Women's work: America's social safety net is built on sexist exploitation

"Other countries have social safety nets. The child care crisis — the current lack of affordable child care for families — illustrates how we rely on mothers to fill in gaps in our economy and our social safety net. Your second chapter, “Leaving Women With No Choice,” starts by saying that once they’re caught in the motherhood trap “it doesn’t take much to get women to stand in for the social safety net. The way this myth operates, though, is that it leads people who would benefit from a stronger social safety net, people who are just above the cutoff for these social programs, to perceive themselves as morally superior to those who rely on the social safety net, rather than saying, "Hey, let's expand these programs so I can have access to them.” "We often tell women that if they just make 'good choices,' if they go to college, if they pursue a high-paying job, if they find the right guy and wait to have children, they'll avoid the hardships that other women complain about." Yet rather than invest in those and make them permanent, rather than take the kinds of steps promised with Build Back Better — things like universal child care, a higher national minimum wage, guaranteed paid family leave — we abandoned all those efforts.