seem to suggest that it is women who should change to conform to the capitalist workplace. “By arguing
that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs,” writes one critic,
“Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the
workplace to maintain a commitment to them.”^72 In her belief that individual women should worker
harder, should “lean in” to the competitive world of the corporate workforce, Sandberg’s presents a neo-
liberal view of feminism, in which the “free” markets will produce a fair economy that will enable those
who try hard enough to succeed. Wealthy moms like Sandberg will be able to hire help to achieve their
life-work balance, but her proposals will do little to help the majority of mothers in the United States who
struggle to pay their bills, take care of their children, and engage in meaningful work in which
opportunities to lean in are even available.
We should definitely applaud that a few women have risen to power within the previously all-male
ranks of the corporate workplace; yet we should not forget that the work of childcare, housecleaning, and
other care work is still overwhelmingly a female-dominated sphere—and as such remains underpaid and
undervalued within our economic system. For many professional women, the ability to pursue careers is
dependent upon being able to hire other women to do this work in the home. As economist Alison Wolf
argues in The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World,
“Without the new servant classes, elite women’s employment would splutter and stall.”^73 While the
women’s movement brought massive changes to every aspect of women’s lives, for the women who work
as nannies, childcare providers, and housecleaners, in many ways their work experience remains the same
as it was in the early twentieth century. The progressive New Deal labor policies that brought much-
needed regulation and protection to workers in a variety of employment sectors explicitly excluded
domestic work, leaving it unregulated and subject to great abuse—including long hours with undefined
workdays, little time off, discrimination, and the expectation that one worker can provide a wide range of
services, involving both taxing physical work and empathetic emotional care work. In the twenty-first
century, the overwhelming majority of those doing this work, particularly in major U.S. cities, are
immigrant women of color. Indeed, a 2013 ACLU study of domestic workers in New York City found that
93 percent are women, 95 percent are people of color, and 99 percent are immigrants.^74
It is precisely these women that Ai-Jen Poo wanted to work with when she founded the National
Domestic Workers Alliance in 2010, another example of contemporary feminist activism. The daughter of
Chinese immigrants, Poo is a first-generation American who was born in 1974 in Pittsburgh. As someone
who had been “really passionate about women’s issues since high school,” it was in the Women’s Studies
Department at Columbia University that she got “the opportunity to explore the intellectual work that had
been done around women’s rights and how gender has shaped our world and our history.”^75 After
graduating with a major in women’s studies in 1996, she worked for a domestic violence shelter that
served immigrant women from Asian countries. In 2000, she cofounded Domestic Workers United, a
membership-based advocacy organization dedicated to establishing fair labor standards for domestic
workers, such as nannies and housekeepers, in the state of New York. The group successfully lobbied for
legislation recognizing the labor rights of domestic workers in the state, work that had previously been
excluded by other labor bills since the New Deal, and in September 2010 New York became the first
state to pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. In a job in which workers are often on call twenty-four
hours a day and expected to work around the clock, the bill ensures that domestic workers get at least one
day off per week and at least three paid days off per year, as well as receive overtime when they work for
more than forty hours per week. The bill also provides legal protection for sexual and racial harassment
encountered on the job. After this legislative success in 2010, Poo went on to found the National