>Barbara Ehrenreich writes well and very intelligently, has a class
>critique of bourgeois feminism (as well as a feminist critique of
>nonfeminism), and has enjoyed some degree of popular success. I'd say
>that makes her someone to be cherished, but I guess to some it's
>proof she's just not hardass enough. Ah well, to each his or her own.
The articles make me wonder about Ehrenreich's political smarts, though. Ehrenreich is making two contradictory arguments, especially in "Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women's Work": (a) it's morally bad for better-off feminists to hire commercial cleaning service, so they shouldn't, unless they have special health- or baby-related needs -- it's better to make men & kids share household work; and (b) cleaning workers' jobs are often without benefits and low-paid, not to mention workers being given a degrading treatment, so their wages and working conditions should be better. Economically speaking, (a) and (b) are contradictory. It's like arguing it's morally bad to buy, so you shouldn't buy, Third World products because Third World workers' wages and working conditions are horrible, while at the same time maintaining that Third World workers' wages & working conditions should be better. Under capitalism, however, less demand, less work, less chances of struggling for better wages, working conditions, etc.
Moral demands for boycotts should come from *below* in the context of *labor struggles*, *not* from above in the context of "lifestyle" moralism of anti-consumerism & domestic sentimentality. Now, it's an _entirely_ different story if cleaning workers are demanding that feminists (& others) boycott this or that cleaning company (for instance because the company in question is using scabs and trying to break a strike) -- *then* they *should* boycott, by all means; but Ehrenreich doesn't say that they are.
Ehrenreich's articles remind me of Mark Jones's moral arguments against female labor in maquiladoras.
Yoshie