How Domestic Workers Enable Well Off Women to Prosper
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Anonymous
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https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/20...-family-life/586282/
As more and more women have entered the workforce, they have naturally spent less time at home. Still, homes demand work, from cooking and cleaning to taking care of children. A majority of American children have two parents working outside the home, and nearly half of all married couples both work. In the U.S. and many other countries, there is no clear answer to who will take care of the housework. That “second shift” of housework falls disproportionately on women. In the U.S. for example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of women report doing housework like cleaning or laundry each day, compared with just 19 percent of men. American women also spend twice as much time caring for children as men do. To mitigate this second shift for working parents, some families with financial means hire domestic workers, more than 80 percent of whom are women. Around the world, women who can afford it are freed to pursue their career by other women who care for their children, cook their food, and clean their home. In a new book, Women’s Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home, the journalist Megan Stack examines this dynamic from the inside, telling the story of her own employment of domestic workers, who took care of her children and home while she wrote a novel. Waters: This memoir is about being a woman harnessing women’s labor, but it’s also about being a white person harnessing the labor of nonwhite people. What role does race play in the question of offloading domestic work? Stack: Race is a huge aspect of this. I think 100 percent of the reason domestic work is so poorly regulated is because it affects this trifecta of demographics that political decision makers don’t care about: women, poor people, and people of color. There’s this subconscious social consensus that things happening to people in those demographics just aren’t as important. I did want to focus this book on the gender aspect, because this dynamic is more universally about women than it is about race. There are Chinese families employing Chinese domestic workers and Indian families employing Indian domestic workers. In those stories, race isn’t as clear-cut an issue as gender or class. |
Anonymous
| Thanks for sharing. This is often a topic I think about when "lean in" conversations happen all around me but I don't have the data to prove my hunch. Will be reading this soon! |
Anonymous
| um ... it's the husband too, right? |
Anonymous
I can't think of anything more cyncically regressive than trying to claim women should not lean in because they should do all the domestic labor themselves. That's some pure bullsh*t. |
Anonymous
Read the second paragraph. |
Anonymous
| I am not seeing the part that is wrong with this. Those jobs - especially nannying - pay much better and off better benefits than most other jobs the candidates could get with similar skills. |
Anonymous
| What about lawn care and car repair. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
| Please, how come lowly paid male workers don't get the same attention? YOu don't think there are deep-sea fisherman who died so that we could all have access to fish? Or construction workers who enable the building of skyscrapers in NYC? These occupations are only occupied by a single gender and are low-wage earning too. |
Anonymous
| Great. Another book that attempts to make successful women feel guilty. But don’t worry, the husband gets a pass. Lovely. |
Anonymous
| What's wrong with offloading? We all do it in some form or way. Do you take your own garbage to the landfill? No. Why is it more acceptable to hire a landscaper than someone to scrub your toilet bowl? |
Anonymous
Right? Wth? |
Anonymous
Many of us hire male domestic help to mow our lawns, etc. |
Anonymous
Because we are fine with outsourcing jobs that are traditionally for men (trash, yard work, household maintenance like power washing etc). It’s so unfair. |
Anonymous
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Pathetic.
And wealthy men benefit from their wife's free labor. |