Families in a Global Context - Assignment Example

Q Until 1990s, the issue of migration of women was discussed largely in the context of sex-trafficking. But globalization has unfolded a new phenomenon of overseas migration of women as job seekers. The book, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild (2003) has revealed there is more to this phenomenon than breaking down of cultural barriers caused by communication revolution and relaxation of patriarchal restraints on the mobility of women. Exploring the avenues that lead to this social behavior, the authors have begun with the socio economic context in which World Bank and IMF- imposed development models have forced third world governments to tighten their economies thereby leaving their citizens no other option than to leave the country to make a living (Ehrenreich, Hochschild, 2003, p.1-5). And what is peculiar about this migration is that “today half of all the world’s migrants are women.”( Ehrenreich, Hochschild, 1993, p.5) and they migrate mostly to take up low paid jobs as maids and nannies. The picture that emerges is that of a new kind of economic asylum seekers who are the refugees of globalization. These women, according to the book, ease a ‘care deficit’ that has emerged in the first world. This ‘care deficit’ was created in the developed world when majority of women who used to take care of the young, aged and the sick of the society shifted their energies to paid jobs (Parrenas, 2003, p.35). Growing awareness about women’s rights and the pressure exerted by a competitive economy were the key factors behind this change. The middle class of US was finding it difficult to balance their budget without two pay checks. In US, 65% of mothers of children aged six, are now doing paid work. (Ely, Scully, Foldy, 2003, p.404). As men were not considerably sharing the domestic work even in this changed scenario, it was inevitable that substitutes had to be there to do the family scores. This brought about commercialization of domestic work and America’s care sector grew to encompass 20 percent of the paid jobs available. (Ely, Scully, Foldy, 2003, p.404) This care work is now being done by maids and nannies migrating from the developing world. The editors of Global Woman (2003) have called this, the “feminization of migration”(Ehrenreich, Hochschild, p.14) While this solves a problem for the first world, it creates a ‘care deficit’ in the countries which these women migrants have left. Rhacel Salazaar Parrenas (2003) in her article titled, “The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families in the New Global Economy”, has talked about the “care crisis” that she found among Filipino children left alone for years while their mothers traveled thousands of miles for a job, a crisis that “pathologizes the children of migrants” and “downplays the emotional difficulties of the mothers” (p.41) Evidence to this has started to trickle in from other sources also as Robin Broad (2003) has provided a personal testament, while reviewing Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, by saying: I can tell you of a woman from El Salvador whom many children (including my own son) in my neighborhood adore, but who bears a deep dark secret: her own two daughters, now grown, long ago stopped speaking to her after cursing her for abandoning them in El Salvador. (Robin Broad, 2003 Summer) Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2003) paid attention to a different kind of problem that migrant women face in her article, “Blow ups and other unhappy endings”. “The most common complaint…from workers is that they have been unjustly terminated, usually following a blow up” (p.48). Problems in cross cultural communication and unequal power relations between the employer and the employee are the major factors that bring about such blowups. In some cases, these women become victims of racism and sexual abuse also. Another alarming aspect of migration of women relates to the issue of overseas sex workers and mail order brides. There is an article in the book which throws light on this process of sexual exploitation. The article by Hung Cam Thai (2003) has explained how sexual trafficking is being accorded legal sanction when countries like Philippines even passed regulations permitting “mail-order-bride agencies to recruit young Filipinas to marry foreign men.”(p.258). All these examples starkly indicate that globalization, as is commonly perceived, has not helped women to become an intellectual workforce. Women, at large, remain an unpaid or low paid physical work force particularly in the global context. Q. 2. In almost all Asian cultures, family has remained the strongest, most hierarchical and authoritative structure that determines the destiny of a human being, particularly a woman. When it comes to the role of women, Asian families have been uncompromisingly patriarchal, with unequal power relations and discriminatory work division. For example in China, the four main features of a traditional family used to be the extended family in the context of its community, filial piety, patriarchy and protection of the honor of the family at any cost, according to social researchers (Brown, Shalett, 1997, p.36). The extended family was the primary facilitator of social support. Filial piety or respect to elders and ancestors and in case of females, respect to the male members were part of the unwritten code of conduct. The role of women in the family was governed by the neo-confucian dictate, “when she is young, she obeys her father; when she is married, she obeys her husband; when she is widowed, she obeys her son.” (Reese, March 2003). The feminist movement in China has been able to bring about at least some peripheral changes to this servitude of women. Parallel to this, the traditional Chinese family-a large extended group with many generations and immediate relatives all living under one roof and collectively carrying out the responsibility of the care of children and the elderly-is a thing of past now. Single child policy of the Chinese government and several other factors caused this change. In the nuclear families that exist in China today, husband and wife live with their children and sometimes their parents and the family more or less retains its patriarchal structure. So childcare and care of the aged and the sick still largely remain the responsibility of the woman in the family. (Brown, Shalett, 1997, p.38) In China, thus the modern nuclear family is replacing traditional family, but in U.S., the modern family which was well-established itself is now under a process of decline and a new post modern family structure is emerging out of it. The traditional notion of man as the breadwinner and woman as the home maker