I think on another hand, this illustrates ways in which the upper classes can commodify gender equality- you don't need to actually work out between you and your live-in partner whose role it is to do housework, having to deal with social institutions creeping into your personal life. Instead, you can pay someone else to take the burden of resolving that dispute- if you have the money.

I think the corporatization of housework could possibly make gender irrelevant if ads paired this cheery young woman with a cheery young man. 

The sad bit is that who this ad chooses to portray perpetuates the idea that women do the cleaning, not men. (Too busy? Untrustworthy? Not as capable?)
I did some searching and other professional cleaning services have done the same thing:

http://www.mollymaid.com/
http://naturalhomecleaning.com/ (this one's even eco-friendly!) 

I feel like the unspoken conclusion of the statement "Life’s too short to clean your own home.” is "without pay" as in, why devote your time to work for which you are not paid. There's a subtext that life (for people with means) should only be divided into  activities that are either lucrative or entertaining.

As EmmaGoldfarb points out a few posts down, please do read the chapter "Scrubbing in Maine" in Ehrenreich's Nickel & Dimed.  Yes, it is different to clean someone else's home.  Mopping one's own floor, for instance, is very different from crawling around with cloths on the kitchen floor ("We clean floors the old-fashioned way -- on our hands and knees!") at the feet of a homeowner while she watches you and says only, "Could you just scrub the floor in the entryway while you're at it?"  Cleaning one's own windows, able to stop when one likes and pour a glass of water whenever it's necessary, is very different from cleaning windows on a time limit and being forbidden to eat or drink -- even a sip of water -- inside a client's house.

I think it's interesting that the race and class issue hasn't been mentioned yet.  Because what I'm getting from the pamphlet?  "Life's too short to clean your own home.....IF you're white and have enough money to pay a brown person to do it."  Which reinforces the idea that wealthy or upper middle class whites are people, and everyone else is an accessory who more or less exists to validate those people's life experiences.  I see this a lot from white, upper-class feminists, going back many decades, that a wife shouldn't have to clean and cook.  But SOMEONE has to clean the house and cook the meals.  The ideal is presented as "husband, wife, and children share these duties relatively equally."  But often enough it means "pay a less privileged woman to do it for me; liberation is for the wealthy."  I remember the first time this class disparity was hammered into my head; the book "Then Again, Maybe I Won't" by Judy Blume.  The narrator, a young teenage boy who's family comes into money, marvels at how now they can afford a maid instead of just a cleaning lady twice a week.  Having the twice-a-week cleaning lady was some sort of code for "poor."  But, at that time, I knew exactly zero people who even had a cleaning lady.....and I also didn't know anyone who would be considered "poor."  The idea normalized the idea that "normal people" have a cleaning lady.  I ran into the idea again in a class I took recently about Latin America in the 20th century.  The teacher repeatedly said (and I've heard this before in many contexts, including the United States prior to about 1970) "just about everyone back then had a maid."  My TA had to explain that the teacher actually meant "just about every wealthy and middle class person had a maid."  The fact that most people in the time period and country we were discussing were NOT wealthy or even middle class seemed irrelevant to the teacher and everyone else talking about "back then."  It drove home the idea that normal people had maids up until recently, wealthy people are the only ones who matter when discussing history, and most importantly, MAIDS ARE NOT PEOPLE.  It doesn't matter that there were a lot more maids that wealthy women, and that maids usually don't have maids of their own.  Maids are basically an accessory in a nice house, as opposed to real human beings existing in a real society.

It should be noted that while I know quite a few people who use cleaning and maid services, none of them nor the maids seem to fit the profiles presented in the pamphlet.  Most of the people I know who use such services are elderly working and middle class people who physically can't do the work themselves, and their maids are typically older women themselves who've been doing this type of work since before they were teenagers, as opposed to cute smiling college-aged girls.  I guess it's relevant that I don't know too terribly many wealthy people, but I know enough upper middle class people who seem capable of running a vacuum on their own, so this may also be regional or cultural.

When my middle-class parents lived in Costa Rica for two years, they were told by their (Costa Rican) neighbors that it would be very rude *not* to engage a cleaning lady (and yes, I mean lady), even though they didn't want one and had never hired a cleaner before. The idea was that it was the responsibility of the middle class to provide work for those less well-situated than themselves, and that it was selfish to do your own housework if you could possibly afford to pay someone else to do it. I don't have anything very thoughtful to say about this system, but I thought it might be interesting to those in the discussion. While I like the idea of using your excess wealth to provide employment for others, I'm not comfortable with the institution of class hierarchy that this system represents. I know it was hard for my parents to accept.

