor in the construction of family life and maternal identity, the phenomenology of mental labor needs to be empirically investigated.

(p.196) Philosophically, our definition of family-related mental labor challenges traditional views of family work. In the broadest sense, everyone does mental labor because everyone performs thinking work for those things over which they have responsibility. Many jobs require ownership over projects, tasks, or human welfare, and these jobs involve substantial mental labor (e.g., organization executives, directors of programs, classroom teachers, office managers). The complex mental work embedded in paid jobs is usually compensated and recognized with commensurate job titles (e.g., manager, supervisor, consultant). By contrast, domestic work is generally unlabeled and has often been characterized as mundane, 196 Psychology of Women...