By dramatizing the female homeowner and placing more concern on the woman that is subjected to working for her, Ehrenreich makes it clear that there is nothing positive about the mistress-maid relationship (64). However, she does not give a clear solution to the problem. Instead, she digresses to tell stories of her own mother’s cleaning expertise and consequential lack of need when it came to outside help. There is a bold sense of pride in the way that she describes the “Niagaralike quantities” of water needed to “rupture [the] cell walls” of dirt and bacteria on countertops and floors (67). Ehrenreich disdains the helpless homemaker and praises the indestructible mother of the past who took seriously the job of thoroughly cleaning her own home. The American ideals of self-reliance and work ethic are wrapped in an old-fashioned image of the mother that contradicts modern feminists’ ideas about a woman’s role. Ehrenreich presents the ideal of a woman whose home is her domain, where only she knows the best methods of making it appear the way it ought to be presented. The break in her discussion of maid services seems out of place, and it makes the reader wonder why she chose to bring up her mother at all.

The role of the mother is an important one in Ehrenreich’s argument, because it is the only reason that we have for caring about the maid dynamic other than the injustice of one woman cleaning up another woman’s mess. She recalls that “once ‘parenting’ meant instructing the children in necessary chores,” but now chores have a “virtual existence,” because a maid takes care of them while no one is watching (70). She places emphasis on the role of the mother as a teacher of morals, because “a servant economy breeds callousness and solipsism in the served” (70). How did Cinderella’s stepsisters turn out after being waited on during their developmental years? Ehrenreich would view their story as a cautionary tale: if a woman teaches her child that he or she is not responsible for cleaning up a mess, then she is giving that child a reason to feel superior. Whereas feminists of the past were trying to abolish male superiority complexes, Ehrenreich is trying to abolish any sense of class-based entitlement at all: in men, women, and children alike.

Trump

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