Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Maid To Order Reading Response #3
I found this article very interesting and I hardly knew anything about the house cleaning industry. Barbara Ehrenreich does a great job of using facts and research within her paper. The most surprising statistic that I found was according to Mediamark Research. They reported "a 53 percent increase, between 1995 and 1999, in the number of households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more". I also did not know that there were about 549,000 domestic workers in 1998. I find this intriguing because I'm used to cleaning up my own house and I am not really exposed to house cleaners; however, my grandparents from both sides of my family do receive that sort of assistance. This author makes house cleaning an important topic through her arguments for and against it along with her many examples of its history and sometimes degrading payroll.
I find her statistics on how men do less house work than women the most persuasive. Even though house cleaning for men increased by 1.7 hours over 30 years still does not compete with what most women normally do. For the most part she is right, women do the most work whether it be cooking, vacuuming etc. I was in Wal-Mart one time years ago with my dad and we heard two men in the store complaining how the store was "too big" and "how could anyone ever find anything in here?". This supports her idea that men really won the "chore wars" in the 70's and 80's.
The least persuasive statistics that I found are of the sanitation used by certain house cleaning businesses. The small amounts of water used in cleaning houses and how they can only use a few rags to clean without cleaning them is pretty gross. I believe that something like this could and did happen, but times have changed, as this article was written over 10 years ago. I think that most companies have most likely changed their standards and things in houses are now actually getting "cleaned". I was shocked when she went into details like..."We scrubbed only to remove impurities that might be detectable to a customer by hand or by eye". This article read well and it was cool to learn how house cleaning has evolved over the years and about her own individual experiences.
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I like how you said from the beginning when you started off that you do not have very much background knowledge on house cleaning, however you found it interesting because I, too, found some of these statistics intriguing. For example, there was a 53% increase in households that have cleaning assistants. It is different in many households, but I agree with you and Ehrenreich when saying that women do more of the household chores, cooking, etc., so I wonder-what if society was set up in which all households consisted of women cleaning the houses and men do the cooking? Take a cook or chef for example. Why is cleaning a house for someone else looked down upon whereas cooking food for them is not? If you think about i,t there is not much in the way of a difference because technically you are doing work for other people in both situations, in which they are fully capable of doing themselves but they chose otherwise. It is interesting how society forms opinions on different occupations, one especially being house cleaning.
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