From The Atlantic Monthly:
Youll Never Nanny in This Town Again by Suzanne Hansen.
I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s, and every housewife I knew had a once-a-week “cleaning lady,” the title itself an oxymoron that revealed perfectly the ambivalence the employers had about hiring help. The cleaning ladies were black; most wore uniforms, and all were the tolerant beneficiaries of an exaggerated white liberal guilt that lent itself to diatribes about the importance of integrating the schools, but not to relaxed standards concerning the proper way to wax and buff a hardwood floor.
Beyond that, my experience with hired help came from books and the movies, until I spent several years of my early adult life under the sway of a woman who had always had servants and who had been raised in a house full of them in the Deep South. She taught me how to treat the weekly cleaning person who came to my New Orleans shotgun house once a week: I was always to pay her, even if I was out of town and didn’t need her services (“Just because you don’t need her doesn’t mean she doesn’t need her check”); I was to be unconcerned and gracious about broken dishes or chipped candlesticks (“Whoever does the cleaning is going to do the breaking”); and I was to understand that it was the way of domestic workers to fall short of money, and the obligation of householders to get them out of scrapes. I came to appreciate that the various trials of the employee’s life were very much my business, that ours was inherently an association of unequals, and that decency demanded that I keep that uppermost in my mind and behave accordingly.
More here.