This poor-little-rich-girl image was crystallized in Lena Dunham's portrayal of Hannah Horvath, an unpaid, post-grad intern in New York who, in the pilot episode of Girls, gets cut off by her parents and then fired from her internship when she requests pay. It's a startlingly accurate portrayal of a real-life problem: Interns who complain about not getting paid are often not understood as exploited labor, but as petulant whiners; bratty if they expect their parents to support them, but equally bratty if they ask their bosses to pay them.

Unpaid work exists, of course, well beyond creative fields and coastal glamor. One can be an unpaid intern with a Nebraska police department, or at a Minnesota restaurant. Young adults in general, particularly students and post-2008 college graduates, face a "job" market that doesn't necessarily promise an ability to pay one's own bills. But if unpaid internships continue to be so closely associated with Carrie Bradshaw wannabes, it's understandable that the issue would be ignored in favor of the plight of tomato farmers.

While many understand the intern to be well-off and female, the issue has traditionally been discussed in terms of class, not gender. But that's begun to change since Schwartz's essay. Schwartz draws a connection between unpaid office workers today and unpaid housework of mid-century married women—even when they worked outside the home, women were underpaid back then, too, and for a similar reason. They were "secondary breadwinners; they didn't need full-time jobs," she writes. "Any financial compensation—'pin money'—was incidental to their crucial place within the household." And like yesterday's housewives, according to Schwartz, today's interns must demonstrate "flexibility, submission, gratitude."

Back then, middle-class married women were sometimes viewed as greedy if they demanded appropriate pay for outside work—regardless of their household income—because it was assumed that they would still be living comfortably otherwise. Women as dependents became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That subconscious belief—that young, middle-class-seeming women are somehow automatically taken care of financially—has persisted to this day, and I believe it's this assumption that prevents even otherwise progressive sorts from taking action to prevent the rise of the unpaid internship.

Today, students and college-educated young women who seem as though they might have parental financial assistance (even if they do not) have proven an easy-to-exploit workforce. The expectation that one will be available to work for free extends beyond those from wealthy families, but evidently not to men, given their underrepresentation in this labor market. And women remain financially insecure for longer and longer, thanks in part to parental largesse and trust funds, but also in part to parental and individual financial struggle and debt.