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Maid : hard work, low pay, and a mother's will to survive  Cover Image E-book E-book

Maid : hard work, low pay, and a mother's will to survive / Stephanie Land ; foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Land, Stephanie, (author.). Ehrenreich, Barbara. (Added Author).

Summary:

Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. "My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter." While the gap between upper middle-class Americans and the working poor widens, grueling low-wage domestic and service work?primarily done by women?fuels the economic success of the wealthy. Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid , she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society. While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.

Record details

  • ISBN: 0316421006
  • ISBN: 9780316421003
  • ISBN: 9780316505109
  • ISBN: 0316505102
  • Physical Description: 1 online resource
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Hachette Books, 2019.
Subject: Land, Stephanie.
Women household employees > United States > Biography.
Working class > United States > Biography.
Single mothers > United States > Biography.
Working poor > United States.
Poverty > United States.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Labor.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations.
Genre: Electronic books.
Electronic books.

Electronic resources


  • Grand Central Pub
    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES, HAILED BY ROLLING STONE AS "A GREAT ONE."
     
     
    "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work."

    -PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, Obama's Summer Reading List


    At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet.

    Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper middle class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets. Driven to carve out a better life for her family, she cleaned by day and took online classes by night, writing relentlessly as she worked toward earning a college degree. She wrote of the true stories that weren't being told: of living on food stamps and WIC coupons, of government programs that barely provided housing, of aloof government employees who shamed her for receiving what little assistance she did. Above all else, she wrote about pursuing the myth of the American Dream from the poverty line, all the while slashing through deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor.

    Maid is Stephanie's story, but it's not hers alone. It is an inspiring testament to the courage, determination, and ultimate strength of the human spirit.
     

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