I have a bit of a quarrel with this statement:

"But cleaning the toilet of an anonymous person may be less degrading
than cleaning the toilet of someone you have a personal (subordinate)
relationship with. On the other hand, maybe people love cleaning toilets
for people they really love."

This statement should be qualified in some way because many people, including myself, clean the toilets at home, but are certainly not "personally subordinate" to their partners and don't feel degraded by this act.

In fact, it generalizes marriage (or cohabitation) as an inherently unequal relationship with the female as the subordinate; obviously still common, but not universal. In addition, framing it this way erases roommates, single people, and the arrangements of non-heterosexual and/or non-monogamous people. It also implies that a stay-at-home mother, for example, may be subordinate to her children. Although the images on the pamphlet would naturally make the conversation go this way with respect to talking about marriage, I believe it is important to avoid falling into this trap.

P.S. I hate cleaning toilets, but the fact is it must be done and I agreed to do it most of the time.

"But cleaning the toilet of an anonymous person may be less degrading
than cleaning the toilet of someone you have a personal (subordinate)
relationship with."

I did find that to be somewhat true.  Obviously, different situations, personalities, etc. can cause one's mileage to vary considerably.

I fail to see how this is any different from hiring someone to cut the lawn, paint the siding, unclog the toilet, fix the roof, install carpet, cut your hair, fix your car, or cook your meals in a restaurant. Where I grew up, you were expected to do all of that yourself. In more civilized and economically successful parts of the country, you pay someone to do these things, because your time is worth more to you. I see it as progress over expecting that a working wife should still provide a clean house in her off hours.

Perhaps the cleaners could go to college and become sociologists who would clean their own toilets.

Great conversation -- thank you. Those interested in more depth and a few links to other sources might visit the longer version of the post that appeared over on my blog, here: http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/when-theres-housework-to-do/

Riddle me this: Why is the cleaning person smiling? If housecleaning is fun, why wouldn't you spend some of your short, luxurious life doing it? Does her smile undermine the point of the ad -- that cleaning isn't fun? Shouldn't they show a tired, sweaty, miserable worker relieving you of all that difficult labor?

Way back in the 1960s when I was a teenager, I accepted a job as a "Mother's Helper" for a woman who I found out didn't have a children. The woman who hired me was older, and Jewish. The first task that she gave me was to get down on my knees and shrub her kitchen floor. I told her slavery had ended and I quit.

I accepted another job as a "Mother's Helper" for a White woman who lived in a rich section of my city. When I got to the house I found out that two of her children were classmates of mine in high school. We share two classes though weren't friends. It amazed me how dirty those teenagers rooms were. I tried to ignore the fact that I was supposed to clean up after people who I would possibly sit next to in class the next school year. I remember one of those teens appeared to be somewhat apologetic about the situation, while the other one seemed to like bossy me around. Thank goodness I had other options, and I quit that job after the end of the first day because I didn't like being in an unequal position to people who I was equal to in another setting (and sometimes "superior" to since I might get better grades in tests or papers than they did).

If my self-esteem was rock solid, being a Mother's Helper in either one of those situations may have been something that wouldn't have affected me. But this was during the time when it was more difficult to positively affirm one's identity as a Black person. I was still repairing and reinforcing my self-esteem and didn't need the extra assaults those situations gave to it.

I lived in the resort town of Atlantic City, New Jersey where (I learned) Black folks couldn't get any jobs as clerks on the boadwalk-those jobs went to (probably middle class) White teens/young adults. So that summer and the next I took a job as a chambermaid, and the following summer I took a job as a waitress in a large hotel. Cleaning up after strangers or serving food to strangers was preferable to having to clean up after people who treated you like dirt and/or people you went to school with. Because I was enrolling in college, I knew I would have career options that a lot of people working those jobs didn't have. I also knew that if I had been born earlier, and wasn't blessed with some intelligence and drive, I wouldn't have those options.

Thankfully, I never worked in "cleaning" or as a waitress after those pre-college enrollment summers. Instead I worked summers in white collar jobs as "office assistants". Although some of my supervisors were petty and overbearing, I felt better about myself in those office jobs because they were/are considered steps up in status to those cleaning jobs.

I've never had a maid or house cleaner-I couldn't/can't afford one. But having done that work, I'm alert to how those jobs can have racial implications, and can contribute to low self-esteem. Those positions can also cause resentment, and anger at the unfairness of it all. I definitely felt that towards those high school classmates of mine in that one summer job, and I was  angry at the racist "system" of Atlantic City then for not opening up other "higher status" summer or year round jobs to Black people. ( I should mention that it appears to me from my summer strolls on the boardwalk, little has changed regarding the lack of boardwalk store jobs for Black folks, except that most of those jobs are being held by White people, by people of Middle Eastern descent and by people of East Indian descent.

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