Maid to Order/ Question 1

Ehrenreich’s intended audience for this piece is people who are mostly ignorant to the hardships of low wage occupations and don’t appreciate how valuable these workers are. Although her topic is specifically housekeepers, I feel she is trying to speak for many others such as lawns men, garbage collectors; anyone who performs a job that is generally looked down upon but is essential for the maintenance of our society. She makes the correct assumption that most middle class people don’t really think about how difficult and generally unrewarding these positions are even though they are important. They may witness someone performing one of these jobs but most never actually consider how challenging and demeaning they can really be or how different life would be if no one filled these careers. What if no one could be called to clean your house or mow your lawn? What if no one showed up to collect your trash? The majority of the population doesn’t realize how significant these jobs are for our society to run as efficiently as it does.

Maid to Order

1. I think this was geared towards the middle-upper class families who can afford a cleaning lady to clean their houses. Ehrenreich expresses the work one by these lower class women and describes how they work on their hands and knees, lower to the ground, and how it's different down there than it is walking around watching the work be done. The author describes that the work should be done by the owners of the house, which goes to show that the author is speaking from a lower class position, because someone willing to pay another to clean their own house would not be saying this. Through evaluating women who are hired to clean homes and those who are doing the hiring, Ehrenreich's essay points out the labor that it takes for these women and the mentions the fact that it often goes by unnoticed.

Quintin's Response

I believe in Ehrenreich's "Maid to Order," that her audience was to all women even if you did do housework or didn't do it at all. I think she was just trying to get her point across about how women use to work back then in the sixties and seventies. She argued about how women use to clean the entire house, getting on their hands and knees. Also argued that women had problems in their relationship because of the housework. In most cases, men that did have a job, couldn't do anything without a woman that did housework especially, when it came down to doing their laundry.