is undergoing a radical change. Sociologists have observed that: four demographic changes have profoundly affected the American family in the past 40 years: the decline in marriage, the increase in marital instability, the change in marital and non-marital fertility and the increase in mothers’ labor force participation ( Farley, 1995, p.6) The women have become more independent which has increased the percentage of working mothers and grand mothers as well as working single mothers in the society. (Ehrenreich, 2003, p.6) This has led to a new phenomenon, namely, the commercialization of domestic activity. Millions of women are imported from Mexico, Srilanka, Philippines and other third world countries to work in homes and nurseries in the first world. It is using these invisible women that the western women are successfully managing work and family, (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1993, p.62) is one conclusion that the book, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy arrives at while discussing the issue of domestic work. It is added as an epilogue to this conclusion that American men are still keeping away from equally sharing the domestic work inside a family which is the real reason that necessitated the help of nannies and maids. Men in families have not taken up an equal share of the paternal, domestic and emotional work associated with family work. Sixty eight percent of households with children have married parents, but women in these homes bear a disproportionate share of family responsibilities (Wilcox, 2004, p.4). It is at this point that the experiences of a first world woman and a third world woman converge inside the family structure. In both the families of the first world and the third world, family work is still considered as the responsibility of women and in both situations, women are compelled to leave the care of their children to strangers and outsiders if they want to have an independent existence. Q.3. A post modern family is a family structure free of norms and standards that govern the existing family forms. To understand this concept better, one has to be aware of the existing family forms and the rules that are embedded in them. The two major and distinct family structures that social researchers have identified in the history of humankind are ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ family. In a ‘traditional family’, production, reproduction, consumption and socialization largely remain inside wide kin networks. These families exist in pre-industrialized societies and they usually survive on land based agricultural units that produce their own food. Care and love for the young and the needy are shared responsibilities in such a system. (Parreñas, 2001, p.105). ‘Traditional families’ are also strongly patriarchal. Industrialization saw the genesis of ‘modern family’ which invented a private space for individuals and also a clear cut labor division between man and woman. Modern family consists of two adults and at least one child who is the biological offspring of the two adults; the couple were married before they had children; All parental and marital tasks were performed exclusively by the married couple; and family members belonged to only one nuclear family and had boundaries that had legally, geographically and biologically explicit ( Elkind, 1995, p.27). The globalization and the global restructuring of human relations is resulting in the collapse this strong family structure also and a post modern family form is emerging: The modern nuclear family, often idyllically portrayed as a refuge and a retreat from a demanding world, is fast disappearing. In its stead, we now have a new structure- the post modern permeable family- that mirrors the openness, complexity and diversity of our contemporary lifestyles (Elkind, 1995, p.1). The increased importance of women as wage earners is viewed as one major factor which caused this shift. “Households now encompass varied social arrangements and relations. They include dual wage-earning households, domestic partnerships, single parent families and divorced families” (Parreñas, 2001, p.105). Transnational families, where the members of a family are spread across countries and continents, are also a new addition to the list of post modern families. Transnational family structures involving highly paid professionals are closely knit despite the overseas distances, as they can afford to travel across, spending lot of money. But members of transnational families involving low paid migrant workers suffer from forced mutual isolation and they are very close to the same as broken families. For them, a family reunification is only a distant dream. Both traditional and modern families offer their members, a strong support system at home and when such families transform into a post modern, transnational family, the effect is drastic in terms of emotional and social security. Q.4. Thanks to feminist movements all over the world, household work and child care which was hitherto considered as woman’s work is now at least partially being shared by men. But there are some figures and studies available to show that when it comes to shouldering equal responsibility, much is left to be desired. The book, ‘Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, has drawn attention to this reality by reminding that in U.S, “men were still found to spend only 1.7 hours per week by 1995 in scrubbing, vacuuming, and sweeping, whereas women still spent 6.7 hours per week performing these particular chores” (Ehrenreich, 1993, p.13). “ In UK, it is only when women are employed full-time that men do more of the un-paid household work, and even then this amounts to only around 27 percent of the household’s un-paid work” (Rubery, Fagan, 1998, p.200) While this is the situation in a countries like U.S. and U.K., where the most liberated women in the world are supposed to reside, there are a huge number of households in the third world countries where women are considered as domestic servants. Hung Cam Thai (1993), author of an article in the book, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, has quoted a Vietnamese woman who narrates her experience on domestic work. She says, “I don’t mind cooking for my husband, but I don’t want it to be forced on me. That’s what the men in Vietnam feel like; they feel that their wives are like their domestic workers. Men in Vietnam never do anything in the house.” (p.236). Sociologists have called this “sexual division of domestic labor” and make it clear that “a general male right to superior personal service and to leisure is evident. This is a source of considerable tension between men and women, but men’s self- interested resistance to change is usually