What is equality? Can we ever achieve it or is it just a figment of our imagination from a utopian society or more so a communist one? Well to answer these pompous questions one must embark on a journey of self realization and more importantly history. Inequality isn’t a recent issue it has been around for almost the start of civilization. The societies were and still are based on a system of classes and hierarchy despite a few exceptions here and there (which were unsuccessful). This issue is not only limited to social status but as humanity progressed ideas like “white supremacy”, “white man’s burden”, “manifest destination” and many more started to foster among these societies. First and foremost, this inequality was based on race then it further proceeded to gender.
According to many gender inequality is not prevalent in today’s society due to the amendments in the constitution and formation of laws against this inequality. However, there are many loopholes in these laws. The fact that women can only rise to a certain level before hitting “a glass wall” is the living evidence of inequality based on gender. According to statistics the average salary or wage of a woman still falls a few strides short as opposed to a man despite the fact that some women are equally or in some cases even more qualified then their male counterparts.
According to the article “Global Woman Nannies, Maids, and Sex workers in the New Economy” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, western women gained equality and went to take on jobs so they needed other people to look after their children so under privileged, uneducated, and poor women who immigrated from from poor and under developed countries fulfilled this role. Even though some of these “Nannies” are paid a decent wage the still had to leave their own children behind to earn bread for their families. So their children suffer from lack of attention and care while on the contrary the children whom were under the nanny’s care received affection from both their parents and the nanny. The children as the one described in this article sometimes grew closer to their nanny as opposed to their mothers or in some instances they were on equal terms this may cause them some emotional trauma if the nanny left the job.
Some of the women from these under developed countries worked as maids who over exerted themselves to make enough money to send home and to survive on. These women were also overworked by the people they worked for. Some of these women were pushed into prostitution just so they could earn money.
This disgusted me because even though it is thought that if women stay home and take care of the children it limits their freedom and invokes inequality, people don’t see that when these women from the upper middle class peruse their so called equality they are pushing lower middleclass or lower class women into inequality which is even more brutal because they are sacrificing others just to gain their personal interest. Furthermore, in my opinion the love and affection a real mother gives to her child is much more than the love a nanny can ever give no mater home much she can give because at the end of the day the fact of the matter is that they are doing this so they could get money to raise their own family.
Even though the rise of women to overcome inequality is a positive thing and it creates jobs for other underprivileged women it is wrong to over exert or miss use these women.