The article, Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, shocked me because I wasn’t aware that so many women from third world countries migrate to first world countries just to make money by taking care of other people’s children. Of course, I was aware that maids and nannies exist, but I didn’t realize the lengths that women from developing countries would go to in order to support their families.
The article begins by discussing Josephine Perera’s story. Josephine is a nanny from Sri Lanka, who takes care of a two-year-old girl named Isadora in Athens, Greece. Josephine’s story reminded me of the film, The Help, in which black maids raise the children of wealthy, white families. Though Josephine’s story is used to show the sacrifices that women living in poor countries have to make in order to support their families from far away and The Help focuses more on the connection between black maids and the children they raise, both plots are similar. Josephine and the black maids spend their lives raising children who aren’t their own, while they are separated from their own children. The very beginning of Josephine’s story with the dialogue especially reminded me of The Help. When Josephine calls Isadora her own baby, it reminded me of Elizabeth’s daughter calling the main character, black maid Aibileen, her mother.
The article moves on to talk about the “invisibility of migrant women and their work.”
The Western culture of individualism, which finds extreme expression in the United States, militates against acknowledging help or human interdependency of nearly any kind.
This sentence on page 24 stood out to me because it’s ironic how “individualism” and self-reliance in Western countries is what is displayed, when in reality, this is far from the truth. Western countries can’t survive on their own, even if that is how they are portrayed. In the United States, most goods are manufactured in other countries, such as China, Taiwan, and Bangladesh.
I was even more surprised by the fact that the governments of some third world countries encourage women to migrate for domestic jobs. As described on page 28, Josephine learned how to use a microwave oven, a vacuum cleaner, and an electric mixer through a program sponsored by the Sri Lankan government. Although I understand that domestic jobs are taken by these women in order to escape poverty, it was still shocking how governments would actually prepare the women for these jobs. By offering programs to teach the women how to perform these duties, it’s glorifying these “opportunities” in Western countries when the jobs are essentially last resorts.
Lastly, I found the arguments presented on page 32 particularly interesting. The second paragraph discusses how the “globalization of child care and housework” unites the migrant woman and “upper-middle-class woman of an affluent nation” in a negative way. These women are not brought together as “sisters and allies struggling to achieve common goals,” but “they come together as mistress and maid.” In this way, the women who travel from third world countries are looked down upon for occupying jobs that no one else wants to have. A starting solution can be to raise more awareness about who actually occupies these domestic jobs in first world countries, since this issue isn’t widely known. By recognizing this “privilege and opportunity,” more light can be shed on this issue and how to solve it, and more recognition can be given to the women who are forced to abandon their families only to raise other people’s children.
The idea that richer countries depend on poorer ones was unexpected, but after processing all the information from the article, this makes sense. While the other direction is how many people view the dependency, this is not the case for the global woman, as evidenced throughout the article. However, when considering all world issues and not just the global woman, I still believe that the dependency works in the other direction. Obviously, developing countries would still depend on developed countries for resources to help with poverty, disease, and shelter.
The comparison of the global relationship between the women of the first world and third world countries, and the traditional relationship between the sexes was also intriguing. I didn’t realize the similarities between both groups until they were presented in the article, but I agree with the analogy. In this sense, the first world countries are like the male in the family, and the third world countries are like the traditional woman in the family. This relates back to privilege and the role that social status and gender roles play in society. First world countries are more privileged, similar to the old-fashioned male, who would rarely stay at home to complete household duties, compared to the traditional woman. Economic status correlates to gender roles as well, with the third world countries representing the traditional woman, and first world countries representing the traditional male in the family.
