Women Gender Study Analytical Reading Response

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24 | Global women Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

‘Whose baby are you?’ Josephine Perera, a nanny from Sri Lanka, asks Isadora, her pudgy two-year-old charge in Athens, Greece.

Thoughtful for a moment, the child glances toward the closed door of the next room, in which her mother is working, as if to say, ‘That’s my mother in there.’

‘No, you’re my baby,’ Josephine teases, tickling Isadora lightly. Then, to settle the issue, Isadora answers, ‘Together!’ She has two mommies – her mother and Josephine. And surely a child loved by many adults is richly blessed.

In some ways, Josephine’s story – which unfolds in an extraordinary documentary film, When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, directed by Nilita Vachani – describes an unparalleled success.

Josephine has ventured around the world, achieving a degree of independence her mother could not have imagined, and amply supporting her three children with no help from her ex-husband, their father. Each month, she mails a remittance check from Athens to Hatton, Sri Lanka, to pay the children’s living expenses and school fees. On her Christmas visit home, she bears gifts of pots, pans and dishes. While she makes payments on a new bus that Suresh, her oldest son, now drives for a living, she is also saving a modest dowry for her daughter, Norma. She dreams of buying a new house in which the whole family can live. In the meantime, her work as a nanny enables Isadora’s parents to devote themselves to their careers and avocations.

But Josephine’s story is also one of wrenching global inequality. While Isadora enjoys the attention of three adults, Josephine’s three children in Sri Lanka have been far less lucky. According to Vachani, Josephine’s youngest child, Suminda, was two – Isadora’s age – when his mother first left home to work in Saudi Arabia. Her middle child, Norma, was nine, her oldest son, Suresh, thirteen. From Saudi Arabia, Josephine found her way first to Kuwait, then to Greece. Except for one two-month trip home, she has lived apart from her children for ten years. She writes them weekly letters, seeking news of relatives, asking about school, and complaining that Norma doesn’t write back.

Although Josephine left the children under her sister’s supervision, the two youngest have shown signs of real distress. Norma has attempted suicide three times. Suminda, who was twelve when the film was made, boards in a grim, Dickensian orphanage that forbids talk during meals and showers. He visits his aunt on holidays. Although the oldest, Suresh, seems to be on good terms with his mother, Norma is tearful and sullen, and Suminda does poorly in school, picks quarrels, and otherwise seems withdrawn from the world. Still, at the end of the film, we see Josephine once again leave her three children in Sri Lanka to return to Isadora in Athens. For Josephine can either live with her children in desperate poverty or make money by living apart from them. Unlike her affluent First World employers, she cannot both live with her family and support it.

Thanks to the process we loosely call ‘globalization,’ women are on the move as never before in history. In images familiar to the West from television commercials for credit cards, cell phones, and airlines, female executives jet about the world, phoning home from luxury hotels and reuniting with eager children in airports. But we hear much less about a far more prodigious flow of female labor and energy: the increasing migration of millions of women from poor countries to rich ones, where they serve as nannies, maids, and sometimes sex workers. In the absence of help from male partners, many women have succeeded in tough ‘male world’ careers only by turning over the care of their children, elderly parents, and homes to women from the Third World. This is the female underside of globalization, whereby millions of Josephines from poor countries in the South migrate to do the ‘women’s work’ of the North – work that affluent women are no longer able or willing to do. These migrant workers often leave their own children in the care of grandmothers, sisters, and sisters-in-law. Sometimes a young daughter is drawn out of school to care for her younger siblings.

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This pattern of female negotiation reflects what could be called a worldwide gender revolution. In both rich and poor countries, fewer families can rely solely on a male breadwinner. In the United States, the earning power of most men has declined since 1970, and many women have gone out to ‘make up the difference.’ By one recent estimate, women were the sole, primary, or coequal earners in more than half of American families. So the question arises: Who will take care of the children, the sick, the elderly? Who will make dinner and clean the house?

While the European or American woman commutes to work an average twenty-eight minutes a day, many nannies from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and India cross the globe to get to their jobs. Some female migrants from the Third World do find something like ‘liberation,’ or at least the chance to become independent breadwinners and to improve their children’s material lives. Other, less fortunate migrant women end up in the control of criminal employers – their passports stolen, their mobility blocked, forced to work without pay in brothels or to provide sex along with cleaning and childcare services in affluent homes. But in even more typical cases, where benign employers pay wages on time, Third World migrant women achieve their success only by assuming the cast-off domestic roles of middle- and high-income women in the First World – roles that have been previously rejected, of course, by men. And their ‘commute’ entails a cost we have yet to fully comprehend.

