Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex workers in the New Economy
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild
Granta Books
The author that brought the world a bestselling book on the impossibility of living on minimum wage in the US, Nickle and Dimmed, has once again managed to highlight the problem of a social reality that many people take for granted: globalization. Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s latest book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, takes an in depth look at the underbelly of mass immigration and economic exchange.
With the aim of highlighting the ugly side of these two fundamental components of our times, Ehrenich and Hochschild expose the social costs of immigration. This aspect of globalization is rarely noticed, they argue, because it is the world’s most marginalized groups who are most likely to immigrate. At the same time, their inherent characteristics as underprivileged people render them incapable of exposing their plight.
This group, primarily composed of underprivileged and undereducated women from underdeveloped countries, sacrifice proximity to their families so they can provide them with financial resources by moving to developed countries with substantially greater economic opportunities. Statistics in the book abound, as they highlight the push and pull factors which lead women to move away from their home countries. For example, in the Philippines a local school teacher earns 15 times less a year than a maid does in Hong Kong. For many women, the choice is simple. If moving abroad alone to be a maid means providing their children with the resources for an education, a growing percentage of women are willing to make the sacrifice.
However, the effects and the details of such migration are more complicated than these statistics might suggest. In moving abroad and undertaking, for the most part, the work that the women of developed countries are unwilling or unable to do, these migrant women are altering power dynamics both locally and globally.
The book finds that immigrant women move to developed countries to undertake a very specific kind of labor: the labor of the private domain. This is the labor restricted to the household, which is predominantly comprised of caretaking (for both the young and the old), housework and sex. By participating in this aspect of the economy, immigrant women are allowing women from developed countries to spend more time in the work place. At the same time, in moving to wealthier countries, they are becoming the main breadwinners in their homes. Overall, the book demonstrates this has two very noticeable effects on power dynamics on a global scale.
According to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, by providing household work the hierarchical relationship that used to characterize the relationship between men and women in the developed world has been replaced. Now, the gendered dynamic is not that men are the dominant force in the household over women, but that Western women are in a higher position than non-Western women in the household. More interestingly, however, the authors argues that while women from underdeveloped countries are in a subordinate position within the household of developed countries, this economic arrangement makes developed countries incredibly dependent on underdeveloped nations for their economic success. Without the immigration of women from underdeveloped countries and their willingness to provide specific services, developed countries would be unable to work as they do.
The power dynamic changes do not end there. In becoming the main breadwinners of their own households, these migrant women have replaced what has historically been a male role in their communities, and thus, a marker of masculinity. As a result, women from underdeveloped countries are improving their position at home, although this has come at a cost.
The price of these changes in power dynamics is that the private nature of the work these women undertake exposes them to various forms of exploitation. “An Ivy League professor, who paid her domestic worker $40 a month, slapped her for smoking outside. One domestic worker reported that she was made to kiss her employer’s feet. A Malawian man recalls being forced to bathe in a bucket in the backyard rather than in the home… A Filipina was forced to wear a dog collar and, at times, sleep outside with the family’s dogs.”
The cases of exploitation mentioned above, explain the authors, are not uncommon. Moreover, they do not even begin to address the more obviously exploitative aspects of globalization, like sex trafficking. In highlighting these issues, the book is undoubtedly successful in its aim of explaining the human costs of globalization.
Nonetheless, as a compilation of various articles by leading scholars in the field, the book includes some that are stronger than others. At the more questionable end of the spectrum is an article entitled “Love and Gold.” In this chapter, Hochschild explains that in leaving their children to become nannies somewhere else, immigrant women are creating emotional deficits in their home countries. While the people left behind are surely part of the human cost of globalization, the author’s tone in this chapter is highly critical of globalization as a whole.
Hochschild warns about the risks of making immigration out to be a personal decision, and consequently, a personal problem. On the contrary, she argues, globalization has created opportunities in developed countries as a result of exploiting the resources of underdeveloped countries, and that the immigration of undereducated women is just another example of resource exploitation that will have detrimental effects on the societies these women come from.
Although it is the case that conditions in developed countries are better than those in underdeveloped countries, the implicit argument that condemns globalization is exaggerated. Such arguments tend to ignore the opportunities that immigration allows these women to provide their families. While in an ideal world economic opportunities would abound everywhere, this is not the case. Moreover, the author does not provide concrete measures for creating economic equality between countries so that these particular effects of immigration could be avoided.
Nonetheless, taken together, the articles that comprise Global Woman are less about how horrible globalization is, and more about the dangers it subjects migrants to. In this sense, the book manages to present valid arguments and relevant examples that should push leaders to protect the women that the developed world has grown increasingly dependent on.
