The assigned chapter that I have selected is “Maid to Order” by Barbara
Ehrenreich. She discusses the history and origin of domestic workers and the challenges they face. This chapter discusses the roles, responsibilities, and difficulties of being a maid. Throughout the chapter Ehrenreich does extensive research on how to be a maid, witness the treatment they receive and discovers the reason why people go into this business.
Within this chapter, Barbara Ehrenreich experienced the maid’s life by becoming a maid. She was employed for three weeks by The Maids International in Portland. During her employment, she worked with team members to clean multiple houses. Cleaning up after the owners Ehrenreich subjected herself to “about 250 scrubbable
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The majority of cultures around the world believe women belong in the household and are responsible for cooking, cleaning, raising children and taking care any and all needs of the man. While fulfilling all these task women are also except to look their best at all times. Being a maid requires the worker to take the roles of cleaning, looking their best as they clean, and in some cases raise the children. Ehrenreich states that maids have to dress “In the most eye-catching elaboration of the home-as-workplace theme”. The typical attire of a maid is a tight, black and white short dress that leaves little to the imagination. In the sixties to seventies, maid service was viewed as the “Great Equalizer” that allowed women to leave the house and work by utilizing the skills they are supposed to know. The Great Equalizer was growing to the extent that in “1973 congressional hearings on whether to extend the Fair Labor Standards Act to household workers”. This hearing would grant maids a minimum wage pay of 7.25 per hour, overtime pay eligibility, record keeping, and child labor standards affecting full-time and part-time workers. Ironically a great counter argument was provided "the demand for household help inside the home will continue to increase as more women seek occupations outside the home." This argument proved very troublesome since it strongly suggests to keep women oppressed by gender standards and maintain the cultural values of the sixties to seventies. Even with this counter argument the act was extended to domestic workers in
“The Pastoralization of Housework” by Jeanne Boydston is a publication that demonstrates women’s roles during the antebellum period. Women during this period began to embrace housework and believed their responsibilities were to maintain the home, and produce contented and healthy families. As things progressed, housework no longer held monetary value, and as a result, womanhood slowly shifted from worker to nurturer. The roles that women once held in the household were slowly diminishing as the economy became more industrialized. Despite the discomfort of men, when women realized they could find decent employment, still maintain their household and have extra income, women began exploring their option.
The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her
The biggest appeal that Ehrenreich makes is after she ends up walking out of the housekeeping job/waitress job because she cannot handle it anymore." I have failed I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time in many years, that the tear ducts are still there and still capable of doing their job." (Ehrenreich, 48) This is the biggest appeal because Ehrenreich is quitting on the whole project. She is basically telling the readers that it is impossible for her, a "well-off", woman to live the life of a low wage worker.
Women are taught to only speak when spoken to, and to be housewives while their husbands take care of the family financially. These ideals trace back to the day of the caveman era. Over the years women have become more tired of not being treated equally compared to their male counterparts. So to combat this problem the women have fought to gain equal rights as men. One way they did this was to fight for equal rights and respect in the workforce because at one point women were completely absent in the workplace. This finally changed between the years of 1966 and 1982 when the amount of women in the workforce increased by 119.4% (Lips & Colwill,
Although in today’s society women are sometimes still subjected to practices that label them as inferior to men, whether it’s in a marriage where the woman must stay at home to care for the child or in the workplace where the female is paid an average of 25 cents less than men, the fight for equality for women has come a long way since the 1920’s and 30’s. This is the time period that Kari Boyd McBride reflects upon for women in her essay “A Boarding House is not a Home: Women’s Work and Woman’s Worth on the Margins of Domesticity.” McBride’s essay is valuable because of the experience and knowledge she has about her field, which is that of Women’s Studies.
