Mary Romero

The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream

NYU Press, September 2011. 288 pp.

Just as Ann Crittenden brought us deep into the economic realities of child-rearing in The Price of Motherhood, Mary Romero's quiet, revolutionary book Maid in America forced readers to really look inside the lives of domestic workers in this country. In her new book, The Maid's Daughter, Romero is again the perfect scholar — respectful, curious, honest about her own orientation. She's a listener, allowing the women she talks with to guide the way in which their stories are revealed. In 1986, then a professor in Texas (she now teaches at Yale), Romero met Olivia Maria Gomez Salazar, a 23-year-old Chicana student who approached Romero after hearing her speak on a panel on domestic workers. Over the next several years, Olivia told Romero her story. Olivia's mother was a maid in Los Angeles. Olivia and her mother lived in the maid's quarters of the house, located in a gated community. Olivia's mother cleaned the house and cared for the family's four children. From the age of 3 to 18, Olivia heard the phrase "just like one of the family." By the end of The Maid's Daughter, a reader realizes just how hypocritical, divisive, and thoughtless this common phrase can be. Romero looks at Olivia's upbringing from many angles: the self-esteem issues, the guilt, the economic disparities, the hard labor, the question of who raises the maid's child when the maid is raising her employer's children, the sense of homelessness created by a lifetime in someone else's home. After decades, when Romero calls Olivia's mother so that she can finally meet her, she is struck by the fact that she is known only by her first name. She is also struck by the sadness and guilt Olivia's mother feels, in spite of the conviction that she did what she had to do to give her daughter a future. It's very moving work; thoughtful, sensitive, the best possible use of scholarship to open our eyes.

Mary Clearman Blew

This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir

University of Nebraska Press, September 2011. 224 pp.

In so many ways, this is a memoir of a life lived on the knife-edge of feminism: between the rocks and the hard places that women have experienced forever, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century in America. Some doors opened, were squeezed through, then slammed shut, trapping women like Blew in lives filled with unprecedented challenges. Blew, who grew up on a ranch in Montana and has written for years about her life in the West, was pregnant at 18, married, and able to continue her education, eventually earning her PhD with a dissertation on the comedies of Ben Jonson, with money from her grandmother. After a few years, with two small children, she remembers the anxiety, the first feelings of not being good enough, never getting enough done. In 1969 she was offered an assistant professor position at Northern Montana College, where she taught until 1987. Meanwhile, her family life exploded around her: one marriage lost; another, to a man she fell wholly in love with, was destroyed by his pulmonary fibrosis ; a son who stopped speaking to her for 25 years; a daughter beset by depression; money worries that seemed to never end. Where is there room for a scholar in this life? Where is the quiet time to think? Like Grace Paley and Susan Straight, Blew writes directly and indirectly about writing, about the working cl...