Go Ahead. Hire That Housekeeper.

The Christian case for getting domestic help and doing it well.

It’s summer now, and as often happens with a change of seasons, our family is swept up in a new flurry of activity. That means the physical living space of our home hovers on the verge of neglect. No matter how many tip sheets I read or gadgets I buy, one of the perennial enigmas of modern living for me, and probably most women, is how to keep up with the housework.

In her recent memoir, Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home, former Los Angeles Times international reporter Megan Stack wrestles with her own expectations of what it means to keep house. Both Stack and her husband, Tom Lasseter, were working in Beijing when they became pregnant with their first child. Stack had planned to quit her work with the Times and write from home once the baby was born while Lasseter continued his career as a foreign correspondent. The only problem was that she hadn’t anticipated the exponentially larger volume of work it would take to run a household with a child. The obvious solution was to get more help, so they hired a full-time ayi who cooked, cleaned, and took care of baby Max.

Stack and Lasseter spent years in China and later India and during those stints abroad always had a least one domestic employee. For Stack, these years were about more than just getting the help she needed for her (eventually two) kids. It was about turning her home into a workplace and “enmesh[ing] myself in a web of women’s work—as worker, employer, and beneficiary, all at the same time. My own work rested on the cornerstone of another woman’s labor,” she writes.

But it wasn’t just trading one woman’s labor for another. The women Stack hired lived in deep poverty, working for pennies on the ...