>If you had finished the article, you would have noticed that she brings this
>all up. It seems to me she's highlighting a contradiction of a certain kind
>of feminism. Feminists, rightly, battled men over what share of the work in
>the private sphere they perform. When men wouldn't give in, the compromise
>entailed hiring a maid.
During the welfare "reform" debate, some argued that men owe women a giant amount of child support and that many men are neglecting their fair share of parental responsibilities (both of which are true for some men, while other men may simply have no or little income or are in prison). Neoliberals invoked a feminist-sounding argument: we should make men pay, instead of having women & children dependent on the state. I don't think this is a progressive argument at this point in history, though. The same for household labor, I think. I'd rather *socialize it in a non-gendered fashion* (and/or leave it undone to the extent it's possible), rather than keep it private and try to divide it equally between genders, as Ehrenreich has it. Better Engels than Ehrenreich.
>Show me the line where she says guilt falls exclusively upon the woman.
It appears to me that the target of shaming is better-off feminists (even the titles of the articles say so), rather than better-off men who are married to them or in relationship with them. Hence the absence of Zoe Baird's husband from the Ehrenreich article in _Harper's_, for instance. Further, what about single men who hire cleaning services, eat out at restaurants where "illegal aliens" wash dishes, etc.? Where _are_ they in the articles? There is an interesting article titled "Rejecting Zoe Baird: Class Resentment and the Working Class Mother" by Diane Simpson in _"Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America_, eds. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky (NY: New York University Press, 1998). You might check it out.
>Did you skip the part about how much of what we do by way of consumption
>would be morally equivalent to hiring a maid?
Ehrenreich says: "Why should housework, among all the goods and services we consume, arouse any special angst?...[B]ecause we all sense that there are ways in which housework is different from other products and services" ("Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women's Work"). I for one, though, think that housework shouldn't be sentimentalized into a morally different category than other kinds of labor & that household work should not be considered as a "haven" from commodification & rationalization, for such sentimentalization makes for a bad class & gender politics. Why argue against the commercialization of cleaning service, while child care, geriatric care, sewing, and other kinds of domestic labour for social reproduction have been commercialized and/or publicly provided in part or on the whole? What's the difference?
Lastly, as Carrol & I already said, a moralizing critique of consumption per se is futile & pointless, not to mention anti-hedonistic. What's the point? Ask the working class to consume less? How? I don't set store by individualistic "lifestyle" changes. Why not focus on unionizing industrial cleaning workers and/or starting cleaning workers' cooperatives, instead of telling feminists it's a shame to hire commercial cleaning services??? Moralism doesn't help cleaning workers, does it? Less consumption, less work under capitalism. Depending on the nature of labor, commercialization can be ecologically destructive (though this point does not apply to most kinds of work of social reproduction), but it _cannot_ be otherwise under capitalism; there is no such thing as ecologically sustainable capitalism. Only under socialism does it make sense to try to make rational decisions about consumption.
Yoshie