Global Woman, edited by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich
Bronstein, Zelda
GLOBAL WOMAN : NANNIES, MAIDS, AND SEX WORKERS IN THE NEW ECONOMY edited by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2003, 336 pp cloth $26 Owl Books, 2004 288 pp...
...and the heartbreak that often follows a sudden dismissal from a household...
...Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job...
...The younger sister, aged fifteen, survived...
...Few realize that the same shortfall afflicts many third world domestics and their families...
...BESIDES THEIR prodigious geographic mobility, what qualifies third world female migrants as participants in the new global economy are their résumés...
...Granted, Hochschild urges that the migrant nannies who fill that gap be given proper respect, decent wages, and the means to enable their children to migrate with them or "to receive all the care they need," presumably in the third world...
...In all developed societies," she writes, "women work at paid jobs...
...Once you have development, she contends, migration is inevitable...
...Most vulnerable of all are live-in servants, isolated in their employers' homes...
...All the same, Bales does not shrink from marking the "horrific" effects for women that occur when all of the above combine with "the new economy's relentless drive for profits...
...the imposition of draconian fiscal terms by international lenders...
...severe cutbacks in social and health services...
...But such exhortation will be effective only if it is legitimated by a larger mutual commitment...
...Female migration and wage labor, including domestic service and prostitution, have been around for ages...
...In general, the stronger the commitment to wage labor as women's best chance, the weaker the inclination to mark the destructive side of globalization...
...But there's another reason that Hochschild's not interested in trying to discourage migration: first world women's professional prospects depend on an ample supply of nannies...
...In yet another challenge to prevailing stereotypes, Ehrenreich and Hochschild emphasize that an increasing number of migrant females "do not come from the poorest classes of their societies...
...Nicole Constable tells how Hong Kong employers use the fiction of family relation to sugar-coat the inordinate demands they place on their live-in Filipina servants...
...The "essential first step," say the editors in their Introduction, is "to bring the world's most invisible women into the light" and to show that they are "strivers as well as victims, wives and mothers as well as workers— sisters, in other words, with whom we in the First World may someday define a common agenda...
...The careers of third world migrant women bear manifold witness to this incursion...
...Their managerial corporate jobs pay exceedingly well but leave little time for life outside of work...
...Having spun this powerful metaphor, Hochschild proceeds to back away from it, as she considers how to make amends for the injustice she has just described...
...Telling the real story in the name of feminist solidarity is the stated aim of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, a collection of sixteen essays by fifteen authors, including the volume's editors, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild...
...In their place are references to "development," with its reassuring aura of progress...
...OBODY WRITING in Global Woman broaches so radical a program—not even Barbara Ehrenreich, who offers the book's most astute critique of the injuries of class...
...For the migrant women who now do them for pay, these assignments are frequently made more burdensome by long and unpredictable hours, low wages, a lack of health benefits, and chronic job insecurity (domestics are commonly fired without notice...
...That's true even of the professionals among them...
...But if radical means challenging the dominant order, such a program is just the opposite...
...It's the recognition of this truth that motivates Hochschild's proposal that we devise ways to enable migrant women to bring their children with them...
...Like Bales, Sassen doesn't allow a recognition of wage labor's real if limited empowerment of some women to trump a critique of the more general "immiserization" fostered by global capital...
...But Ehrenreich dispenses stronger yet...
...it's that they don't want to...
...Of the sixty million female migrants in the world, perhaps a few million have been forcibly recruited and transported for sex work...
...It takes discipline to save what you earn...
...In light of that charge, you'd expect to find considerable resentment toward men in this book, as well as some intensive analysis of male fecklessness and some bold proposals for male reformation...
...Workers are free to sell their labor to whoever has the means to buy it...
...Sassen's essay offers analysis, not remedies...
...WHIGH BRINGS us to the issue of men's absence from the domestic sphere of responsibility...
...Nowadays, for example, most of the Mexican-born maids in the DISSENT / Spring 2004 91 BOO KS United States have graduated from high school and worked in retail, clerical, or professional positions before leaving Mexico...
...Yet it has remained largely hidden from the public, reported only intermittently by the mainstream media, and then usually as a horror story such as the one sketched above, in which third world female migrants appear as isolated victims...
...Contributors to Global Woman point out, however, that maids and nannies also grapple with a difficulty that is specific to domestic service: the emotional strains inherent in "the peculiar intimacy of the employer-employee relationship," as Ehrenreich puts it...