In the article, Cult of True Womanhood, the underlying theme is of what society thought was the ideal woman. Women of that time where thought of as homemakers “deeply shaped by the so called “cult of womanhood” a collection of attitudes that associated “true” womanhood with home and family.” Women were supposed to stay home and clean and take care of the children while men worked and provided for their families. The misconception that housework was not hard and that even these women didn’t work as hard as paid labors was a strong opinion of the time. “With economic value calculated more and more exclusively in terms of cash and men increasingly basing their claims to “manhood” on their role as “breadwinners,” women’s unpaid household labor went largely unacknowledged.” Many married women ran their households and took on extra work to support their families and many in underpaid positions. Many of these were even in the service of other’s houses working in “true womanhood”
After moving to Haiti, Mark and Linda both trying to work full-time jobs, Mark as a hospital administrator, and Linda as high-school English teacher became overwhelmed with domestic tasks. Linda and Mark urged by their colleagues and the overwhelming amount of housekeeping tasks hired a maid, despite their reservations. The maid would be responsible for daily trips to the market, soaking fruits and vegetables, boiling water, killing and cleaning the chicken. As well as various other tasks around the household. Such as garbage burning, instated protection, mopping, laundry, and dusting. Mark and Linda overcame their fear of having a maid because they would be providing an underprivileged Haitian with housing, food, and a source of religion.
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
During the beginning of Ehrenreich’s first day at “The Maids”, she observes her fellow employees as they simultaneously gather their cleaning supplies and feast on the daily breakfast supplied by the cleaning agency. Before
For several decades, most American women occupied a supportive, home oriented role within society, outside of the workplace. However, as the mid-twentieth century approached a gender role paradigm occurred. The sequence of the departure of men for war, the need to fill employment for a growing economy, a handful of critical legal cases, the Black Civil Rights movement seen and heard around the nation, all greatly influenced and demanded social change for human and women’s rights. This momentous period began a social movement known as feminism and introduced a coin phrase known in and outside of the workplace as the “wage-gap.”
In the “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the female characters are confined mentally and physically. In the 1890’s, when these stories were written, women did not have a role in society. A woman’s role in the house involved cleaning and keeping up the house, taking care of the children, and making a meal three times a day. The man’s role was to go out and work to make money for his family. He also took care of his wife. He acted as a leader, ruler, and doctor of his wife. Gilman and Chopin demonstrate how women are confined physically, how they are confined mentally, and how being restricted in these ways affect the women’s emotions, actions, and mental stability.
but washing must be done and procrastination won’t do it for me (Schlissel 83).” Although this woman obviously did not like doing the washing, she saw it as her job to do. In addition, the book describes this scene, “The banks of a river would be lined with women who carried their kettles, their washtubs, and piles of unwashed linen (Schlissel 82).” Again, it is the women who are doing the cleaning. The McGuffey Readers, being the handbook that young girls would read in school, taught them that it was their place to do the cleaning.
Men have dominated the workforce for most of civilization up until their patriotic duties called away to war. All of a sudden, the women were responsible for providing for their family while the men were away. Women went to work all over America to earn an income to insure their family’s survival. Women took all sorts of jobs including assembly line positions, office jobs, and even playing professional baseball. When the men returned home from war, the women were expected to resume their place as housewives. The women who had gotten a taste of the professional life decided that they wanted to continue working. Thus, the introduction to women in a man’s working environment began. Women were not taken seriously at first, because they were stepping into a “man’s world”.
More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.
Gender is defined as the scopes of genetic, physical, mental and behaviour characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and feminity, meanwhile inequality is defined as in a situation where there is an unfair situation or treatment in which certain people have more privileges or better opportunities or chances than other people. Thus, from the definition stated gender inequality refers to unequal or unfair management, treatment, or perceptions of persons or individuals are based on their gender. In a parallel sense, gender inequality can be said as the world in which there was discrimination against anyone based on gender. In this introductory, the general understanding of gender inequalities will be discussed further into three significant factors that influence the allocation of housework between men and women. Household chores can be classified as cleaning, cooking and paying bills. Division of housework serves as an important element in the continuation of the function of a family and it requires contribution from both spouses (Tang, 2012). However, current society’s perception on housework is based on gender, so the three major factors that influence the division of household chores within the couples are education level, economic resources, and time availability (refer to Figure1 in Appendix 1).