The migration of women from the Third World to do ‘women’s work’ in affluent countries has so far received little scholarly or media attention – for reasons that are easy enough to guess. First, many, though by no means all, of the new female migrant workers are women of color, and therefore subject to the racial ‘discounting’ routinely experienced by, say, Algerians in France, Mexicans in the United States, and Asians in the United Kingdom. Add to racism the private ‘indoor’ nature of so much of the new migrants’ work. Unlike factory workers, who congregate in large numbers, or taxi drivers, who are visible on the street, nannies and maids are often hidden away, one or two at a time, behind closed doors in private homes. Because of the illegal nature of their work, most sex workers are even further concealed from public view.

At least in the case of nannies and maids, another factor contributes to the invisibility of migrant workers and their work – one that, for their affluent employers, touches closer to home. The Western culture of individualism, which finds extreme expression in the United States, militates against acknowledging help or human interdependency of nearly any kind. Thus, in the time-pressed upper middle class, servants are no longer displayed as status symbols, decked out in white caps and aprons, but often remain in the background, or disappear when company comes. Furthermore, affluent career women increasingly earn their status not through leisure, as they might have a century ago, but by apparently ‘doing it all’ – producing a full-time career, thriving children, a contented spouse, and a well-managed home. In order to preserve this illusion, domestic workers and nannies make the house hotel-room perfect, feed and bathe the children, cook and clean up – and then magically fade from sight.

The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife’s traditional role – childcare, homemaking, and sex – from poor countries to rich ones. To generalize and perhaps oversimplify: in an earlier phase of imperialism, Northern countries extracted natural resources and agricultural products – rubber, metals, and sugar, for example – from lands they conquered and colonized. Today, while still relying on the Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love. Nannies like Josephine bring the distant families that employ them real maternal affection, no doubt enhanced by the heartbreaking absence of their own children in the poor countries they leave behind. Similarly women who migrate from country to country to work as maids bring not only their muscle power but an attentiveness to detail and to the human relationships in the household that might otherwise have been invested in their own families. Sex workers offer the simulation of sexual and romantic love, or at least transient sexual companionship. It is as if the wealthy parts of the world are running short on precious emotional and sexual resources and have had to turn to poorer regions for fresh supplies.

There are plenty of historical precedents for this globalization of traditional female services. InCo py ri gh t @ 20 11 . Ze d Bo ok s.

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the ancient Middle East, the women of populations defeated in war were routinely enslaved and hauled off to serve as household workers and concubines for the victors. Among the Africans brought to North America as slaves in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, about a third were women and children, and many of those women were pressed to be concubines, domestic servants, or both. Nineteenth-century Irishwomen – along with many rural Englishwomen – migrated to English towns and cities to work as domestics in the homes of the growing upper middle class. Services thought to be innately feminine – childcare, housework, and sex – often win little recognition or pay. But they have always been sufficiently in demand to transport over long distances if necessary. What is new today is the sheer number of female migrants and the very long distances they travel. Immigration statistics show huge numbers of women in motion, typically from poor countries to rich. Although the gross statistics give little clue as to the jobs women eventually take, there are reasons to infer that much of their work is ‘caring work,’ performed either in private homes or in institutional settings such as hospitals, hospices, childcare centers, and nursing homes […]

Most women, like men, migrate from the South to the North and from poor countries to rich ones. Typically, migrants go to the nearest comparatively rich country, preferably one whose language they speak or whose religion and culture they share. There are also local migratory flows: from northern to southern Thailand, for instance, or from East Germany to West. But of the regional or cross-regional flows, four stand out. One goes from Southeast Asia to the oil-rich Middle and Far East – from Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka to Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Another stream of migration goes from the former Soviet bloc to western Europe – from Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania to Scandinavia, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and England. A third goes from south to north in the Americas, including the stream from Mexico to the United States, which scholars say is the longest-running labor migration in the world. A fourth stream moves from Africa to various parts of Europe. France receives many female migrants from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Italy receives female workers from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Cape Verde.

Female migrants overwhelmingly take up work as maids or domestics. As women have become an ever greater proportion of migrant workers, receiving countries reflect a dramatic influx of foreign-born domestics. In the United States, African-American women, who accounted for 60 per cent of domestics in the 1940s, have been largely replaced by Latinas, many of them recent migrants from Mexico and Central America. In England, Asian migrant women have displaced the Irish and Portuguese domestics of the past. In the French cities, North African women have replaced rural French girls. In western Germany, Turks and women from the former East Germany have replaced rural native-born women.

