Domestic Life and the Use of Maids

¶ … 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 and knees" (59). 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 housework done, the second wave feminist found it also reinforced an already degrading role women had in society. With the use of maids and the expectations employers had for maids, it cemented the preconceived notion that housework really is woman's work and that men could drop that sock on the floor and expect a woman to pick it up because that was her job and only her job. "Housework was not degrading because it was manual labor, as Freudian thought, but because it was embedded in degrading relationships and inevitably served to reinforce them" (61) Women that worked as maids demonstrated to the public and society, that women will always have that role as cleaner of the household no matter if another works away from the home. Because, another woman will be there to clean up the mess. That arrogance, that hurry, that obliviousness as seen by the angered child, the dropped socks, and the unaware housewife- shows the level of dominance a person has over a maid. And when the kind of action that creates toil for someone else is consistently created by a male and toiled over by a female, it reinforces already oppressing views of women in society (61).

These views remain unchanged even in modern times. Ehrenreich explains that while men have attempted to share some of the household responsibilities, it still falls largely to the woman to do most, if not all of the housework. "The inequity is sharpest for the most despised of household chores, cleaning: in the thirty years between 1965 and 1995, men increased the time spent scrubbing by 240% ... up to 1.7 hours per week, while women only decreased by 7%, to 6.7 hours per week" (61-62). Such figures show that even with the changes brought on from the modern era, there exists a stark contrast of what should be the norm in regards to housework and the reality of housework responsibilities.

Moving from gender and transitioning into class and race, Ehrenreich focuses on the black maid or woman of color and her role in an upper class/middle class white household. She also details the emergence of the servant class and the permanent shift away from "sharing housework" to "woman's work" that feminists tried so hard to rid society of in the past. "Household workers are disproportionately women of color: "lower" kinds of people for a "lower" kind of work" (63). With women now regarded as the only ones that should do housework thanks to maid services and the reinforcement of such relationships, women of color became the new bearer of domestic spheres. Soon Hispanic women, the ones that made up the majority of private household cleaners and servants were associated with the idea of maid and even a person's name "Rosa" would be regarded as coming from a maid instead of simply another person.

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.