I've offered my feminist and socialist agenda concerning the question of "domestic labor" in a post titled "Socialization of 'Household Labor.'" The agenda, I think, is a good one -- perhaps you disagree -- and I arrived at it without making it sound as if the feminist movement helped cause, and most feminists in the USA depended upon, the exploitation of immigrant women from poor nations. Why can't Barbara Ehrenreich?
Perhaps, you think that Barbara Bergmann should do her household chores or make her male partner do them without hiring maids -- I personally don't care if she does (the maids whom she hires probably care, in so far as they most likely don't want to lose their paychecks while they need them), but if you care, you might contact her male partner and excoriate his sexist ways, so he may reform himself and she can fire the maids.
At 8:41 AM -0500 8/12/03, C. G. Estabrook posted an article, in which
Ehrenreich is quoted as saying:
>"Imperialism used to extract the gold and other resources, now we
>are taking love from the poorer countries. Many of these women have
>to leave their own children behind to come and work as childminders."
>
>Ehrenreich, whose new book, Global Women, examines what she claims
>is an unrecognised people trade, said: "We women in the rich
>countries work, so we need someone else to do the work at home and
>look after our children.
"We women in the rich countries," says Ehrenreich -- well, most women workers in rich countries, be they feminists or non-feminists or anti-feminists, don't have financial resources to have maids, cleaners, governesses, private tutors, etc. come into their homes every day to "do the work at home and look after" their children. The best working-class parents can do is to pay baby-sitters once in a while (btw, does Ehrenreich scorn women who hire baby-sitters, too???) and, once children grow old enough, send them to kindergartens if they can find affordable ones; and, in addition, the lucky ones among them get help from their families, friends, and neighbors. Ehrenreich has no business passing off what bourgeois families do as if it were what most feminists do, much less what "we women in the rich countries" do.
At 10:45 AM +1000 8/13/03, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>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
I do see a big difference between men who expect their wives and girlfriends to do "housework" for them and men and women who hire servants to do it for them. The obvious difference is that servants are paid wages whereas wives and girlfriends aren't.
At 10:45 AM +1000 8/13/03, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>If a man who can exploit his wife, refuses to do so, it changes
>nothing. He still can. She is still vulnerable.
It's not as if a woman in this day and age in rich modern nations can't survive without living with a man. Women ought to divorce their husbands if they are unhappy with what their husbands do or don't do. An increasing number of women have and continue to do just that, alarming conservatives. Or better yet, women might stay single, become lesbians, or just go out with likable men without living with any of them, etc. rather than live with or get married to men who expect wives to do "housework" and take care of kids. -- Yoshie
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