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¶ … feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in midsentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled."
Barbara Ehrenreich
The daughter of a miner from Butte, Montana, Barbara Ehrenreich takes a look at what life is like for a maid in America from a social perspective in one of her essays titled, "Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women's Work,." It highlights the progress feminists made with the domestic sphere and then the regression brought on by maid service. Ehrenreich also brings in the idea that race and class are connected to the maid concept and poor colored women are often treated by professional women as less than, perpetuating longstanding beliefs of servitude and dominance. It culminates with Ehrenreich examining the role of mother: the need for children to be taught by mothers to clean up after themselves instead of relying on maids to do it for them. All of this highlights the author's view of domestic life and how it not only regresses feminism, but also reinforces old ways of thinking.
The essay starts out with a scene described in one of the ads from a Maid Service Business. "We scrub floors the old-fashioned way, boasts the brochure from Merry Maids ... on our hands...
This is followed by an account of how the maids had to deal with being on their hands and knees and the various ways their employers behaved while in their presence. From temper tantrums of children not wanting them there after school, to the wives sitting, oblivious to their existence, there is an almost inhuman approach these people have towards the maids, treating them as less than human. Less than human is how many women felt during the 1960's and 1970's when the second wave of feminism emerged, which is where Ehrenreich directs the reader.
As women's rights progressed throughout the decades with women gaining more independence and will to work outside the home, a reassessment of the duties of household work led to a decrease in women performing household duties and instead acquiring the services of maids. Instead of men sharing the housework with the women as what should be done and was expected by feminists, women instead asked for men to maintain their position as worker and for women to find either a way to be both the worker and the cleaner or hire another woman to do the work for her. These women were expected to lack intelligence and be a means to provide for the better off woman, a way to have independence at the same time fulfill her household duties (60).
Yet, while this provided a solution to those that wanted…
Such women, frequently possessing poor English skills, lacking education, and troubling immigration status are often underpaid, overworked, or even worse, held as slaves by high-ranking officials. "-of undocumented women held in servitude by high-ranking staff members of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund" (64). Such was the case of former U.N. employee, a Senegalese women's rights activist, Angelique Savane who promoted the rights of women in 1986, yet imprisoned another Senegalese woman and made her work for fourteen hours a day. Showing that women's rights and enslavement of women went in hand-in-hand in some, regardless of the hypocrisy and immorality. These kinds of examples and especially the experience of working as a maid in a corporate cleaning chain demonizes domestic life and invites a kind of unsavory perspective on it. This is because the women that do this work have to deal with horrible people, being exploited, and furthermore lack the rights and privileges that one should have in a job.
Ehrenreich continues the essay with detailing the experiences of a maid and the pain and resultant quick turnover of maids due to the nature of their employment and the exhausting labor they perform (68). While leaving this aesthetically clean versus actually clean, the maids still must be on their hands and knees and deal with all the trouble that comes with cleaning several homes. This kind of detail reinforces the already negative view Ehrenreich has on domestic life overlooking the reasons why women choose the jobs and instead focusing on the potential negative effect maids have not just on the ones that work as maids, but the children that see maids working in their homes. "Children learn from maids that some people are less worthy than others, that the employer has "something better" to do with her time" (69).
This moves into the final point Ehrenreich tries to make about domestic life in that the role of the mother falls away from teaching children to behave or do in a certain way and instead is left to the maid who cannot give the child the kinds of lessons and instruction a parent can. " ... a servant economy breeds callousness and solipsism in the served" (70). The child learns not how to clean and view people appropriately, but how to depend on the labor of others instead. She closes the essay with reiterating the plight of the maid and the relationship she inevitably forms with the female employer and the idea that domestic life, something feminists fought hard to change, was now back to the way it was before, with women performing and depending on class, being the ones on their hands and knees.
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