quite effective.” (McMohan, 1999, p.4). The obstacle to change is usually cited as the male psyche but feminist theorists resist this argument by saying that men are prompted to behave like this because it just suits them. (McMohan, 1999, p.8). There are also studies which indicate that working class men do more domestic work than middleclass men ( Hochschild, 1989, p.11). This uproots the general notion that educated men are more willing to share domestic work than the less educated lot. Many women, particularly of the third world, are not even aware of the injustice involved in this arrangement. “Most of the men and women… accept this division as just, and they judge themselves and others according to it” (Gamburd, 1993, p.187). There are many migrant families in which women carry the double burden of a paid job as a nanny or maid and also the domestic work in the after hours without complaint. This is because the concept of “natural caregivers” has been associated with the female gender since generations (Rivas, 1993, p.62). Q.5. Modern nuclear families which came into being at the outset of industrialization are fading and they are being replaced by a variety of family forms which have no uniform structure and which cannot be categorized or named. Social scientists resort to an umbrella nomenclature to describe this new family- the post modern family. This change is visible in different degrees all over the world. But the first world families are the fastest to move towards this transition. In developed countries, the modern nuclear family in which father is the wage earner, mother is the housekeeper and their biological offspring/s are nurtured under the shade of these two grown ups is a rarity now. Families in which both the parents are wage earners, single parent families, families with adopted children and divorced families are a few to name the new emerging family structures. The women in this first world have somewhat freed themselves of the compulsive domestic work. They have the freedom to choose a paid job instead but the irony is that men have not come forward to take up their share of domestic work to balance the situation. This has created a ‘care crisis’ in the first world as described by a group of authors in the book, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (Ehrenreich, Hoschchild, 2003, p.5-12). The First world has found a solution to this crisis my importing maids and nannies from the third world. Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) have ventured to analyze this phenomenon in a feminist angle and arrived at the inference that: The First World takes on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family- pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks. Poor countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman within the family- patient, nurturing, and self-denying (p.11-12). The authors in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, moved on to probe what impact the migration of the third world women have on the families they leave behind. The findings vary from the left alone feeling of the children of migrant women to their husbands being compelled to fit into the roles hitherto considered as woman’s work. Sometimes the migrant women also leave their kids to the care of locally hired nannies. There are plenty of examples in the book when the children despise their migrant mother for leaving them alone. The book has also discussed the creation of transnational families where the “migrant mothers do not necessarily ‘abandon’ their traditional duty of nurturing their families. Rather, they provide emotional care and guidance from afar” (Hochschild, 2003, p.29). Many migrant women are troubled by a deep feeling of guilt though they had left their family behind just for the sake of the welfare of its members. The authors in the book also cited examples of women who emotionally find refuge in loving the kids of their employers as they would have loved their own kids. (Parrenas, 2003, 40) How this arrangement affects the mother-child relationship inside a first world family is also a matter worth enquiring. The stress imparted by the highly competitive paid jobs on one side and the tension created by unfulfilled demands of care and love from the members of the family often turn these first world women into bad employers, mothers and wives. Both the first world and third world women are in fact, “struggling between being the care person who gets self esteem from her job and being the parent who really loves her children,” ( Cheever, 1993, p.22) Countries such as the Philippines have become economically dependent on the remittances women domestic workers send home. They may leave behind men whose skills are in less demand in the west: demoralized by unemployment, some husbands turn to drink and gambling, wasting all the hard-earned money their wives send, leaving the children worse off than if their mothers had stayed home” ( Toynbee, 2003). This is yet another consequence of the global migration of women in search of jobs. In countries like Thailand, overseas trade of girls for sex work is an equally alarming migration trend. The women thus trafficked are needed to send money back to their families on a regular basis. Here, the very foundation of the concept of family-as a shelter and source of care- is being subverted (Gamburd, 2003, 195). In general, it can be concluded that the changes happening to the family structure are putting more and more physical and emotional pressure on women. This can further lead to situations where childcare gets more and more problematic and the whole family system disintegrates. The crisis management must start from bringing more democracy into the family. References Ehrenreich, Barbara, Hochschild, Arlie Russel, (2003), Introduction, In Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russel Hochschild (Eds.), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (1-14), New York: Henry Holt & Company. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, (2003), The care crisis in the Philippines: Children and transnational families in the new global economy, In Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russel Hochschild (Eds.), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (39-54), New York: Stanford University Press. Ely, Robin J., Scully, Maureen, Foldy, Erica, (2003), Reader in gender, work and organization (404), Simmons College (Boston, Mass.), Center for Gender in Organizations, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Broad, Robin, ( 2003, Summer). Finding courage (Review of the book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, And Sex Workers in the New Economy ). Yes! Magazine. 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