"Mommy Tax" and Our "Hotel Civilization"

While Pinand’s writing focuses more on the individual experience of paying the “mommy tax,” Ehrenreich, Dalla Costa, and Critenden focus on overarching structural barriers that perpetuate the experiences Pinand fears as she contemplates motherhood and the advancement of her career. The theme for these readings is definitely a discussion on the “mommy tax” and how corporations are the invisible hands that shape and influence family and career values in a direction that may lead to a regressing society.

In my sociology class, we briefly discussed the America and the “culture of fear.” While Churchill insists “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Barry Glassner suggests that we have to begin fearing that we fear the wrong things, (Ferguson, 61). We’re scared of the world ending in 2012. We’re scared of teaching homosexuality in the classroom because we’re under the assumption that it will promote homosexuality and will spread like a disease. But right under our noses, our authors point out that corporations are out to devalue altruism and endorsing invisible taxes on caretakers. The scale of power already looks like this:



Do we really want corporations to have the loudest voice in deciding what our society looks like? Focusing on women, their campaign is objectifying workers, and punishing natural stages of life that cannot be helped. Through their biological capability, women promote and sustain civilizations. In an economic standpoint, sustaining the population of laborers. In a moral standpoint, creating a population that comprises of hope and spirit for a better future and overwriting the history of oppression that our civilization has. Yet, this biological capability that every civilization and society known to humankind depends on is punished and denigrated. When looking at the “mommy tax” and all of the opportunity costs to having a child, it is obvious that there is no more value to bringing life to the world. Cirtenden speaks about the “ultimate mommy tax: childlessness,” (Critenden, 107). This is what our “be a man” policy to promoting gender equality in the workforce has done to not only our women, but to our society that will bear the brunt of this forced choice in the name of success, the way our society – or rather our corporations – define it.

Many mini-themes emerged from these readings and the second point I want to focus on is housework. Dalla Costa’s speech frames housework as a job comparable to wage-earning occupations and yet, it is a job that garners no voice and no political power because apparently, money buys power and we all know that being a housewife doesn’t allow for financial stability. Dalla Costa encourages us to think about the nature of housework in the mindset that it’s a real occupation and to compare and contrast the benefits and setbacks. One thing that was brought up that really interested me was holidays and breaks in general. While store-owners, factory workers, or waitresses file home to a warm meal and a tidy home for rest, we tend to overlook who has to work to put out the warm meal and who has to work to clean the house, despite a declaration of a holiday (Freedman, 303).
Dalla Costa’s main focus was on housework as the unpaid shift, but Ehrenreich shows us that even as a paid job, housework still perpetuates discrimination on women and even spreads to larger issues encompassing those of race, age, and sexuality. Sociologist, Mary Romero, discusses employer’s inclination to employ young, naïve, docile, and dependent workers that tend to be women of color. Ehrenreich’s experiences working in the industry tells us that the antiquated maid uniform as well as images that the slogan, “on our hands and knees” generate not only perpetuates a subservient nature of women, but the images and connotations behind “maid-work” promotes heterosexuality as a norm. Thus, I think the maid industry’s success is highly due to an endorsement of a contradicting and hypocritical campaign. To draw in upper-middle class to upper class families – especially women – maid industries sell the service as liberating to women and marriages because housework is no longer a duty that is attached to the role of being a wife. Not only does this maid industry use new, feminist ideas to make the sale, it also promotes antiquated values through maid uniforms that contradict the theory of liberation.

Cornel West talks about our society gravitating towards a “hotel civilization.” We tend to disregard what goes on behind the scene and the reality that creates the illusion of a perfect, clean world we favor to see. Using West literally here, Ehrenreich talks about the inefficiency and sub-par services of the maid industry because the importance is not to actually doing the job to do the job, but to do the job to create the illusion of being clean (Ehrenreich, 67). But when we use West’s observation of a hotel civilization to analyze the act of hiring maids, we can begin to understand that the liberation of a small population of women from the burden of housework is actually counteracted by the creation of an invisible population of oppressed women – the women who get down on their hands and knees and do the dirty work, literally.

Thus, it is important to think about who is being oppressed at the expense of someone else’s liberation. In the end, women still lose the battle here. Instead of endorsing the hiring of maids as a way to liberate women from the oppressive duties of housework, we should be focusing instead on counteracting the influence corporations have in developing cultural values. Our societal ills concerning gender equality and the workplace are not going to be cured by a population of wage-earning maids in costumes, but by laws and campaigns to promote a truly “family-friendly” environment in the workplace, where currently, the words “family” and “friendly” are taxed and discouraged.