Death of a maiden
In the week before Christmas, in a small town in Bavaria, a 21-year-old au pair from Romania hanged herself in the cellar of the house where she had looked after four children. When the police came to inspect the scene, the found that the body of Ramona Radulovici was covered with the kind of bruises that were consistent with having been inflicted by a heavy, blunt object. Neighbours said that they had noticed that when the girl appeared at the local playground with the couple's young twins she often had a blackened eye, but nobody wanted to get involved. It was a small town in Bavaria.
The same neighbours, who became aware that the au pair was being beaten, knew that something was seriously amiss from the outset as the host couple and their four children rented an expensive apartment but lived off social welfare. The police are also certain that Ramona had been exploited for quite some time — her visa had expired and there was no evidence that a bank account had ever been opened by her or for her.
Because of a change in the law in March last year, one can open an au pair agency in Germany by filling out a form and paying 30 euros. This has resulted in an explosion of web sites offering young girls from all over Eastern Europe to German families. And this is probably how Ramona Radulovici ended up in Bavaria.
The exploitation of young women such as Ramona Radulovici is one of the themes of a new book "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. The two editors look at the lot of America's domestic workers and one their controversial conclusions is that it's ethically wrong not to clean your own house.
Ehrenreich and Hochschild bring formidable credentials to their writing. The Second Shift, Hochschild's 1989 book about couples' battles over housework, started a debate about men's failure to share domestic chores with their working wives, and she expanded the discussion with her 1997 book The Time Bind, which explored the reasons people spend more time at work and less at home. Ehrenreich's 2001 book Nickel and Dimed illuminated the hard lot of ordinary women trying to make ends meet in dead-end jobs. She gave up her comfortable life to work as a waitress, a Wal-Mart clerk and a maid to experience what it is really like to depend on low-wage work.
"One bitch would crawl under pieces of furniture to see that I had really done the floor underneath," says Ehrenreich, recalling her experiences as a maid cleaning houses in Maine. She points out that 20 percent of American families now use some kind of housecleaning service. So, in a certain sense, the domestic struggles over sharing housework that Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote about in "The Second Shift" are now history for many middle-class couples — they have simply outsourced the work. As a result, affluent men and women now traipse around their homes, leaving socks here and dropping underwear there, confident in the knowledge that someone from the Third World will pick up the pieces, wash and iron them and not demand much in return. Given this arrogance, it's not surprising that Ehrenreich is given to screaming "Pick up your own mess!"
This is all very well, but it is quite a leap to say that it is morally wrong to pay people to do unfulfilling work. That smacks more of eletism than sisterly solidarity. Hiring a cleaning woman or an au pair is not immoral. Mistreating or underpaying her is.
Diarist of the day: Dawn Powell, 29 January 1950"A lovely, remote time at Murphys'. The spoke of Elsa Maxwell and how she raised money for Russian Ambulance in World War I, absconded with money, then returned to social success after three yeas. How a friend. Lily Havemeyer, had a calller who brought Miss Maxwell to lunch. Elsa looked over the place -- marvellous for party -- and said to Lily (first meeting). 'You go shopping for the day and leave me your servants , your house and carte blanche and at night you will find yourself with a party all Paris will talk about.' 'No' was all Lily said."
