She Feels Unclean
In the pages of the Observer, a new niche agony is detected:
Is it ever acceptable for a feminist to hire a cleaner?
Needless to say, it starts off quite dramatically,
The day my cleaner used to visit, I would return home in the evening to the smell of Dettol mixed with Tania’s sweat, to a clean kitchen and bathroom and a drenching sense of guilt.
Gratuitous drama and drenching guilt aside, I’m not entirely sure why hiring a cleaner should obviously be more fraught than hiring, say, a gardener or roofer. And it occurs to me that if you can smell someone’s perspiration above the odour of cleaning products, said person may require some kind of medical attention.
The piece, by empowered feminist author Sally Howard, continues in high gear,
It was the same unease that greeted me when I collected my son Leo from his nursery – a national chain disproportionately staffed by women of colour – or bought clothes from a mainstream clothing outlet that relies, as many do, on female garment workers in the global south.
For the kind of middle-class feminist who as recreation writes for the Observer, life is apparently an endless moral torture inflicted by minor, everyday events, or at least an exhausting theatre of pretending to be tortured by minor, everyday events. Which of the two constitutes a more harrowing and nightmarish existence, I leave to the reader.
For [my book, The Home Stretch], I spent time under cover with the women who clean Britain’s offices and homes. I picked used tampons off bathroom carpets and scrubbed bathtub tidemarks and sauces spattered across kitchen walls; and I discovered a few things.
That some women are so messy and antisocial that bloodied tampons are left for others to step on? Is that a permissible feminist thought?
I learned that fashionable householders’ preference for less-effective eco and homemade cleaning products doubles cleaners’ labour.
No laughing at the back.
And I learned that the second-wave feminist rhetoric that positions housework as nasty and tedious “shitwork” also, quite naturally, alienates the workers who take pride in competently performing necessary work.
Why, it’s almost as if there were an unflattering class dynamic to poke at, a rich seam to mine. Alas, we veer away and instead head towards ideological fetish territory:
Is it morally and economically reprehensible to contract out our domestic labour? And if this act is dubious from the point of view of many or most feminists, can we correct for this ethical quandary by contracting, say, a male cleaner…?
For some reason, 1970s comedy sketches are flashing before my eyes. Presumably, fewer tears would be shed, and written about at length, while hiring a male cleaner in preference over a female one – in the name of feminism and female empowerment, of course.
Other questions come to mind. What about the chap who fixes Ms Howard’s car or washing machine – would his toil and perspiration be noteworthy too, a cause of public agonising and a “drenching sense of guilt”? And then, unaddressed, there’s the issue of what a disabled feminist is to do, or a feminist recovering from knee surgery or whatever. Must she limit her hiring to one sex or the other, or must she do without and clean her own carpets, wheelchair permitting, in order to conform with current feminist ideology?
For two months, I tried the fair pay option, contracting Jurate, a non-agency cleaner, and paying her, to her delight, £40 for a two-hour session. In the end, I couldn’t square this approach with my new knowledge about the relationship between paying a woman to clean my home and the structural devaluation of women’s work.
Yes, I know, it’s a bit of mental tangle and somewhat mysterious. But apparently, paying a female cleaner over the odds, much more than she or her male peers would likely earn elsewhere, is a structural devaluation of women’s work. It’s new knowledge, you see.
The clincher, in the end, was my three-year-old son, who quizzically followed Jurate around the house as she squeezed her mop and brandished her ever-present Viakal. I did not want him to see the labour of some women as less worthwhile than the labour and leisure of other women and men… I found I could ease my feminist conscience by scrubbing my own toilet.
And so, with immense righteousness and a great sense of personal breakthrough, the services of the female cleaner in question were dispensed with. No above-market wages for you, my dear. Because the way to empower female “domestic labourers” is, it turns out, to not hire them at all.
Clearly, another triumph for twenty-first century feminism.
And I learned that the second-wave feminist rhetoric that positions housework as nasty and tedious “shitwork” also, quite naturally, alienates the workers who take pride in competently performing necessary work.
This pretentious and self-indulgent sheila knows nothing about real ‘shitwork’. Obviously she’s never had to deal with a blocked and over-flowing septic tank and had to laboriously clean the outfall pipes of obstructions of varying textures and types.
There’s an on-going campaign to try and get companies to publish their “wage gap”, so that they can be shamed if the average woman earns less than the average man.
Should it come to pass, this is what smart companies will do:
— get rid of every low paid female and replace them with men.
— hire one or two very well paid women at the top of the tree.
— put as many as possible of the highly paid staff down as “contractors”, so not included.
— contract out anything like cleaning that is difficult to get sufficient men for.
Hey presto! the averages will favour women.
But only at the expense of hiring far less women.
I found I could ease my feminist conscience by scrubbing my own toilet.
If you have the time to do your own cleaning, why have you hired a cleaner? Why this? Why any of this? It sounds like the author was contributing to the problem she railed against. The view that cleaning is a nasty job, low-brow’womens-work’ and frankly, being such a powerhouse in the ‘journo covering travel, feminism, social affairs’ field, she shouldn’t have to do it, even if she has the time. But no one is above cleaning up after themselves. Of course employ someone if you genuinely don’t have the time, or are physically incapable. But if you can, you should, because otherwise it is kind of like saying, ‘yes I am much to important and fancy to do this.’ Clean up your own shit.
