Response to Ehrenreich

I found parts of Ehrenreich's article "Maid to Order" interesting. My experience with maids and house-cleaners is extremely limited. In my area of South Dakota, few people hire someone else to clean for them. That being said, I do remember one woman in my town who supplemented her income by being an independent maid. I didn't realize some of the socioeconomic factors that are associated with being a maid. I thought of it as a career and not a temporary job to do for a short time until a better one comes along. I am interested in knowing if there are any changes in the last decade in the amount of maids of color. They were a majority in 1998, and I would guess that those numbers would have increased. I am thinking that the number of maids of color is related to the lack of options for other occupations. Something that I found disturbing in the article is that the company that she worked for didn't seem to care about actually cleaning their houses, rather they just wanted to give the impression that it was clean. I would be extremely disheartened to learn that I was paying for services that weren't actually rendered. I thought about this part of the article to speak in large part for women's equality with men. It became apparent that there were disparities (dirty) and so some people worked together to reach a greater equality (clean). In actuality, the problems are partially taken care of and not actually fixed. One example of this is the the wage disparity between men and women, as discussed in Crittenden's article.