Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2005 by Siskanna Naynaha

GLOBAL WOMAN: NANNIES, MAIDS, AND SEX WORKERS IN THE NEW ECONOMY

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. (Henry Holt and Company, 2004)

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild's collection of essays chronicles the gendering of economic relations between rich and poor countries around the world, with the so-called First World playing the pampered patriarch who makes a killing--sometimes literally--on the obscured domestic toil of Third World women's bodies. In the fifteen essays presented, along with a small set of annotated maps and a chart, the contributors take up specific, local conditions, such as the tenuous position of live-in maids and nannies in Los Angeles County, the double-bind of migrant domestics in Taiwan, and the plight of sex workers in the Dominican Republic. The lived realities of these specifically located women are then connected to several themes in relation to global trends in female migration including the failures of (white) U.S. feminism, the propagation of what Cherrie Moraga has called "the obsessive individualism of Western thought" and "Corporate Amerika's cultural arrogance," the institutionalization of global economic inequalities through such international financial institutions as the IMF and World Bank, and the systemic racism that undergirds it all via the logic of late capitalism. Ultimately the collection aims to bring the diaspora of Third World women, and its causes, out of obscurity: to make the invisible visible to the myopic Western eye.

Several essays, including those by Ehrenreich, Hochschild, Susan Cheever, and Nicole Constable, examine the ways in which U.S. feminism, in its predominantly white, middle-class manifestation, has reinforced social inequalities. Of particular significance here is the critique of men's role in the reproduction and intensification of the servant economy worldwide. That is, the freedoms of First World women are accommodated by the migratory labor of Third World women precisely because Western men have refused to take up domestic responsibilities. Thus, as women in the U.S. and other increasingly technologized countries exercise their "rights" to work and recreate beyond the domestic sphere, women from underdeveloped nations must be imported to keep the home fires burning. Moreover, the industrialization of domestic labor through the incorporation of cleaning, child care, and other household services threatens to victimize workers even further as employer-employee relationships are depersonalized. Under this arrangement the "maid-mistress" relationship is eliminated, as Ehrenreich notes, but the exploitation of poor women and women of color who work for horrendously low wages and no benefits becomes, conveniently, a "company" problem.

Bridget Anderson, Lynn May Rivas, and Pei-Chia Lan explore the connections between female migration and the ideology of individualism. As Western media in general and the American entertainment industry in particular spread to cover the furthest reaches of the planet, migration from poor to richer countries escalates, with workers in search of "independence," "self-reliance," and their share of the Western-world pie. Yet, as Rivas explains, instead of becoming "self-made" individuals, their First World employers often conflate their independence with the invisibility of the poor women of color who are their domestic workers. Conversely, in middle- to upper-class Western homes the ostentatious display of domestic laborers can function as a status symbol in a world in which what one owns, the "service" of a maid or nanny in this case, becomes--in a familiar capitalist contradiction--the very sign of one's self-determination. When "making it" on a domestic worker's wages proves impossible, migrant women often return to the Third World, where securing the trappings of Western-world success proves to be more "affordable," after years, or even decades, of laboring abroad.

Other essays, such as those by Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Joy M. Zarembka, Hung Cam Thai, and Saskia Sassen, recount the effects of what could, with some justice, be labeled as the international crimes of the IMF and the World Bank. The fact that many of the poorest countries in the world, which are further impoverished through forced economic "restructuring," are economically sustained by remittances from their exported female overseas contact workers (OCWs) is not news to many, but the exploitation and abuse suffered by such women remains hidden on the whole. For example, while nearly fifty-percent of the Filipino population (by some accounts more) relies on the remittances of its OCWs for subsistence, they are excoriated in the local media for a "care crisis" that has left their children feeling alienated and their husbands estranged. Meanwhile, according to cultural studies scholar E. San Juan, Jr., about five or six of those OCWs return home daily, in coffins. Moreover, while the IMF and World Bank require local governments to cut social services, reduce and freeze wages, and devalue currency in order to secure development loans--forcing the transnational migration of millions of domestic workers--they also keep the whereabouts of A-3 and G-5 (visas for the employees of diplomats and international agencies, respectively) domestic workers "confidential," despite common complaints of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse on the part of past workers.