Maid Book Summary - Maid Book explained in key points

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Maid summary

Name: Maid
Rating: 4.1 (123 reviews)
Author: Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land

Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

4.1 (123 ratings)

25 mins

Topics

Women's Stories Memoirs Culture

Table of Contents

Maid
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn what it’s like to be a low-income single parent working a menial job in America.

Living in poverty, being a single parent and working a menial job – each of these tasks is challenging enough by itself. But imagine the difficulty of facing all three at the same time – and not just anywhere, but in the United States of today, where public assistance is hard to come by.

For many Americans, this isn’t an imaginative exercise, but a lived reality. Unless you’ve experienced it yourself, though, the contours of that reality may be unfamiliar to you. Perhaps you know some facts and statistics about poverty – but what is it actually like?

In her memoir, Stephanie Land provides an answer to that question. This is the story of her late 20s and early 30s when she was a single mom working as a maid and living on an income of less than $1,000 per month. Some aspects of the story are particular to her, but others illustrate larger realities faced by millions of single parents and low-wage workers in the US.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about

the pressures and challenges faced by single parents with menial jobs;
the cultural and psychological dimensions of poverty; and
both the benefits and the drawbacks of receiving government aid.

Stephanie Land had big dreams before she became a single mother and a maid.

At the beginning of this story, Stephanie was in her late 20s and had recently moved to Port Townsend, Washington – a small seaside city on the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Despite having deep roots in the surrounding northwestern region of the state, she felt disconnected from them. Both sides of her family had lived in nearby Skagit County, where she was born, for multiple generations. But when she was seven, her family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where she grew up and spent her young adulthood.

By returning to northwest Washington, Stephanie intended to return to her roots – but not for long. Port Townsend was only supposed to be a pitstop on her journey away from Alaska. Her ultimate destination was another far-flung city: Missoula, Montana.

Stephanie had always loved books and dreamed of becoming a writer. And ever since she read John Steinbeck’s evocative descriptions of Montana in his travelogue, Travels with Charley, she had dreamed of living in “Big Sky Country” – a common nickname for the state. In Missoula, she envisioned her dreams coming together. The city is home to the University of Montana, which has a creative writing program she had always wanted to attend. But first, she needed to save up enough money to afford the move to Missoula, which was an expensive place to live. Unfortunately, employment opportunities were scarce in Port Townsend, and most of them were low-wage jobs in the service industry. Stephanie cobbled together an income by working at a cafe, a dog daycare and a farmer’s market.

Then she met Jamie. He was a young man in a similar situation as her – lacking a college education, working odd jobs and planning to move somewhere else as soon as he could. For him it was Portland, Oregon. He lived in a tiny camper trailer filled with books by writers like Charles Bukowski and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Stephanie was attracted to Jamie’s literary tastes. They started a relationship, and she moved into his trailer – but this was just supposed to be a temporary arrangement. By splitting the trailer’s $300 rent, they would save up enough money to pursue their dreams. As soon as they could afford it, they planned on parting ways – he to Portland, she to Missoula.

But then, right after her 28th birthday, life threw Stephanie a curveball – she discovered she was pregnant.

Stephanie’s descent into poverty was precipitated by an abusive relationship and a lack of familial support.

When she learned she was pregnant, Stephanie considered either getting an abortion or keeping her pregnancy a secret from Jamie. That way, she would be able to still pursue her dream of attending the University of Montana and becoming a writer. But she was drawn to the idea of motherhood and felt obligated to give Jamie a chance to be a father, so she literally tore up her college application and decided to stay in Washington.

Jamie wanted her to get an abortion and was furious when she refused. He was enraged at the prospect of having to pay child support, and his behavior became abusive toward her – full of insults, outbursts and threats. Later in life, Stephanie wished that she had been strong enough to leave him at that point, but she stayed with Jamie through her pregnancy and after the birth of her daughter, Mia. Though he continued to abuse her, there was a practical benefit to staying with him. His job allowed her to stay at home with her baby.

Stephanie escaped homelessness thanks to government aid – but this aid was limited and came with many downsides.

When Stephanie moved into the homeless shelter, it was the first in a series of government-provided or subsidized housing situations in which she would take refuge over the course of her story. The next one was an apartment in a transitional housing building. Both the shelter and the apartment were provided by the local housing authority, and they shared some features in common. First, they were rather dreary places. The shelter was a small, secluded cabin with dirty floors, dingy walls and minimal furniture. The apartment building had paper thin walls and was filled with people yelling at each other. Second, they were only temporary. They both had strict time limits – 90 days for the shelter, 24 months for the apartment.

Third, they required her to jump through hoops to stay in them. While she was living in the shelter, she had to spend much of her time visiting the government buildings of various public assistance programs, meeting with an array of caseworkers and joining long lines of other people living in poverty. All of them carried folders full of paperwork that proved they were poor, which they had to present whenever they sought aid.

