Price of Motherhood (Crittenden)

Ann Crittenden, a former reporter for the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, financial writer, and an economics commentator on American television, explores the economic, legal, and social costs of motherhood in her 2004 book, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued. Crittenden argues that even though women's lives have benefited from second wave feminism, American mothers' lives have not because the culture systematically refuses to support, recognize, and value mothers' unpaid care giving to their children as work.

Crittenden suggests that all mothers are legally deprived of financial equality in marriage, while college-educated women are penalized economically by a “mommy tax” of lost income. Stay-at-home mothers' caregiving labor is neither counted in the Gross ...