>If feminists are going to concern themselves with the way men try to negotiate more free time to themselves by not picking up their share of the housework, then I can't see why Ehrenreich is so horribly out of line when she points out that feminists who hire maids are doing the same. Again, I'm not saying you should stop hiring a maid.
This is the central issue. Men exploit their wives because they can, by the same token middle class women (and men) enter into equally exploitative relations with hired servants because they can. There is no difference and of course it wouldn't help the situation of the exploited classes for people who can exploit them to refuse to exploit them.
The solution is not to take the high moral ground on an individual basis. If a man who can exploit his wife, refuses to do so, it changes nothing. He still can. She is still vulnerable. If you can exploit the labour of a vulnerable person but refuse to do so on moral grounds, it doesn't change the fact that you can. In other words you have to address the vulnerability of the person who can be exploited, not the moral rectitude of the person who can exploit.
The solution is the same. Universal economic security would remove the ability of men to exploit their wives as personal servants and women and men to exploit the economically insecure as personal servants. But I don't think we can blame feminists for not universally supporting this solution, because feminism has always been about equal rights for women, equality of exploitation. Not the end of exploitation. Feminism is not the same as socialism.
>Just questions I'm curious about: I'm not sure we want to say that someone should make what they make because the cost of reproducing their labor is less than someone else's do we? That is, if a maid doesn't have children, lives by herself, does it follow that she should make less because she doesn't spend as much time cooking and cleaning?
Yes, that's the way it generally goes. Of course the cost of children is more or less socialised in every civilised country, through concessionary tax scales and child supplements and allowances. The free market is completely useless at distributing the real costs of reproducing labour.
It isn't up to individual employers because that wouldn't work, if they had to pay people with children a higher wage than those without children, then the human race would probably die out. Markets don't work, they never have.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas