The "cost" of Paying for a Clean House

In 2000, award winning columnist, essayist and author Barbara Ehrenreich published an article in Harpers Magazine titled "Maid to Order - The Politics of Other Women's Work". As a feminist, socialist, political activist, and humanist, Ehrenreich immersed herself into the commercial world of domestic cleaning services in order to investigate the growing trend of outsourcing housework. Her experience prompted her examination of how the corporate world, by entering the realm of the private sphere of home, has created a "new politics of housework". A politics in which housework is about power more than ever before. The article generated so many letters that the magazine created a special section just to accommodate them. I believe that with this piece, Ehrenreich establishes a framework for a powerful discussion about what impact the emergence of household work as a full-fledged capitalist industry could have on society.

The title and opening of this article imply the piece will be about gender inequality, but the article's main concentration is on socio-economic class and race structures within these class structures. Ehrenrich does begin her piece by placing housework in the feminist realm, referring to theorist Betty Friedan, Maria Rosa Dellacosta and Shelma James, and in so doing provides a historical background for the struggle women have always had in relation to housework. This background illustrates that housework and power have gone hand-in-hand for decades. Ehrenreich also discusses Marxism in connection with domestic services focusing on how consumerism has changed this power dynamic. This structure is significant in that it allows Ehrenreich to take the politics of housework from being a feminist issue of equal pay for equal work (wages for housework) to housework being an issue of class, race, and gender. It takes housework our of the private sphere of home and places it squarely in the public sphere of work. Although housework is still an issue of gender, it has expanded in a consumerist society in which most households consist of two wage-earners. Ehrenrich takes housework into an arena larger than other feminist writings, which either focused on gendered roles of housework or the gender split in the workforce of domestic-type jobs which covered bringing in international workers. The second limited the discussion to a small few upper-class women who could afford to hire help from outside the United States. With cleaning services becoming available nationwide, domestic servants are a new commodity and many working middle-class women are turning to these cleaning agencies in order to free them from some of the duties of "the second shift". Ehrenreich communicates the issues that arise when the home becomes the work place.

What she terms the "new politics of housework" is only about gender but more about race and class. How does housework take on a new dimension when a third party enters the private sphere? She explores the dynamics within corporate cleaning and refers to the industrialization of housework by showing the cleaning companies' routines as "factory-like" or "assembly-line like". Also the effects a "servant economy" can have on future generations, leading to a greater divide of classes. A servant

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