Why this transfer of women’s traditional services from poor to rich parts of the world? The reasons are, in a crude way, easy to guess. Women in Western countries have increasingly taken on paid work, and hence need others – paid domestics and caretakers for children and elderly people – to replace them. For their part, women in poor countries have an obvious incentive to migrate: relative and absolute poverty. The ‘care deficit’ that has emerged in the wealthier countries as women enter the workforce pulls migrants from the Third World and post-communist nations,

poverty pushes them. In broad outline, this explanation holds true. Throughout western Europe, Taiwan, and Japan, but

above all in the United States, England, and Sweden, women’s employment has increased dramatically since the 1970s. In the United States, for example, the proportion of women in paid work rose from 15 percent of mothers of children six and under in 1950 to 65 percent today. Women now make up 46 percent of the US labor force. Three-quarters of mothers of children eighteen and under and nearly two-thirds of mothers of children age one and younger now work for pay. Furthermore, according to a recent International Labor Organization study, working Americans averaged longer hours at work in the late 1990s than they did in the 1970s. By some measures, the number of hours spent at work have increased more for women than for men, and especially for women in managerial and professional jobs.

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countries have become – in both absolute and relative terms – poorer. Global inequalities in wages are particularly striking. In Hong Kong, for instance, the wages of a Filipina domestic are about fifteen times the amount she could make as a schoolteacher back in the Philippines. In addition, poor countries turning to the IMF or World Bank for loans are often forced to undertake measures of so-called structural adjustment, with disastrous results for the poor and especially for poor women and children. To qualify for loans, governments are usually required to devalue their currencies, which turns the hard currencies of rich countries into gold and soft currencies of poor countries into straw. Structural adjustment programs also call for cuts in support for ‘noncompetitive industries’ and for the reduction of public services such as healthcare and food subsidies for the poor. Citizens of poor countries, women as well as men, thus have a strong incentive to seek work in more fortunate parts of the world.

But it would be a mistake to attribute the globalization of women’s work to a simple synergy of needs among women – one group, in the affluent countries, needing help and the other, in poor countries, needing jobs. For one thing, this formulation fails to account for the marked failure of First World governments to meet the needs created by its women’s entry into the workforce. The downsized American – and, to a lesser degree, western European – welfare state has become a ‘deadbeat dad.’ Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the United States does not offer public childcare for working mothers, nor does it ensure paid family and medical leave. Moreover, a series of state tax revolts in the 1980s reduced the number of hours public libraries were open and slashed school-enrichment and after-school programs. Europe did not experience anything comparable. Still, tens of millions of western European women are in the workforce who were not before – and there has been no proportionate expansion in public services.

Secondly, any view of the globalization of domestic work as simply an arrangement among women completely omits the role of men. Numerous studies, including some of our own, have shown that as American women took on paid employment, the men in their families did little to increase their contribution to the work of the home. For example, only one out of every five men among the working couples whom Hochschild interviewed for in the 1980s sharedThe Second Shift the work at home, and later studies suggest that while working mothers are doing somewhat less housework than their counterparts twenty years ago, most men are doing only a little more. With divorce, men frequently abdicate their childcare responsibilities to their ex-wives. In most cultures of the First World outside the United States, powerful traditions even more firmly discourage husbands from doing ‘women’s work.’ So, strictly speaking, the presence of immigrant nannies does not enable affluent women to enter the workforce; it enables affluent to continue avoiding themen second shift.

The men in wealthier countries are also, of course, directly responsible for the demand for immigrant sex workers – as well as for the sexual abuse of many migrant women who work as domestics. Why, we wondered, is there a particular demand for ‘imported’ sexual partners? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that new immigrants often take up the least desirable work, and, thanks to the AIDS epidemic, prostitution has become a job that ever fewer women deliberately choose. But perhaps some of this demand […] grows out of the erotic lure of the ‘exotic.’ Immigrant women may seem desirable sexual partners for the same reason that First World employers believe them to be especially gifted as caregivers: they are thought to embody the traditional feminine qualities of nurturance, docility, and eagerness to please. Some men feel nostalgic for these qualities, which they associate with a bygone way of life. Even as many wage-earning Western women assimilate to the competitive culture of ‘male’ work and ask respect for making it in a man’s world, some men seek in the ‘exotic Orient’ or ‘hot-blooded tropics’ a woman from the imagined past.

Of course, not all sex workers migrate voluntarily. An alarming number of women and girls are trafficked by smugglers and sold into bondage. Because trafficking is illegal and secret, the numbers are hard to know with any certainty. Kevin Bales estimates that in Thailand alone, a country of 60 million, half a million to a million women are prostitutes, and one out of every twenty of these is enslaved […] Many of these women are daughters whom northern hill-tribe families have sold to brothels in the cities of the south. Believing the promises of jobs and money, some begin to voyage willingly, only to discover days later that the ‘arrangers’ are traffickers who steal their passports,Co

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define them as debtors, and enslave them as prostitutes. Other women are kidnapped, or sold by their impoverished families, and then trafficked to brothels. Even worse fates befall women from neighboring Laos and Burma, who flee crushing poverty and repression at home only to fall into the hands of Thai slave traders.

