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Ehrenreich Barbara - Maid: hard work, low pay, and a mothers will to survive

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Ehrenreich Barbara Maid: hard work, low pay, and a mothers will to survive

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At 28, Stephanie Lands plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and, with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that werent being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) coupons to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance while she didnt feel lucky at all. She wrote to remember the fight, to eventually cut through the deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor. [This book] explores the secret underbelly of upper middle class Americans and the reality of what its like to be in service to them. Id become a nameless ghost, Stephanie writes about her relationship with her clients, many of whom do not know her from any other cleaner, but who she learns plenty about. As she begins to discover more about her clients lives--their sadness and love, too--she begins to find hope in her own path. Her compassionate, unflinching writing as a journalist gives voice to the servant worker, and those pursuing the American Dream from below the poverty line. Maid is Stephanies story, but its not hers alone. It is an inspiring testament to the strength, determination, and ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

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Authors Note This memoir has been pieced together with the help of journals - photo 1

Authors Note: This memoir has been pieced together with the help of journals, photographs, blogs, and Facebook posts. Most names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect them from recognition. Time has been compressed. Dialogue has been approximated and in some cases compositely arranged. Great care has been taken to tell my truths. This is my story and how I remember it.

Copyright 2019 by Stephanie Land

Jacket design by Amanda Kain
Jacket copyright 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Hachette Books
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First Edition: January 2019

Hachette Books is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

LCCN 2018954908

ISBNs: 978-0-316-50511-6 (hardcover), 978-0-316-50510-9 (ebook), 978-0-316-45450-6 (Canadian trade paperback)

E3-20181115-DA-NF-ORI

For Mia:

Goodnight

I love you

See you in the morning.

Mom

Ive learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life.

Maya Angelou

Welcome to Stephanie Lands World

T he price of admission requires that you abandon any stereotypes of domestic workers, single parents, and media-derived images of poverty you may be harboring. Stephanie is hardworking and articulate, to use the condescending praise word bestowed by elites on unexpectedly intelligent people who lack higher education. Maid is about her journey as a mother, trying to provide a safe life and home for her daughter Mia while surviving on pieced-together bits of public assistance and the pathetically low income she earned as a maid.

Maid is a dainty word, redolent of tea trays, starched uniforms, Downton Abbey. But in reality, the maids world is encrusted with grime and shit stains. These workers unclog our drains of pubic hairs, they witness our dirty laundry literally and metaphorically. Yet, they remain invisibleoverlooked in our nations politics and policies, looked down upon at our front doors. I know because I briefly inhabited this life as a reporter working in low-wage jobs for my book Nickel and Dimed. Unlike Stephanie, I could always go back to my far-more-comfortable life as a writer. And unlike her, I was not trying to support a child on my income. My children were grown and had no interest in living with me in trailer parks as part of some crazy journalistic endeavor. So I know about the work of cleaning housesthe exhaustion and the contempt I faced when I wore my company vest, emblazoned with The Maids International, in public. But I could only guess at the anxiety and despair of so many of my coworkers. Like Stephanie, many of these women were single mothers who cleaned houses as a means of survival, who agonized throughout the day about the children they sometimes had to leave in dodgy situations in order to go to work.

With luck, you have never had to live in Stephanies world. In Maid, you will see that its ruled by scarcity. There is never enough money and sometimes not enough food; peanut butter and ramen noodles loom large; McDonalds is a rare treat. Nothing is reliable in this worldnot cars, not men, not housing. Food stamps are an important pillar of her survival, and the recent legislation that people be required to work for their food stamps will only make you clench your fists. Without these government resources, these workers, single parents, and beyond would not be able to survive. These are not handouts. Like the rest of us, they want stable footing in our society.

Perhaps the most hurtful feature of Stephanies world is the antagonism beamed out toward her by the more fortunate. This is class prejudice, and it is inflicted especially on manual laborers, who are often judged to be morally and intellectually inferior to those who wear suits or sit at desks. At the supermarket, other customers eye Stephanies shopping cart judgmentally while she pays with food stamps. One older man says, loudly, Youre welcome! as if he had personally paid for her groceries. This mentality reaches far beyond this one encounter Stephanie had and represents the views of much of our society.

The story of Stephanies world has an arc that seems headed for a disastrous breakdown. First, there is the physical wear and tear that goes along with lifting, vacuuming, and scrubbing six-to-eight hours a day. At the housecleaning company that I worked for, every one of my coworkers, from the age of nineteen on, seemed to suffer from some sort of neuromuscular damageback pain, rotator cuff injuries, knee and ankle problems. Stephanie copes with the alarming number of ibuprofen she consumes per day. At one point, she looks wistfully at the opioids stored in a customers bathroom, but prescription drugs are not an option for her, nor are massages or physical therapy or visits to a pain management specialist.

On top of, or intertwined with the physical exhaustion of her lifestyle, is the emotional challenge Stephanie faces. She is the very model of the resilience psychologists recommend for the poor. When confronted with an obstacle, she figures out how to move forward. But the onslaught of obstacles sometimes reaches levels of overload. All that keeps her together is her bottomless love for her daughter, which is the clear bright light that illuminates the entire book.

Its hardly a spoiler to say that this book has a happy ending. Throughout the years of struggle and toil reported here, Stephanie nourished a desire to become a writer. I met Stephanie years ago, when she was in the early stages of her writing career. In addition to being an author, I am the founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization that promotes high-quality journalism on economic inequality, especially by people who are themselves struggling to get by. Stephanie sent us a query, and we snatched her up, working with her to develop pitches, polish drafts, and place them in the best outlets we could find, including the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. She is exactly the kind of person we exist foran unknown working-class writer who needed just a nudge to launch her career.

If this book inspires you, which it may, remember how close it came to never being written. Stephanie might have given in to despair or exhaustion; she might have suffered a disabling injury at work. Think too of all the women who, for reasons like that, never manage to get their stories told. Stephanie reminds us that they are out there in the millions, each heroic in her own way, waiting for us to listen.

Barbara Ehrenreich

X

M y daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.

It was an afternoon in June, the day before her first birthday. I perched on the shelters threadbare love seat, holding up an old digital camera to capture her first steps. Mias tangled hair and thinly striped onesie contrasted with the determination in her brown eyes as she flexed and curled her toes for balance. From behind the camera, I took in the folds of her ankles, the rolls of her thighs, and the roundness of her belly. She babbled as she made her way toward me, barefoot across the tiled floor. Years of dirt were etched into that floor. As hard as I scrubbed, I could never get it clean.

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