Also, it’s not so easy for men to get work cleaning houses. My brother and cousin were looking for part time work cleaning houses that provided in house training. Both had good work histories (admittedly they had not held cleaning positions), but they were rejected by two different agencies. One was honest and said they did not hire men for in house (as opposed to commercial) work as customers were often uncomfortable with the idea of their house being empty with only a male cleaner. Other vulnerable clients did not want to be alone with a male cleaner. Perhaps unfair, but I can understand the agencies point of view.
there was a personal ad placed by a man who wanted to clean women’s apartments for free. The catch was he would do it naked.
Haha, no bloody way. I would much rather to pay to be spared the thought that a fully bonered, naked man was wiggling through my house with the dyson.
Wait, “bathroom carpets“…? Ugh! Who puts carpet in a bathroom?
When not fretting incoherently over whether hiring a cleaner is suitably feminist, Ms Howard is busy retweeting things like this: “Why white people can’t experience racism.” Apparently, you can’t call it racism when the people on the receiving end have pale skin. Because of the “eurocentric model of thinking.”
So, if, for instance, you see video of black youths gratuitously attacking a random white tourist, gang-stomping him, robbing him, stripping him naked, all while laughing and jeering and filming his degradation, and shouting racial slurs, do bear in mind that what you’re seeing with your own eyes is merely “prejudice,” and by implication unworthy of much concern. Because the lone person being attacked by human hyenas is, we’re assured, the one with all the “power.”
I found I could ease my feminist conscience by scrubbing my own toilet.
Stunning and brave.
Ugh! Who puts carpet in a bathroom?
That was a thing back in the 1960’s/70’s. Ugh indeed.
Ugh! Who puts carpet in a bathroom?
Admit it, Julia. The words deep shag in the bathroom make you tremble with pleasure.
Relevant Milton Freidman: I’m on your side, but you’re not.”
“I’m on your side, but you’re not.”
Heh. Again, actually including the preferences of the ladies being talked about – and fired in the name of feminism – might have made for a better article. Albeit one at odds with Ms Howard’s little vanities.
“I’m on your side, but you’re not.”
Again…THIS. In the broader sense, the argument is a minimum wage one. This is probably the second most damaging economic fallacy, the thing that holds back not just low end workers but in a trickle up sense, to some degree, the economy as a whole. The first most damaging being the fallacy that the amount of wealth is some constant value, that wealth cannot be created and that economics is just about how it is distributed. Millions and millions of people believe these two things without question. And whether they vote or not, their misunderstanding of these two fallacies has a significant impact. Yet for so many people it is a simple education problem that in spite of the bazillions we spend on education, many fail to understand mostly because they have NEVER been exposed to any form of information on the matter. Granted, it’s not something plainly intuitive without some degree of thought and consideration. But it’s also not all that hard to get people to at least think about it enough to understand. And when our news and entertainment media persist in perpetuating these fallacies through the culture, I really cannot blame people (too much) for their ignorance. I’ve pointed these things out to a number of reasonably intelligent people and often it’s a moment when the heavens part and the light shines through. This isn’t a hard problem to fix.
Meanwhile I have spent countless hours arguing this with one specific college professor, but a couple other ones as well, over the last decade or more. It is stunning to me that these fallacies persist. What with all the money we spend on education, that we can’t make progress in these two regards due to the thick heads of supposed “liberal educators” concerns me more than the sum total of Islamic (or whatever) terrorism, viral pandemics, Russian trolls, and whether or not I left the light on in the attic when I put the Christmas lights away two months ago.
What with all the money we spend on education…
Pay a staff of pyromaniacs and you get fires.
Hey presto! the averages will favour women.
But only at the expense of hiring far less women.
Minnesota has a Pay Equity Act which demands that public-sector pay between comparable male-dominated and female-dominated job classes be equal. In a former life, I used to help cities and counties to comply with the pay equity rules, and saw the effects up close.
For one thing, there were rampant problems caused by weak negotiating with the Teamsters, since their classes were mostly male-dominated and whatever compensation gains they made tended to take jurisdictions out of compliance. The Teamsters got upset when the cities started to point out that their demands were a lot more expensive once they priced in the cost of paying the affected non-union females whatever was needed to keep things equal.
My favorite project, though, was one rural county that was out of compliance, and just couldn’t afford the payroll impact of bringing their female-dominated classes up to the required level. I took a look at their pay report and sent them a recommendation to give one woman a 6% raise, and to fire three women in another job class and replace them with men. They’d be in compliance for less than ten grand plus the cost of hiring a few clerks, and if the women sued, the county could say it was simply doing what was required under state law.
I sent a copy of the report to the state pay equity office with a note asking if this was what they intended when they set up the system. After a subsequent conference call between me, the state office, and the owners of my firm, it was determined that I should focus on utility rate studies in future. (The county was given a waiver and three years to work on fixing the imbalance.)
Economists have more fun than statisticians, because they play with perverse incentives instead of standard deviations.
Economists have more fun than statisticians, because they play with perverse incentives instead of standard deviations.
And professors of gender studies have the most fun of all, because they play with perverse incentives and nonstandard deviations.
I doubt she will last a week before crawling back to a different cleaning agency (to save face).