Letters to the editor

Generations of servitude
BY PAMELA TOUTANT
(04/03/00)

The answer to Toutant's dilemma is simple: She should take a job cleaning houses for a while so she can get over her misplaced middle-class guilt. There is no shame in honest work. It seems to me far more shameful to so loathe the idea of domestic service that she cannot bring herself to think anyone with a brain would ever be a housekeeper. Am I the only one who saw the humor in the image of the author in her tortured ruminations, as backdropped by a laughing Maria, who was smart enough to cash in on them? Where's the victim here?

I grew up on the low end of lower-middle class, taking every kind of job imaginable to improve my situation and put myself through school. Now I enjoy a very successful career and have a degree of financial security I never thought possible. And here's the best part: My experiences in the world of blue-collar workers are precisely why I have a housekeeper that I compensate fairly and treat with respect. It's what any self-respecting person would want from his or her employer, isn't it?

Toutant should find her daughter a job. Quickly.

-- Leigh Hellner

Why is it that when a man achieves a certain level of financial success, he is entitled to contract out all the husband-y chores: cleaning the gutters, cutting the grass, etc. If a woman, God forbid, hires another woman to do work that has historically been woman's work, the end of American life as we know it is at hand.

-- Frances Molefsky

I can certainly relate to Toutant's mixed emotions of what "hired help" means politically. I recently hired a twice-a-month woman from Latvia. Her daughter is still there, while she and husband try to make a go of it in America.

I grew up in the black middle class, but my mother and grandmother had many friends who cleaned "lazy, selfish white folks'" homes. I remember listening to these women recount stories with a serpent's tongue, every negative detail of their employers' lives laid out and ridiculed.

It was the '60s, and the black middle class had a lot fewer members and more interaction with the "working class." The black housekeepers I knew worked in protest and because they were legion, their wages were determined by a market swelling with lots of black and Latina women needing work.

Laura is an excellent housekeeper, no complaints. She advertised and accepted my offer of employment. I overpay her, out of guilt and gratefulness. I have finally given in to the fact that I cannot do "a second shift." As my finances bloom, will I hire someone full time? There may be the need physically and the money may be there, but I still hear the voices of the friends of my mother and grandmother. I guess I haven't overcome just yet.

-- Alice Huebr

Men II Boyz
BY JOYCE MILLMAN
(04/03/00)

The teen schlock market is nothing new -- it can be traced from Frankie Avalon through Sean Cassidy to Tiffany to New Kids On The Block to "'N Stynk." What is interesting about this perennial phenomenon is that it tends to succeed in times of conspicuous consumption, as a reaction to a more dangerous trend on the wane (Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis in the '50s, Nirvana and the Heroin club of the '90s). The Hegelian Dialectic does apply to pop music, and these disposable teen bands will always emerge in times of relative comfort. Exciting mainstream music is more likely in times of social strife.

-- Matt Hutton

Joyce Millman writes, "Why would a grown man -- assuming that you can consider 19- and 21-year-olds 'grown men' in these days of elongated adolescence -- want to be in a boy band anyway?"

Are you kidding?

I'm a grown 48-year-old man and I'd join the Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync or maybe the Backstreet Geezers or help form a new "boy band" in a country micro-second ... mostly because I still want to be the drummer in the Beach Boys.

-- Thom Prentice

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