Maid in America

In season 2, episode 1 of The West Wing, we get a flashback to the time when Josh Bartlett, President for most of the series, is beginning his run for the White House. He tells a poorly attended meeting in his home state of New Hampshire that:

Today, for the first time in history, one in five Americans living in poverty are children. One in five children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking, gut wrenching, poverty. One in five. And they're children. 

That’s as good a reason as any to vote Democrat in the US. Because surely nothing can be so shameful as that desperate, “gut wrenching” poverty, in the world’s biggest economy. It’s true that there are twelve nations with a higher Gross Domestic Product (basically national income) per head, topped by oil and gas rich Qatar. Still at 13th, the US GDP is three and a half times the world average.

That’s at purchasing power parity, in other words taking account of variations in cost of living around the globe.

Somehow, such high income per head suggests that no one ought to be poor in the US. But they are. Boy, they are.

That’s what makes watching the Netflix series Maid so interesting. And I say “interesting” advisedly. It might even be fascinating. But for me at least, it’s hard to describe it as enjoyable for a great deal of the time. Harrowing would come a lot closer to the truth.

Margaret Qualley as Alex with Rylea Nevaeh Whittet as Maddy

It’s based on an autobiographical account by Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. The central character, Alex, superbly played by Margaret Qualley, escapes an abusive relationship with her two-year old daughter, Maddy. To be honest, the series is worth watching just to see Rylea Nevaeh Whittet, who was then four, playing the child – her performance is outstanding.

There’s also poignancy in Margaret Qualley being the daughter of Andie MacDowell who is also her mother in the series. Mother and daughter playing mother and daughter works wonderfully well. It adds to the poignancy of watching the show.

The trouble is that Alex falls between many, many stools. The abuse didn’t leave her injured, so she didn’t feel she could go to the police. All sorts of doors to benefit payments or housing are therefore closed to her. There are forms of assistance she can get if she has a job, but without the assistance, it’s hard to find work.

Throughout the series, there’s a powerful sense of how the poverty trap, once you’re caught in it, leaves you paralysed, with few if any ways out. If nothing else, any escape requires, as a minimum, completion of a huge amount of paperwork, and for that, all sorts of criteria have to be met. Assistance is given grudgingly and made extremely difficult to obtain.

I think that’s what I found most painful to watch. The sense that you’re offered no way of breaking the cycle. That the poverty, as Bartlett says, really is “abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking” and “gut wrenching”.

As the title suggest, she finds work as a ‘maid’, the euphemism for a cleaner. It’s work and it allows her to earn an income, of sorts. But even that it is minimal, and it puts her at the mercy of a great many people, whether bureaucrats, employers or clients. Stephanie Land powerfully challenges the notion that all it takes is hard work to make it in the States. As the title of her autobiography suggests, she worked extremely hard, but that left her in acute poverty.

On top of these difficulties, there’s the ex-partner with whom she also has to contend. That involves lawyers, who are either far too expensive, or of limited value.

Not all of the difficulties are external, of course. There is a brutal honesty to the story and, without wanting to give any spoilers, I can tell you that there were many occasions when I shouted out “why the heck did she do that? All she had to do was” ... something else. But that some of the injuries are self-inflicted doesn’t reduce my compassion for her, especially as I couldn’t help feeling that had she been living more easily, in more comfort and above all, more security, she probably wouldn’t have inflicted them on herself.

At the risk of issuing a slight spoiler, let me tell you – in case everything I’ve said so far sounds too bleak to tempt you to watch the show – that the writer now has a bestseller to her name, with a highly successful TV series made from it. So you can probably guess that Maid didn’t leave me feeling suicidal.

But it did give me a powerful insight into that strange paradox: how does a nation as wealthy as the United States have an appallingly high number of people living in the most abject poverty?

And, worst of all, why are so few people getting serious about doing anything much about it?