First Shift Justice Project Book Club- How Mamas Love Their Babies by Juniper Fitzgerald, Illustrated by Elise Peterson
First Shift Justice Project provides free legal support to parents, people with serious illnesses, and people who provide care for seriously ill loved ones. First Shift’s mission is to empower workers to assert their workplace rights related to their health and the health of their loved ones through access to free legal services. Asserting workplace rights can be a challenge for workers for many reasons, including time, income, and extent of legal protections. Workers often know when their workplace is unsupportive and when their rights are being violated, but without laws in place and legal support to uphold the law, they are often unable to assert their rights without jeopardizing their employment.
International Sex Workers' Day is held on 02 June every year to hold space to recognize sex workers and the often exploitative working conditions that they face. My interest in employment rights as a health issue began as an intern working on a know-your-rights project related to wage theft for strippers in DC and designing curricula to support sex workers with job applications and career development. The criminalization and stigmatization of sex work as a profession undermine access to supportive workplace environments and workplace rights, access to housing, access to economic stability, and access to healthcare, among other determinants of health. Criminalization and stigmatization also invisibilize the lives of sex workers outside of sex work. For example, Blewitt, Jones, and Obourn (2022) wrote, “Critical disability studies scholars, too, have not adequately incorporated disabled sex workers in theorizing and writing.” In addition, Duff et al. (2014) wrote, “In general, very little is known about sex workers as parents or the challenges they face as pregnant/parenting women.”
How Mamas Love Their Babies, written by Juniper Fitzgerald and illustrated by Elise Peterson, is the first picture book to depict a sex-worker parent (The Feminist Press, 2018). It is a beautiful picture book– illustrated with a colorful, highly textural, collaged style– that celebrates the ways that mothers use their bodies to care for their babies by performing labor both inside and outside of the home. One of the pages of the book depicts a sex worker protesting labor conditions outside of a strip club– she is a mother, she is a sex worker, and she is one of many workers empowered to assert her rights in the workplace.
First Shift envisions a world where all workers have the ability to support themselves and their families as they see fit. This International Sex Workers' Day, How Mamas Love Their Babies highlights some of the ways that families show love for their families through labor, including sex work.
By C. Nickel
Citations:
Blewett, L., Jones, A., Obourn, M. (2022). Sex Work and Disability: Introduction To The Special Issue. Disability Studies Quarterly, 42(2). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i2.9121 Duff, P., Shoveller, J., Chettiar, J., Feng, C., Nicoletti, R., Shannon, K. (2014). Sex Work and Motherhood: Social and Structural Barriers to Health and Social Services for Pregnant and Parenting Street and Off-Street Sex Workers. Health Care for Women International, 36:1039–1055, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399332.2014.989437
The Feminist Press. (2018, February 13). How Mamas Love Their Babies. The Feminist Press.
https://www.feministpress.org/books-a-m/how-mamas-love-their-babies
Fitzgerald, J., & Peterson, E. R. (2018). How Mamas Love Their Babies. Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
