Historian. Writing a book on Britain & its imperial history http://tinyurl.com/sojs272 . Quite tired.
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Hang on, I realise everyone is all over this article but: the author’s ‘realisation’ that she ‘can’t’ pay a woman to clean for her came about because she thought her toddler son saw woman’s work as undervalued because... she paid a woman a fair wage? What?https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/08/acceptable-for-feminist-to-hire-cleaner …
If you want to pay someone a fair wage to clean for you — an actual fair wage — of course that’s fine. If the problem is that your male partner doesn’t do any cleaning, so your son only sees you and your female cleaner doing any cleaning, that’s not the fault of the cleaner.
If you and your male partner split the housework and then you pay a woman a fair wage to do the extra cleaning that neither of you have time for, that’s not anti-feminist. Paying a woman because you can’t or won’t do the second shift isn’t inherently anti-feminist.
I mean personally I prefer to solve this problem by having a male partner who does his fair share of housework because he’s not a toddler, but if we could afford it I’d absolutely pay a cleaner £25 an hour to do that instead.
(I feel like the imbalance in a lot of homes is not domestic labour but emotional labour — both partners pull their weight in terms of doing things but women disproportionately have to *think about it* — otherwise known as ‘but who remembers to get cash out to pay the cleaner’)
(AND THAT IS WHY I THINK EMOTIONAL LABOUR IS A THING)
I'm a cleaner. Women are allowed to be busier and richer than me and still be feminists. The dreariness comes more when they (men and women) are entitled, or pretend we're in some Downton scenario when I actually give a lowly fuck about their kids and their triumphs.
By that logic her toddler son should never see anyone clean the house ever, regardless of wage or no wage. Enjoy your dirty house then!
I have a man as a cleaner and a woman as a handy-person so I'm happy
...why couldn't she just contract a non-agency male cleaner and pay him a fair wage if she was worried about the association between gender and domestic labor
But then it's taking a fair wage job from woman to assuage her guilt of watching another woman do the work she, as a feminist, would prefer not to do. Her whole attitude is f*cked up. If housecleaning paid well, more men would do it.
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