In reading Toronto, she claims that feminists should feel responsible for the "nanny problem" if they themselves have a nanny. I thought her three main points were very strong. Her main points were
1) An institutional setting of a household is a different setting than the market (the market being day cares, child care with multiple children, etc.)
2) Relationships within household are more immediate and intimate than in a market and 3) Quality of relationships are measured by quality of work, so part of the work of domestic service is to nurture and maintain care of relationships.
Going off of the first point, household settings are more so the householder's territory. Things need to be done their way and because domestic caretakers are the owner's employees, they are the ones to say where the line should be drawn. If there is a nanny expected to raise the employer's children a certain way, they better assimilate otherwise their job could be on the line. Toronto also brings up a good point that because domestic service takes place in a private home, it's often not regarded as employment. This may be the reason why child care work pays pretty poorly and is looked at as low prestige, as Toronto states. The second point marks on the fine line between professionalism and getting too involved. Some employers were shocked to think their child care workers were only doing their job for the money. This attitude creates high expectations for child care workers to play the correct motherly role on top of household care which is their primary duty. Not only are they expected to do what the mother or father should do when they are off at work, but they are expected to be the parents as well. This also ties along with Toronto's third point saying that the domestic service worker should nurture and maintain care of relationships with the employer and the family members. Feminists could be held responsible for this "nanny problem" in part because they are advertising that women should be heavily into their careers, doing what they want to do. Some are out there making the bacon, but a possible issue is that they are not raising their kids if they choose to have kids. They are saying goodbye to the motherly role as they dive head first into their careers. Not to say that they shouldn't, but child care is something that they must look at deeply if they are going to choose a strenuous career and choose to have children in my opinion.
Tronto speaks of a "charge" as usually the child being cared for by the domestic worker, or another member of the family. Syfer's essay talks about her longing for a wife. She plays with society's expectations and definition of a wife. There is satire in her essay. The description of a "wife" given by Syfer almost makes a wife seem disposable. Who would want to be a wife if the definition was the one given by Syfer? I think that is sort of the point she was trying to make.
Ehrenreich knows what it's like to do household care first hand. Her and Tronto both make points about the rise of the two-career household and notice the shift in who is doing the housework today. Ehrenreich, different from Tronto, points out that the women of the house are still doing 2/3 of what needs to be done, it's the cleaning that is really getting to be too much. American's are helping feed this problem because they are giving jobs to others to clean their house, clean up what they don't have time to. The biggest problem with this that I think Ehrenreich and Tronto both talk about is the fact that this work has no prestige, it is seen as slum work by some or many in America. The other issue that they all bring up is our definition of a "wife" and our gender roles that are still so cemented in our societal norms.
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