First, I want to comment on a passage from Parrena's article. When quoting Joy Manlapit, Parrena writes, "I want to be able to order someone to make me coffee, to serve me food. That is good. That is how you can take back all the hardships you experienced before. That is something you struggled for." How is it that a domestic worker struggles to be the one who forces others into enduring hardships? It is sad that domestic work makes some bitter and aspire to be the employer instead of seek ways to abolish these put downs of what the article Maid to Order states as "lower' kinds of people for a 'lower' kind of work". This leads me to my questions raised from Maid to Order.
When in 3rd grade, we sat in a circle and my teacher asked all of us to say our hobbies....I answered with cleaning, because it was one of my favorite things to do. My teacher just laughed, causing the other students to laugh at me, and said that "cleaning is not a hobby. Isn't there anything else you like to do?". To this day I still enjoy cleaning but I do realize that it isn't a hobby to some people but it is a job; a job that defines what others think of you. pg 70, "Dirt..tends to attach to the people who remove it--'garbagemen' and 'cleaning ladies'".
This article discusses the lack of male partner's help around the house and cleaning while the female works. But for the most part, a female's idea of clean is not that of a males. Would a woman actually be happy living in a house that a male thought of as clean? Wouldn't she feel the need to do more and clean it more, anyway?
Here are some other questions I have from this reading:
Another interesting issue to look at that isn't raised in this article is which person, male or female, pays for the domestic help. Since the woman is free to do work and earn money, does the man see it as she has to pay someone to do "her job"? Or will the male pay so he doesn't have to do his share around the house?
How many women who consider themselves feminists have hired domestic help? If they have, do they because they see it as 'helping' the other women get money for their families? What would their reasoning be?
What about male maids? Do they feel discriminated against? It would be neat to hear some of their stories.
Lastly, I find it interesting how housework is considered as heritable. Pg 61, "And when the person who is cleaned up after is consistently male, while the person who cleans up is consistently female, you have a formula for reproducing male domination from one generation to the next." And Pg 69, "Since most of us learn to clean from our parents (usually our mothers), any diminution of cleaning skills is transmitted from one generation to another, like a gene that can, in the appropriate environment, turn out to be disabling or lethal." Here cleaning and domestic work is seen as genetically and socially constructed. How does any woman, especially migrants and women too poor to migrate, defeat this preconception and rise above it to create a society where one's identity is not defined by her occupation and domestic work is not a woman's duty?