On Feminists and Their Maids: Care between Reciprocity and Depersonalization

This paper presents results from a research conducted in 2008 among feminist women endowed with a “gender consciousness” who employ maids. The use of a maid, in most of the cases cited, is to cut short on marital quarrels related to the resistance of men to the sharing of chores. There is, however, a contradiction in the relationship with the employee: on the one hand, employers are seeking to establish relations of reciprocity and care, and on the other hand, they appreciate the discretion, or transparency, of their employees, thereby giving a new vigor to the theme of depersonalization, treated by Le Guillant in the 1950s in a work devoted to the “condition of being a servant.”