Response to Ehrenreich Essay

In what could easily have become a spewing of meaningless facts and figures regarding the changes in the roles of housework over the past decades, leaving the reader feeling somewhat unconvinced and apathetic, Ehrenreich instead uses personal experiences to make sense of and interpret such statistics in her essay "Maid to Order." By assuming the life of a paid housekeeper as part of her research, Ehrenreich is able to personally relate to many of the facts that she presents in her essay, helping to legitimize the validity of those facts. For example, Ehrenreich does not just say the world "below knee level" is filthy and subpar; rather, she describes in extreme detail the "dried bits of pasta glued to the floor" (59). The reader is left with an image of the floor in his or her mind, much more moving than a dull, uninteresting adjective. Later in the essay, when describing the inevitable loss in pay for workers as they transition from being "independents" to employees of a corporate cleaning service, Ehrenreich provides the reader with details about her own wages when working for The Maids International. The unjust rules of the cleaning service, such as "miss one day and your wage dropped to $6" or having to arrive at work at 7:30 but with billable hours not beginning until 8:00, are ones most likely only a true worker would know. It seems unlikely that a corporate cleaning service would advertise such restrictions when trying to hire employees in an already tight labor market. And yet, such details are significant additions to Ehrenreich's argument, allowing her to present the reader with a more thorough, more developed argument by providing both the advantages and disadvantages of the corporate cleaning services for the individual workers.