Summary of Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries—from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete—Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638159582

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Sarah Jaffe's Work Wont Love You Back

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Ray Malone was a late Bloomer, and only after she had her daughter did she start to understand the world through her daughter’s eyes.

#2

Maloney, a middle-class theater artist, had a baby girl in 2018. Her partner left them both shortly after. She moved to Sheffield to be closer to her sister, but found herself lonely and isolated.

#3

The author is a mother of two who lives in London. She works full-time, but is still struggling to make ends meet.

#4

The work-family balance that we hear so much about is often in reference to how women should spend their time outside of work. The family, however, was created by capitalism to serve its needs.

#5

Women were also exploited under patriarchy, through the domination of their reproductive labor and its subsequent devaluation.

#6

The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries created the notion of the family unit we have today: mother at home, father at work. This dichotomy has continued to shape our society to this day.

#7

Today’s labor-of-love myth necessitated not just the glossing over of the brutality of the family and the workplace, but the addition of a romantic sheen. Marriage, for its first few centuries, had little to do with love. Today, the ideal of marriage-for-love brings with it its own mystifications about work.

#8

The nuclear family, with a man working and a woman staying home to raise the children, is a relatively new concept in the history of humanity, and has come along with new gender expectations and pressures on working-class women.

#9

The family-wage ideal, which was promoted by the American New Deal, allowed white workers to aspire to have a wife and children while still working full-time, which was rare before the New Deal.

#10

The traditional family we know today was not the norm for much of human history, and was not created by a traditional family. It was a result of a compromise between capital and labor, and was shaped largely by socialist