In the US, people who live in poverty and receive government aid are viewed and treated unfairly.

While Stephanie felt grateful for the housing assistance she received from the government, she also felt degraded and stigmatized by the rules and surveillance that accompanied it. To her, they suggested a rather demeaning view of people struggling with poverty.

Rather than compassion, trust and respect, low-income people are treated with condescension, suspicion and contempt. They’re assumed to be so dirty, drug-addicted or incompetent that they need curfews, housing inspections and urine tests to keep them in line. Stephanie perceives this as just one manifestation of the general stigmatization of poor people in American society – especially those who receive forms of government assistance, which are collectively referred to as welfare.

The stigmatization of welfare recipients took a heavy psychological toll on Stephanie.

As she tried to move forward with her life, Stephanie was well aware of the critical role that welfare played in her journey. Far from making her “lazy” or allowing her to be a “freeloader,” it was the very thing that enabled her to return to having a job after she had her baby.

For instance, as a single mother without familial support, she couldn’t leave her daughter at home with a partner or a family member to go to work. She needed to find childcare. But without governmental assistance, she wouldn’t have been able to afford daycare for Mia. This support allowed her to find work as a maid with a cleaning company.

Working as a maid was demanding and unrewarding for Stephanie.

While it provided her with a much-needed income, Stephanie’s job as a maid came with many difficulties. First, she had to drive her own car to each of the houses the cleaning company assigned to her. Because the company’s clients were so spread out, it could take her up to an hour to drive to a single house. This travel time was unpaid, and the company didn’t even compensate her for the cost of fuel, which took up to a third of her paycheck.

Once she arrived in a house, her task was to clean nearly everything as quickly and meticulously as possible – no matter how disgusting it was. She removed the grime from the showers, the urine stains from the toilets, the mold from the bathroom ceilings, the grease from the stovetops, the dog hair from the carpets and the dust from all of the hard surfaces. She went through each house changing bedsheets, fluffing the pillows, replacing the toilet paper, taking out the garbage and doing the laundry – all while navigating unwelcome surprises, such as semen-soaked socks on a porn-loving client’s bedroom floor or blood-speckled sheets on a sick client’s bed.

The work of a maid is physically and psychologically difficult, as is the work of a single mom.

In addition to being poorly compensated, Stephanie’s work as a maid was physically demanding. It required a relentless series of repetitive motions, strenuous exertions and punishing positions, such as scrubbing, lifting and kneeling. It also involved the heavy use of cleaning chemicals in moldy, often poorly ventilated conditions.

This took a heavy toll on Stephanie’s body. She had persistent sinus infections, nasty coughs, chronic back pain and aching muscles, on top of constant exhaustion. But even though her low wages left her in poverty, Stephanie’s income was too high for her to qualify for Medicaid, the government-run healthcare insurance program for low-income Americans. As a result, she was unable to afford to see a doctor. To deal with her pain, she had only one recourse – frequently downing 800-milligram doses of ibuprofen.

Stephanie’s experiences as a single mother and a maid taught her what she really values in life.

Every cloud has its silver lining, as the old saying goes. While it was tough being a single mother and a maid, Stephanie managed to find the bright side of her predicament. She felt lonely without a partner – but she also felt free to concentrate on enjoying her time with her daughter. If she wanted to play with her or take her out for ice cream, she didn’t have to worry about another adult feeling bored or left out.

Their relationship was thus able to blossom, and she felt a growing sense of companionship with her daughter, which mitigated her feelings of loneliness. She realized that she was not alone – she had Mia.

In Missoula, Stephanie found the missing element of the life she wanted to live.

Stephanie continued living in northwest Washington for about five years after giving birth to Mia. What happened to her dreams of moving to Missoula, Montana, and becoming a writer?

They were indefinitely deferred – but she hadn’t forgotten them. She just needed to wait until Mia got older, she reassured herself. Then she would pursue them. But the years rolled by, and she stayed in Washington. What was holding her back?

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What is Maid about?

Maid (2019) is a memoir that tells a powerful story about a low-income single mother’s experience raising her daughter, working as a maid and struggling to get by in the United States today. A deeply personal account, it also has broader implications, providing insight into the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of poverty.

Who should read Maid?

Those interested in learning about poverty in the United States
Professionals wondering what it’s like to be trapped in a menial job
Whoever wants to hear an honest story of resilience

About the Author

On her way to becoming a writer, Stephanie Land overcame many challenges – an abusive relationship, descent into poverty and an exhausting job as a maid and single mother. She is now a freelance writer who has been published in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation and Vox. She’s worked with the author Barbara Ehrenreich, participating in her Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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