"Maid to Order" Response

In essayist Barbara Ehrenreich’s thought-provoking “Maid to Order”, Ehrenreich explores the underlying ideology of housework to finally argue that the act of leaving a mess for someone else leads to an eventual “callousness and solipsism” (Ehrenreich 70). While many sociologists and feminists have explored the relationships between women and men and argued continuously about gender power struggles in the household, Ehrenreich takes the discussion one step further by exploring the emergence of the cleaning lady. Having someone clean for you, she argues, is essentially a manifestation of dominance. The emergence of a ‘servant class’ who’s purpose is to “[wipe] up the drippings of the affluent” (59), Ehrenreich argues, says much about our new values. One of her most interesting points, I believe, is the one she makes about the actual physical cleaning. The cleaning, she argues, is not true cleaning but rather to create “the appearance of having been cleaned” (67). The maids in maid businesses such as the one in which Ehrenriech worked are not there to make the house sanitary, but rather to create a set: an appearance of cleanliness and order in which the family can then operate. I found this to be a very thought-provoking argument: this causes us to reconsider the point of cleaning. While we originally would think to clean to sanitize and disinfect, this has become a secondary effect in our primary goal of creating an illusion of order. All in all, I found Ehrenreich’s close examination of the sociological underpinnings of household cleaning to be well-thought out and executed nicely.