If the factors that pull migrant women workers to affluent countries are not as simple as they first appear, neither are the factors that push them. Certainly relative poverty plays a major role, but interestingly, migrant women often do not come from the poorest classes of their societies. In fact, they are typically more affluent and better educated than male migrants. Many female migrants from the Philippines and Mexico, for example, have high-school or college diplomas and have held middle-class – albeit low-paid – jobs back home. One study of Mexican migrants suggests that the trend is toward increasingly better-educated female migrants. Thirty years ago, most Mexican-born maids in the United States had been poorly educated maids in Mexico. Now a majority have high-school degrees and have held clerical, retail, or professional jobs before leaving for the United States. Such women are likely to be enterprising and adventurous enough to resist the social pressures to stay at home and accept their lot in life.

Noneconomic factors – or at least factors that are not immediately and directly economic – also influence a woman’s decision to emigrate. By migrating, a woman may escape the expectation that she care for elderly family members, relinquish her paycheck to a husband or father, or defer to an abusive husband. Migration may also be a practical response to a failed marriage and the need to provide for children without male help […] And there are forces at work that may be making the men of poor countries less desirable as husbands. Male unemployment runs high in the countries that supply female domestics to the First World. Unable to make a living, these men often grow demoralized and cease contributing to their families in other ways […]

To an extent, then, the globalization of childcare and housework brings the ambitious and independent women of the world together: the career-orientated upper-middle-class woman of an affluent nation and the striving woman from a crumbling Third World or postcommunist economy. Only it does not bring them together in the way that second-wave feminists in affluent countries once liked to imagine – as sisters and allies struggling to achieve common goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.

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25 | Slavery and gender: women’s double exploitation Beth Herzfeld

For many people, the word slavery conjures up images from history – of the transatlantic slave trade, the practice of buying and selling people that the modern world is supposed to have left behind, and of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. But the reality is that not only does slavery exist today, it is expanding. An estimated 27 million women, children and men are currently enslaved around the world ( ): eastern European women are bonded into prostitution in westernBales 1999: 8 Europe; children are trafficked between West African countries; and men are forced to work as slaves on Brazilian agricultural estates. Contemporary slavery can affect people of any age, sex, or race on every continent and in most countries. This article is an introduction to what constitutes slavery. It focuses on bonded labour (the most widespread form of slavery today), and on the worst forms of child labour. It provides examples of the way in which socially constructed expectations can increase women’s and children’s vulnerability to slavery-like practices.

What is slavery? Contemporary slavery takes many forms: bonded labour, forced labour, forced and early

marriage, the worst forms of child labour, human trafficking, and ‘traditional’ slavery. All types of slavery share some of the following key elements, with persons being: • forced to work through the threat or use of violence; • owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental, physical or threatened abuse; • dehumanized, treated as a commodity, or even bought and sold as ‘property’;

• physically constrained or having restrictions placed on their freedom of movement and freedom tochange employment.

A person can be subject to more than one form of slavery at a given time. In some cases, a person is enslaved for several months, in others they may be enslaved for their whole lives, passing the status on to their children. For example, in the case of bonded labour (also known as debt bondage), a debt that keeps individuals or families enslaved can be passed on from generation to generation.

Gender-specific forms of slavery Poverty, greed, marginalization – particularly of women and girls and of minority groups – social

complicity and lack of political will to address the issue are central to slavery’s existence. Although slavery affects men, women and children, there are particular slavery-like practices that are gender-specific.

Female ritual servitude, which is found in West Africa, is one example of this. Under the system of Trokosi in south-eastern Ghana, girls as young as seven are given by their family to a shrine in order to atone for a family transgression. The family believes that if they do not do this, they will be cursed; this ‘contract’ can last for generations.

As one former Trokosi recounted:

I was sent to the shrine when I was nine years old because my grandmother stole a pair of earrings. I was made to work from dawn until dusk in the fields and when I came home there was no food for me to eat. When I was 11, the priest made his first attempt to sleep with me. I refused and was beaten mercilessly. The other girls in the shrine told me it was going to keep happening and if I refused I would be beaten to death and the next time he tried I gave in. The suffering was too much so I tried to escape to my parents but they wouldn’t accept me and sent me back to the shrine. I couldn’t understand how my parents could be so wicked. ( )Anti-Slavery International 2000: 11

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