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A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.
“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930. Her cook was in the hospital, so Woolf couldn’t write for two weeks. She was busy interviewing new cooks and washing greasy dishes.
“For century after century most women expected either to be servants or to keep servants,”
James Guthrie writes, “that ownership of all kinds is a precarious business at best, or at worst, a form of self-delusion.”
Service is the act of paying interest on a debt, labor that doesn’t produce a commodity, and a ceremony of religious worship. That’s something close to what I had in mind.
She was a manager, a secretary, a cook, a companion, a lover—a wife of her time and class. And she enjoyed it, lunching with friends on filet of sole, driving with Gertrude to Marseilles for bouillabaisse, cooking bass for Picasso, taking an ocean liner to America, getting two enormous crabs at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, and tasting passion fruit for the first time.
What’s harder about our work, she says, is that we can’t walk away from it at the end of the day. It’s always with us. We can’t clock out.
study of job satisfaction among hospital janitors found that the janitors who reported the greatest satisfaction were the ones who thought of their work as caring for the sick, though their job description was a list of duties like “collect and dispose of soiled linens” and “stock restroom supplies.” When these janitors described their work, they talked of visiting the patients who had the least visitors, joking with patients to cheer them up, writing letters to patients who had gone home and might be lonely, and carefully cleaning the rooms of the patients who were most vulnerable to
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