Hey, Don’t Forget: Women Are the Working Class in America

There are more women in the labor force, yet the care economy is still underfunded and undervalued.

A certified nursing assistant helps a women in her care in Wisconsin, on November 15, 2024. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images)

When I was a young woman, I took a job cleaning houses in Raleigh, North Carolina. I signed on with a company, the type that pays you $7.15 an hour but charges the homeowners $65 an hour for the clean. I signed a contract promising I wouldn’t disclose this and steal the clients, but I figure 20 years later I can spill the beans.

My cleaning partner was Jacqueline, who had been cleaning houses for 20 years. Jacqueline taught me everything I needed to know about cleaning: how to polish faucets, dust rooms from top to bottom, how to leave vacuum marks to ensure the homeowner that we had, indeed, been there.

One day, we arrived at a house we cleaned weekly and saw a car in the driveway, which was unusual. We knocked, but when no one answered we let ourselves in. After all, we were on the clock and our pay would be docked if we weren’t efficient.

As we cleaned downstairs, we caught a glimpse of the lady of the house upstairs but she still didn’t respond to our greetings. This client had long been a pain in our sides, complaining to our boss any time we wrapped up early and didn’t clean for the full hour or if there was a hair we had missed in her shower. The hair thing really bothered Jacqueline, who would apologize but point out that it was her hair, not ours. Maybe we had missed it, but so had she.

At the house that day, it came time to go clean the upstairs bedroom and I asked Jacqueline what we should do. We knew the woman was up there, but we also knew that if she complained that we skipped it, we could be fired. “Honey, we go up and knock,” Jacqueline said, hoisting the heavy vacuum cleaner onto her back and heaving it up the stairs.

We didn’t end up needing to knock, because as we headed up the stairs, we saw the homeowner duck into a closet to hide from us. I was flabbergasted and uncertain of how we should continue. But Jacqueline knew exactly what to do. She went straight into the bedroom and started dusting. Then she vacuumed. Then she carefully made the bed. It was at the bed that I noticed that Jacqueline was being extra fastidious, taking her sweet time. She glanced over at me and grinned. “Slow down and dust those lamps one more time, honey.”

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Jacqueline taught me a lot about how to be a working-class woman. “You gotta work hard and get over shit,” she’d say. But no matter how hard she worked, I could see that a lot of things weren’t working right for her: Jacqueline had a bad, persistent cough and no health insurance; she regularly got payday loans to make sure the car she used for work didn’t get repossessed. When we had to work overtime, her kids would have to come with us to the houses—something that could have gotten her sacked right then and there.

Women are the working class in America, and we know it. Women who work in the kitchens, the supermarkets, the hospitals, and our schools have a keen sense of who we are and what’s going on. Politicians are obsessed with the working class—they always claim to be from it and to represent it, but rarely move policy that would help working-class women like Jacqueline. Campaign ads show men in hard hats and men throwing hay, but often forget the women out here.

That’s an odd fact, given that there are more women than men in the labor force. This past March, federal data highlighted in a report from Indeed showed that women are participating in the labor force at a greater rate than men, and also hold two-thirds of current job growth. This is barely the feminist revolution that I once dreamed of, however; the jobs women are occupying are paying less and less in real wages every year.

House cleaners. CNAs. Cashiers and store clerks. These are jobs that have long been considered “extra” and not meant to support a family, as if the way women make wages is superfluous instead of central to our economy. When FDR passed Social Security, women’s professions such as domestic workers, as well as many teachers and social workers, were excluded, signaling that women didn’t need to work or, apparently, retire. But women are now “head of household” as frequently as men, just with less money and significantly less protection or support.

In New Rochelle, New York, Deloris “Nunu” Hogan has been running a childcare center for nearly 47 years—on a phone call recently, she told me that she’s cared for 997 children over the years and isn’t “ready to lay down yet.” As a childcare worker, Nunu sits at the center of a working-class women’s world—her work allows other women to work, but because of their limited incomes, she can only charge what they can pay. What this means is that Nunu hardly turns a profit and rarely takes time off.

Nunu has been in a front-row seat to witness a changing economy. “It now takes…