AIBU to think women escaped domesticity by hiring other women to do it?

[AlloaintheMiddle]

This has been on my mind for a while, give me your thoughts.

There’s so much talk about modern womanhood, career success, independence, “having it all”… but often, that freedom seems to rely heavily on other women stepping in to do the work they’re now too busy (or unwilling) to do: childcare, cleaning, cooking, eldercare….

It’s rarely men picking up the slack. It’s almost always other women, often migrant, often poorly paid, and working long hours to support their own families while making it possible for more privileged women to “lean in.”

AIBU to feel like this isn’t really liberation so much as delegation, and that it doesn’t dismantle gendered domestic roles, it just shifts the burden to women lower down the socioeconomic ladder? And men still get away with it?

What do you think?

@BeNiceWhenItsFinished or the pay remains low because it's only a woman's job. It's chicken and egg theory really. The lower the salary the lower the socio economic status and the less respect given to the people who do the job.

Oh please op, stop making it seem like women are so hard done by. How many male cleaners, Nannies etc have you seen. Because women would shut that down too. So it is women who have to do these jobs. My nanny and cleaner is paid very well, well above minimum wage so no need to feel sorry for them.

‘Domesticity’ uses up a woman’s time and energy with little to no gain. Hiring someone is a totally different thing.

19/hour at 37.5 hours per week with no sick pay, no holiday pay, no work place pension with employer contributions etc class 2 National insurance and tax works out at around minimum wage.

I think you do have a point on the gendered nature of it but I don't think it's straightforward or black and white when it comes to be being able to earn money doing it. There is value attached to cleaning for money in a way there isn't when it's unpaid and it's also good, honest work. I briefly had a cleaner when I went back to work and his hourly rate was a good bit more than mine at the time (he was self employed so it would have to be a decent rate). I would never be opposed to working as a cleaner myself if I didn't have my current job but then I come from a line of domestics on my mum's side and don't see anything inherently demeaning in it. I'd rather clean a hospital or an office or someone else's house than do my own kitchen for the sixty millionth time 😆

I am aware there is exploitation and we need to be aware of it and, well, not exploit other women.

I think your average couple can’t employ the help you’re talking about so no.

Wealthier people do of course, and that help is disproportionately female, but employing women to do domestic work long predates women being more fully in the workplace.

Also everything else about domestic life doesn't disappear just because you have a cleaner. It lightens the load, it doesn't vanish it.

Nannies do generally get holiday and sick pay

Cleaners generally don’t, so yes they should get it, or be able to charge enough on their freelance rate to cover it themselves. Freelancing only works if your rate is pretty high.

Exactly. When I was younger it was totally normal that men would do most of this themselves. I think we are all outsourcing things we don’t want to do anymore.

My cleaner takes time off when she wants and just lets me know. She couldn’t do that if she was an employee. Self employment suits many people

It not just lack of holiday pay and sick pay for self employed, it’s also a lack of employer pension contributions, Business insurance costs, public liability costs, materials costs, transport costs from one house to the next, business vehicle insurance.

19/hour self employed is not the cushy wage some on here seem to think it is.

Amazing, this completely makes up for zero holiday pay.

I don’t think about too deeply. Also why is it only women who are made to feel guilty for outsourcing domestic tasks.

It ‘s a paid job at the end of the day.

Erm no. None work for minimum wage

Self employed cleaners, include holiday pay and insurance cover in their costs.

My Dsis's cleaner is very well off. Arrives in her new Audi with her vacuum, fit as a fiddle, she is EE and has managed to buy herself a home on her earnings.

My cleaner is a friend of a friend. She already works part time in a job she loves, but isn't able to increase her hours.

She cleans for me once a week for 2 hrs, I pay her above the going rate, and we're both really happy with the arrangement.

When DD was small, I paid my friends mum to have her at home for one day a week.

"Outsourcing" domestic and childcare work in our case has been money well spent - we have always paid at least the going rate, but it's meant that parts of our lives are less fraught.

When I had a cleaner she was self-employed. I paid her $150 per week, and she would come one day and work 2-3 hours depending on what needed to be done. I didn't pay her for holidays or vacations but I don't think most self-employed people get paid for holidays or vacations; they build those things into the rates that they charge.

Same with the guy who cuts my grass. He charges me $35/week. If I want additional work done I pay for it separately.

Meh, you start where you can. When the first students who wanted to graduate from higher education pushed for it of course they weren’t asking for the same rights for poor girls. They would have been laughed at. How could they push for rights they didn’t have, for other women, who couldn’t have them due to their education.
White rich feminism was the only way to go for white rich girls. Things changed quickly with WWI and II. It’s too easy to tell the victims that they didn’t do enough for the other victims.

I have seen loads of male cleaners. My last two cleaners were both men (well the two before my most immediate one.)

I think you’ve made an amazing point that I’d never thought of before. Every now and then someone says something in my life that really changes how I think about things. It’s gets rarer as I get older. This post is one of those moments. I genuinely had never considered this before and instantly after reading it I’m seeing things through a different lens. This is the very best of what Mumsnet is for me, why I’m still here. What an eye opener for me.
ps… I’m pretty poor and my wee mum was a cleaner.

The problem of who should do the menial, low-paid, unpleasant, undesirable jobs is a difficult one to solve.
We could do it by paying high enough wages to attract people to the roles (there may be arguments against that & it might not work).
What seems to happen is that certain groups become subordinated and then forced into doing the shit work that no one else wants to do

And it’s a whole-society issue to solve, not just the problem of the traditionally-subordinated 50% who had the non-prestigious cleaning and caring tasks allocated to them.

I was reminded of this thread thinking about utopian fiction of various kinds. In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, women in the post-collapse future have voluntarily given up the power to give birth (how is not explained), all babies are born from central labs, and you ‘volunteer’ to ‘mother, each child has three parents, who can be either sex, at least two of whom breastfeed (men can also BF), but the baby continues to live in a central baby/child house. Every adult has their own separate living space. Cooking is done centrally too. Everyone has to contribute to raising food.

In Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers novels (cosy sci-fi), most of the humans in the galaxy live in a fleet of giant spaceships in an essentially communitarian society. Everyone gets access to free food and accommodation, and jobs aren’t paid. You train for and work in a particular field because you want to and it’s needed. And the unpopular tasks (litter-picking, cleaning out sanitation tanks, washing out the recycling etc) are done by lottery by everyone, from the admiral of the fleet to schoolkids.

We've all collectively outsourced most factory work, agricultural work, mining - either to poorer countries or poorer immigrants.
Women outsourcing their domestic labour is a very minor issue in comparison.

Exactly. We outsource EVERYTHING. Food and goods production, manufacturing, services. Some of that labour is valued higher by society. It would be disingenuous to say that sexism wasn't present within the creation of the hierarchy of these jobs but it recent times there has been movement towards fairer pay for services regardless of the sex of those who traditionally carried out the roles. Hence our Local Authorities finding themselves in the shit. Unless we are willing to grow our own food, make our clothes, generate our own energy, and give up our careers and live in isolation, we are ALL availing of services that we just don't want to or can't do ourselves. The key is to increase the status and pay of these roles. Not shame people for availing of them.

Exactly
I pay my cleaner £17 an hour and I provide all the cleaning equipment . I also pay her holiday and sick pay