Presumably, before you turned eight, your mother or her partner or both cooked for you, cleaned after you, etc. Would she have been a bad person, if she had hired the services of others to do them (e.g., buying prepared and semi-prepared meals, hiring baby sitters, sending you to a kindergarten and then to a school, etc.), instead of doing them herself?
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No, she would not have been a bad person if she had hired someone to do domestic work. But it truly would have been unfortunate if I had never received lessons in domestic self-reliance. It's the knowledge transfer and sense of responsiblity that are key.
Although, at the end of my post, I made a jab at people who hire help for housework while touring the world giving speeches about feminist issues, I do not support a blanket condemnation of this practice (hiring help that is).
My focus was on the idea that hired help is made necessary by the stubborn refusal of men to do housework. If this is true (and I can't honestly claim to know if the suggested cause and effect sequence is true) then the solution is a modification of male behavior in this area. Which, I suggest from my own experience, is very possible.
House cleaning work is as valid as any other. However, within an exquisitely class and racially conscious environment such as the one through which we swim, it carries dangers of stereotyping and skill deterioration on the part of the employer and his/her family.
That is, whether it's your mom who makes the socks on the floor disappear and the stovetop go from grease-encrusted to sparkling clean or someone you hired from an agency, if you don't have the skills to take care of these things yourself (as opposed to being genuinely too busy, too ill or handicapped) the pathetic result is the same.
Those guys I lived with didn't know how to clean. They hadn't a clue. They knew about as much about cleaning and taking care of themselves as they did about matter-antimater intermix formulas. No one taught them. It had all been done by mom or domestic workers.
When you find this skill-less state, multiplied over and over again, across the country, you've got a major problem. Solving this problem would help make a lot of women's lives a little easier. Maybe a lot easier.
It would help many men too.
DRM
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