Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land (born September 1978) is an American writer and public speaker. She is best known for writing Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive (2019), which was adapted into the television miniseries Maid (2021) for Netflix. Land has also written several articles about maid service work, abuse, and poverty in the United States. Land grew up in a middle-class household between Washington and Anchorage, Alaska. A car accident at age 16 led to her being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition which was later exacerbated by her financial struggles.

In her late twenties, she lived in Port Townsend, Washington, where she had her first child and became a single mother who worked maid service jobs to support her family. Although she did not grow up in poverty, she spent the next several years living below the poverty line and relied on several welfare programs to cover necessary expenses; this later inspired her writing on poverty and public policy issues. 

In January 2008, Land broke up with her boyfriend and moved to a homeless shelter with her nine-month-old daughter. Land and her eldest daughter occasionally lived in homeless shelters, transitional housing, and a camper in a driveway before securing an apartment in low-income housing. The first line of her debut book reads: "My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter."

After six years of cleaning in Washington and Montana, she was eventually able to use student loans and Pell grants to move to earn a Bachelor of Arts in English and creative writing from the University of Montana in May 2014. During her studies, she published her first public writing through blog posts and local publications, followed by Internet-based publications such as HuffPost and Vox. Upon graduating from the University of Montana, Land ended her dependence on food stamps, started working as a freelance writer, and became a writing fellow with the Center for Community Change.

Land's first book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive, was published by Hachette Books on January 22, 2019. The book—an elaboration of Land's article for Vox in 2015—debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list. Barack Obama placed the book on his "Summer Reading List" of 2019, and actress Reese Witherspoon said she "loved this story about one woman surviving impossible circumstances."

The book has received critical acclaim. In USA Today, Sharon Peters praised the book's honesty, writing that it fills the "with much candid detail about the frustrations with the limitations of programs she relied on. It is a picture of the soul-robbing grind through poverty that millions live with daily." Emily Cooke of The New York Times summarized her review by focusing on the clarity of Land's suffering in work: "Land survived the hardship of her years as a maid, her body exhausted and her brain filled with bleak arithmetic, to offer her testimony. It’s worth listening to."

Katy Read of The Star Tribune suggests, "The next time you hear someone say they think poor people are lazy, hand them a copy of Maid. Stephanie Land can tell them otherwise and, unlike most authors who write about poverty, speaks from personal—and recent—experience." In The Washington Post, Jenner Rogers writes, "Maid isn’t about how hard work can save you but about how false that idea is. It’s one woman’s story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below—and it’s one worth reading." Kirkus Reviews concludes that Maid is "[a]n important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty."