> > maybe you could actually quote her extensive rants?
> >
>
>Checking if I read the assigned material?
Yes, since she doesn't spend several pages ranting about yuppie lifestyles. You've misremembered. She does complain about the bible thumpers who didn't tip her--and I see you didn't have a problem with that--and she does address, at most, a few sentences to _describing_ her work. However, the only place where she makes a judgement is where she notes that people who had to clean themselves would probably not have an all white living room and dogs with long black hair.
She's writing what's akin to an ethnography. Her audience expects to hear how she felt Wojtek. She wrote honestly about her feelings. Big deal. Further, her point isn't their lifestyles, but the fact that they don't pick up after themselves. Like it or not, that's a major theme in feminist critique of housework. When only women do that sort of work, it gets treated like shit work and no one has appreciation for any of it. They imagine it gets done magically.
You can see this in office work environments all the time when people get themselves coffee, spill it and leave it there for someone else to clean up. Or, even cuter, they grab the last cup and leave the pot there to burn. Men, women, old, young, doesn't matter. They're people who either think the task is beneath them or are so used to someone else doing it and not having to deal with the mess accompanying not doing it that they never learn a lesson. (Like my son is learning about not keeping his tub clean and poking a bizillion holes in the wall that will have to be patched and painted :).
This concerns she raises (and feminists have raised) speaks to Marx's insight that while the socialization of labor under capitalism is welcome, providing us benefits hitherto unheard of (economis of scale, etc.), the problem is that it obscures the way the work actually gets done. We don't have a sense of the _entire_ labor process. Feminists have argued that women's work--like childcare, housework, etc.--is likewise erased and denigrated (albeit sometimes simultaneously glorified as if it requires the special talents and virtues of women to accomplish these tasks).
This is a legitimate point to disagree over and I don't think it should be dismissed. I happen to think that, on the way to utopia, we have to learn how to pick up after ourselves. We need to learn to value the kind of scut work that has to get done, see how we depend on it getting done in order to live decent lives. Otherwise, I happen to think that status hierarchies will reassert themselves during and after the revo.
For the same reason, I disagree with Yoshie that we should focus primarily on socializing childcare and not work to make sure that non-custodial parents pay child support.
kelley