I found a few connections in Maid to Order, some from previous classroom observations, some from other materials. I’ve found that all across the globe, when women want to have some of the power that men have traditionally had, they do so by taking on male attributes (Power recreates itself in its own image). Part of the tradition of masculinity is domination over women. Women who want power seem to find it much easier to dominate other women than to really challenge the status quo and dominate men. That seems to be too radical to risk. I think a lot of that ties into the phenomona of hiring ‘cleaning ladies’ to perform tasks that were traditionally assigned to women of the family. First, a woman asking a man to perform housework is a radical reassignment of traditional gender roles and risks provoking feelings of resentment. The much safer choice is to hire another woman to do the job. Peace and calm is preserved, but no moves toward gender equality have been made. Also, a working woman probably faces monumental discrimination and has to work twice as hard to advance to the level of her male coworkers can come home, observe the cleaning lady and remark to herself ‘At least that isn’t me’. Even hiring household help, which seems like a straightforward, utilitarian need, has taken on symbolic significance in that maids scrub ‘the old fashioned way’, taking a submissive, degrading position that really does nothing to make the task more efficient, but does reinforce feelings of superiority.
I don’t neccessarily think that hiring domestic help is in itself evil, we are a capitalist society and specialization of professions is part of what makes us prosper. But attitudes toward the hiring of maids have got to change, or every step forward that the feminist movement has made will be so saturated in classism and hypocrisy that it may cripple us.
