Working for the (Wo)Man
Nowhere Woman by Zelda Bronstein
A review of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
The women featured in advertisements for the new economy, familiar to American television viewers and magazine readers, are neither nannies nor maids, and certainly not “sex workers,” but stylish executives wielding credit cards and cell phones as they take in the view from a luxury hotel room or run to catch a plane or taxi. In the very different reality disclosed in this book, globalization also involves the movement of a much larger and humbler set of female travelers, the estimated sixty million women who currently make up half the world’s migrants. The members of this huge group traverse four major routes: Central and South America to the United States and Canada, the former Soviet bloc to Western Europe, Southeast Asia to the Middle and Far East, and Africa to Europe.
Besides their prodigious geographic mobility, what qualifies third world female migrants as participants in the new global economy are their resumes. Female migration and wage labor, including domestic service and prostitution, have been around for ages. What’s truly new about the new economy is its scope - the unprecedented spread of for-profit exchange and the cash nexus into human affairs - and the speed at which this monetized system expands and operates. The careers of third world migrant women bear manifold witness to this incursion. Most female migrants to the first world find employment as maids or domestics. The need for their services is largely occasioned by the fact that those who formerly did the work for free, their first world female employers, have themselves moved into the full-time labor market.
After reading Global Woman, it’s hard for one to see the third world female migrants in our midst as victimized drudges or, worse yet, not to see them at all. In this respect, the book achieves half of its admirable goal. As envisioned by its editors, however, Global Woman would not only illuminate the truth of migrant females’ lives, but through such illuminations, enable first world feminists to perceive these women as sisters with whom they could make common cause. Instead, these writings expose contemporary feminism’s difficulties in bridging the oppositions that now divide the rich and the poor women of the earth. The essays here leave the impression that second wave feminists are deeply invested in prevailing economic and social arrangements, to the extent that even when they discern the injustice of those arrangements, they cannot bring themselves to demand, much less to undertake, their overhaul.
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