Zelda Bronstein, let me shake your hand.
It is now 2:30 am. I awoke suffering from thirst and itchy legs. While remedying both ailments, I plopped down in front of the computer and begin to read a book review of such genius and pertinence, I know that I may be up all night.
The book being reviewed by Ms. Bronstein is called Global Woman : Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (edited by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich).
The review has made me want to run to my new local bookseller and order the title. I have first-hand experience with the plight of the migrant female domestic worker, though little insight into the more insidious plight of the poor sex worker.
Reading Bronstein’s strong words makes me want to say “what the hell was feminism for if we can’t make life better for all women on the face of the planet?” Makes me want to say, “but this is what feminism is for.” The challenge to present and future feminists is clear and enormous. But Bronstein points out the small way to begin answering the challenge: ". . .the job remains to be done. Two jobs, actually--recovering the work that makes the earth a home and recovering the feminism that respects such work and the people who do it".
I want to tell Bronstein to take heart, to let her know that we are out here, not only consciously recovering the work, but just as consciously recovering the feminism that goes along with it. Every day this blog, and those of others, bears witness. (And I ought to start compiling a list of these blogs.)
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About two years ago, my Mexican friend Mina asked me if I had any work for a friend of hers to do. The friend, a woman named Margarita, had left her four children in Mexico (ages 10-16) for the chance to earn enough money to support her children and send them to the university in Mexico. I was then, as now, a stay-at-home mom, but with other ambitions. The job of laundry was never-ending and I told Mina that if Margarita liked, she could come once a week to do the wash. It isn’t that I hated the task. Like my mother, (who will not budge from her house if she’s got clothes in the dryer; she must be there, the moment the buzzer goes off, to pounce on and fold the hot clothes immediately), I’ve usually enjoyed the act of laundering, folding, and putting away my family’s clothes, except I never seemed to find five or six uninterrupted hours to tend to it from start to finish. What I hated, was getting around to the clothes after they had been sitting in the dryer for two days—or even worse, in the washer. You could say this was just a failure in concentration or organization on my part and quite often, it was. Just as often it was a failure of my husband's, who has no qualms about starting the task, but little succes in completing it.
So we paid Margarita $7.00 an hour to come in once a week and do the job from start to finish. She did an excellent job and I used my freedom from laundry to devote more time to cooking, always inviting Margarita to share my experiments with me. Being able to communicate with her in her own language, I felt more like a colleague than employer and was, in turn, able to learn more about her situation. She had a husband, an alcoholic truck driver on whom she could not rely. She missed her children acutely; she suffered.
She suffered, and now, looking back, I see how I began to suffer too. It wasn’t that I felt entitled to her help. I didn’t seek her out, but responded to an appeal that was made to me. Nevertheless, I began to feel disconnected in a small but disjarring way from my own and my family’s well-being. And just from a practical standpoint, though there were always clean clothes in our drawers, sometimes the socks were all mixed up or I couldn’t find the one particular item I’d be looking for or something I might have known to hand-wash, turned out a little worse for having been dumped unawares into the washing machine. I almost began to forget about the clothes we owned. I felt a little at a loss, a little more frazzled in the act of dressing.
What we often forget, I think, when we choose to let someone else do our families’ domestic labor is what our own domestic labors give back to us. In this small departure from the way I grew up, I got my first real sense of what my home requires from me, and of what it gives me in return: pleasure, knowledge, confidence, ease.
Bronstein writes: "Cooking, cleaning house, and looking after children are physically demanding under any conditions. Many mothers and wives who do these tasks for free find them tedious at best."
"Tedious at best"; therein lies a failure of education. First off, that only mothers and wives should devote themselves to these tasks. And secondly, that no one does them "for free". They may be unpaid economically, but there are other pay-offs. Many mothers and wives do not find them tedious; many mothers and wives have perhaps been led to believe they are supposed to be or can be nothing but tedious. Many men may have been led to believe the same thing.
Let’s see: I’m the mother of a son. What do you think I’m going to lead him to believe?
There is much more to comment on in Bronstein's review, but it's now 4:30 in the morning. My itchy legs are gone, but now my eyes are burning.
Margarita, by the way, went back to Mexico. I wonder how she's doing. I ought to make it a point to find out.
4:36:33 AM 
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