Wonder Women: The Invisible, Invaluable Work of Mothers and Caregivers*

2020 was not the year the world broke, just the first time the cracks were visible to those who haven’t been holding it together. During the pandemic, the majority of those deemed “essential workers” were women, including the overwhelmingly female child care workforce (disproportionately women of color) whose personal risks on the frontlines allowed parents to work. Additionally, unprecedented attention was paid to mothers’ unequal share of parenting and household work in addition to their key contributions to the financial stability of their families and communities. The incredible strength it takes to simultaneously support children and the economy is finally being acknowledged as a superpower. But our narrative elevating mothers and caregivers to superhero status is strongly rooted in their role as saviors of the social and economic status quo, ignoring the disproportionate damage done to women by the very structures their superpowers uphold.

With the rise of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, it seemed that the Justice League of superheroes was finally doing its diversity and inclusion work. However, despite her other qualifications, Wonder Woman is still expected to conform to traditional male superhero norms of gratuitous violence and wreckage—an affirmative action star. Gadot was called back to reshoot some of Wonder Woman’s fight scenes in freezing rain—while she was five months pregnant. It was in these feats of strength—not in Wonder Woman’s ability to decimate nameless extras in a battle scene—that many women saw their own superpowers. The filmmakers “slapped some green-screen style material on Gadot’s stomach and edited out the bump in post-production.” This too is the lived experience of many women—the casual erasure of motherhood and self in service of other goals, the rendering invisible of perhaps the greatest superpower of all.

If action stunts and violence comprise the mold to which women must conform to be seen as feature film-worthy superheroes, economic success is our sole metric for determining worth. Because the work of caring for children is not seen as inherently valuable, we are forced to justify its value in the primary language of our profit-driven culture. We pitch early care and education as a high-return investment, an employee work-support to boost businesses’ bottom line, and a tool to produce capable K–12 students and “the workforce of tomorrow.” Although these arguments are true, they all frame early childhood in the service of some “greater” purpose.

Caring for and raising children has always been part of the “invisible labor”—unpaid and unrecognized work—that is disproportionately done by women. In her book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner, Katrine Marçal describes the failure of the “father of capitalism and economics” to include non-tangible goods like domestic labor and child care in his new method of calculating a country’s wealth, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This literal devaluation of women’s time and the “free” price tag placed on child care—though essential to society’s well-being and economic success—reflected historically entrenched sexism and also foreshadowed how women and care work would fare even when finally permitted entry to Smith’s capitalist marketplace.

While the post-WWII influx of women into jobs that did factor into GDP calculations was heralded as a victory for gender equality, the interlocking gears of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism quietly grinded away. Working mothers were still engaging in the bulk of domestic responsibilities outside of their “official” job duties, thus working the “second shift.” These dual roles were already pressing on women of color who have always been expected to work outside their homes and solo parents who are overwhelmingly women. Furthermore, the “invisible” work of child care did not disappear, but was merely outsourced to other women—unpaid relatives or neighbors and a child care workforce often earning poverty-level wages. While the new class of (mostly White) working mothers experienced a rise in social and economic privilege, they ended up “leaning down,” calling largely upon the labor of Black, brown, and poor women—an extension of enslaved Black women’s role as our country’s original child care providers.

While the patriarchy has extended an invitation for women to join men on their pedestals as action stars and breadwinners, true gender equity will not be reached until a co-elevation of values and roles occurs.

What fundamental shifts might we see if a nation’s prosperity was measured not by GDP, but by a more holistic metric—like Gross Domestic Happiness or overall child well-being—that includes economic development alongside indicators that center child and family well-being? We might see the end of the gender pay gap and achieve equitable division of parenting responsibilities (a change projected to take 75 to 200 years at the current rate). We might see women equally represented in corporate leadership and the proportion of men in the early childhood workforce increase from 2 percent to 50 percent. What else might happen if we valued child development and economic development equally?

To patch our cracked foundation, the Biden Administration is proposing a massive increase in child care funding as part of the FY22 federal budget proposal and notably includes child care in the landmark infrastructure plan. Although the relegation of the “care economy” to a secondary legislative package has been seen as disappointing given the Biden Administration’s commitment to working families and child care, this separation from traditional infrastructure may be an opportunity to elevate caregiving in its own right. Child care is infrastructure for our economy, but also for our collective well-being and human potential, something that should not be ignored until things start to crumble. The “building back better” of existing social and power structures is simply not enough. It is only when the invisible but invaluable work it takes to raise children is made visible and valuable that we will have a world worthy of the work Wonder Women do to save it every day.

* We recognize that the labels of women/men and female/male suggest that gender is binary and do not include the full range of gender identity or address the complexities such binaries reinforce. (Adapted from Building a Gender-Balanced Workforce: Supporting Male Teachers). We also acknowledge that not all of those who mother a child have biologically given birth or are women (just as not all people who father a child are men) and we use mother to encompass all those who inhabit the term in a biological, emotional, or familial sense.