Various thoughts and considerations

Barbara Ehrenreich, like any good postmodern Marxist/Feminist, looks for and successfully finds a social problem involving underpaid women, and claims that it is representative of a number of greater social ills. In her essay Maid to Order, Ehrenreich discusses the many problems with the recent cultural trend of having paid servants clean residential quarters. The essay fails polemically, however, as the expanse of Ehrenreich’s claims, and the eclecticism of her rhetorical choices shroud her central thesis, which is still not clear by the end of the last paragraph. Additionally, instead of focusing on a specific problem, such as wage inequality, or the predominantly female composition of the modern housekeeping industry, or the degradation of the moral fiber of the middle classes, or the industrialization of the cleaning process and consequent loss of quality, Ehrenreich focuses on all of the above. Her muddled exposé strings together all of these different points, while she supports her claims with some basic tenets of Feminist and of Marxist theory: minimum wage workers are exploited, women are simultaneously sexualized and physically degraded when doing housework, and capitalism tends to creep into any sector of the economy, sucking out its vital juices and alienating the worker from just about everything including his or her self. Ehrenreich argues that housekeeping should be subsidized by the government where it is sorely needed and that this will create “good jobs”, but fails to consider that the industry is already doing that, providing jobs to people that need them, and dividing labor quite efficiently among the social classes. Of course, Ehrenreich also fails to see the inherent worth of the new “invisible” jobs that dominate the American economy, arguing that we should perhaps have more physical or “visible” labor. Finally, Ehrenreich seems to think that industrialized housekeeping invades the home and turns it into a place of work. I can only comment from personal experience, but I will say in response that, no, industrial housekeeping is for the most part the realm of office spaces, hotels, and other businesses and public institutions, and that the majority of housekeepers that work in the homes tend to be immigrants, sometimes hired illegally, who cannot get other jobs, and despite having deep seeded resentment for their rich employers (which is natural to anyone performing a base task for the benefit of someone else), nonetheless appreciate their jobs and the often many perks it comes with, although there are of course the exceptions, the employers who are not particularly kind or generous with domestics.