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Melissa Smith
English

Linda Kintz, Mentor

Cleaning Ladies: The Complicity of Liberal Feminism in Class Oppression

American liberal feminism has a problem; while many successful women aspire to the same professional goals as men, they are employing women to do the work that still needs doing – housework. Though the women’s movement has yet to result in gender parity, many assert that women’s general lot has improved. Such claims, however, reflect the particular situations of affluent, white, professional women, while those in the working classes still labor in conditions comparable to those of their foremothers. Liberal feminists have demonstrated comfort in hiring other women to do the work that they themselves have, understandably, rejected as their own. This problem of just who does the housework is a troubling symptom of class-based prejudice that supercedes ties of shared gender oppression. Core materials focus on studies from the social sciences, liberal and materialist feminist theory, government employment and economic opportunity trends, and paid domestic laborer autobiographies.