Women's Work

The Fifth Estate

American-born journalist Megan K. Stack is an acclaimed author and war correspondent. She was Moscow bureau chief for the L.A. Times when she made the decision to work from home and look after her newborn child. As her growing family followed her husband’s work through China and India, Stack’s new life forced her to understand the economy of women’s work, and the inequalities that make it possible to exploit ‘poor women, brown women, migrant women’.

Megan Stack (left) and Sally Warhaft (right)

Stack’s memoir, Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home, undertakes a forthright and relentless examination of domestic labour, and the complexities of working parenthood – for herself and for the babysitters, cooks and cleaners which made her continuing career possible. She asks: ‘Why was it that, whatever you desired, you could find a poor woman to sell it?’

In conversation with Sally Warhaft at Bendigo Writers Festival, Megan K. Stack discusses the ethics, unexpected emotional shifts and negotiations of the household as a workplace.

Presented in partnership with Bendigo Writers Festival.

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