Big thanks to my gorgeous sister-in-law for sending me this bit, from the New York Times:

Here we have an employer's essay about her nanny's blog.
Here we have the nanny's response.

The employer's essay is just embarrassing (for the employer.) The nanny's response, while admittedly defensive and over-wrought (but who would not be defensive in this situation) is fascinating. First, because it rightly protests the erasure of workers' subjectivity in the so-called "caring professions" with statements like this one:

I take issue with her because she suggests nannies are not workers, that our service is not labor. Isn’t the problem that traditionally defined "women's" work is not considered real labor? Real labor that is valuable? Caring for children is work. It can be great work, it comes with real highs and real lows. Just Like Everything Else.

Second, the nanny rightly calls her employer on her narcissistic fetishizing of singlehood, here (I'm especially interested on how the employer keeps making things personal, and the nanny keeps bringing the issue back to WORK):

It is particularly sad when Ms. Olen expressed "fear" that I would "judge her life and find it wanting." This might be hard for Ms. Olen to understand, considering this article reveals that she lives in an insular inner world where everything is about HER, but I didn’t judge her life. Why? Well, I never really thought about it at all. She employed me to care for her children. Her choices? Her compromises? Not my business. The only times I considered [in] her life was in relation to my employment: Would she manage her schedule so she would stop changing my hours? Would she and her husband figure out if they were staying in Brooklyn so I would stop having to listen to them debate moving to the suburbs? But I think it is also relevant to point out that Ms.Olen's expressed fear that I would judge her life, is really to try to paint me as anti mother and anti children. When in fact, I have consistently blogged about how I want to make professional choices now to ensure that I can be a mother some day…

Third, and by no means least important, I'm happy to see that this young woman has some forum to state her case at all, given that the editors at the New York Times Styles Section (that bastion of hard news) seem to have no interest in giving her equal voice in their pages. After all, why talk about women, class, labor and the right to write when the Sex in the City crowd is waiting for a column shrieking that "The New Nanny Diaries Are Online," right?