...In the worst-case scenarios, migrant nannies and maids experience physical or sexual abuse, instances of which Joy Zarembka recounts in hair-raising detail...
...sex work" has the antiseptic ring of a business contract...
...Like their predecessors, the expropriators of care get what they want through force...
...Men may often act like jerks, but they are not incorrigible, as even the scant evidence in Global Woman suggests...
...But as much as these measures would improve the lives of migrant women and their children, they would do little to narrow the global chasm between poverty and wealth...
...When Sassen contemplates migrants' female employers, the first thing she sees is not deserving women doctors, bus drivers, and computer programmers who need quality child care but members of an elite whose privileged status requires the support of cheap service...
...Many mothers and wives who do these tasks for free find them tedious at best...
...Noting that almost all the increase in male activity occurred between the 1970s and the mid1980s, Ehrenreich emphasizes the demands issued by women in the period's "chore wars...
...ZELDA BRONSTEIN, a writer and community activist, lives in Berkeley...
...the devastation of small- and medium-sized enterprises oriented to national markets...
...Second wave activists have campaigned for affordable child care and for paid family and medical leave, programs that would greatly benefit working parents and their children...
...Numerous female migrants are single mothers whose children's fathers are of little or no help in raising their offspring...
...Her seventeen-year-old sibling died...
...In short, Bales presents the new economy as a deeply mixed blessing...
...The arrangements I have in mind are those of wage labor...
...The "consequence-abolishing effect" of a servant economy, she says, "breeds callousness and solipsism in the served...
...Ehrenreich's last-minute reprieve of the truant sisterhood exemplifies nothing so much as the "consequence-abolishing" attitude she so rightly deplores...
...Indeed, by the end of the essay, the image of that abyss has disappeared, as has talk of coercion and capitalism...
...Widely associated with the rise of second wave feminism, the wholesale entry of western women into the paid workforce that began in the 1970s should also be seen as an aspect of the new global economy...
...Ehrenreich cites the black poet Audre Lorde: "I wheel my two-yearold daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket . . . and a little white girl riding past in her mother's cart calls out excitedly, 'Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid.' 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 both cases, women move under the press of circumstances that typify globalized third world economies: the dominance of big foreign companies and export industries...
...IF HOCHSCHILD had followed out the implications of her parable of empire, the mistresses of the first world would figure as agents, however unwitting, of the new emotional imperialism...
...But the moral detriment that concerns Ehrenreich exacerbates those hardships by reinforcing the sense of entitlement claimed by the mistresses (and masters) of the world...
...Given that since the late nineteenth century, Americans have associated real work with wage labor performed outside the home, the new terms reflect feminists' predilection for monetized transactions...
...It's also to grasp the urgency of doing it...
...Though migrant women suffer plenty under this regime, the worst victims of "the new emotional imperialism" are their children, whose mothers' firsthand devotion has been sold off to the wealthy parents of the first world...
...Ehrenreich recognizes that the mistress also suffers—from an impairment of character...
...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...
...The moral of this story is that if women want men to do their fair share, they have to ask—make that, insist—that they do so...
...The story broke on Thanksgiving Day, 1999, after the girls had fallen unconscious from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in one of the landlord's apartments...
...Paying people to clean their own homes or—taking this idea to its logical conclusion—to care for their own children or parents or others who can't care for themselves would extend the cash nexus further into personal and domestic spheres...
...The result is, in Hochschild's phrase, a gaping "care deficit...
...But it will take a lot more than paternity leave to reform the men glimpsed in Global Woman...
...Short on time but long on money, the women and men of this new urban gentry hire others to look after their BOOKS households and their offspring...
...Even so, she's liable to encounter snobbery, often alloyed with racism, in the society at large...
...Someone else...
...And trafficking apart, every contributor to the volume recognizes that the new economy has visited suffering and injustice on third world peoples...
...In the wake of women's departure for paid work, an insufficient number of volunteers have taken up the unpaid domestic tasks that require personal attention to either things (cleaning the house, doing the laundry, preparing meals) or people (looking after those who cannot look after themselves—children, the sick, the disabled, the elderly...
...Most female migrants to the first world find employment as maids or domestics...
...It's their "consumption practices," says Sassen, that "generate a demand for maids and nannies as well as low-wage workers in expensive restaurants and shops...
...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...
...In Global Woman, their accommodation of the market can be inferred from their characterizations of the family as "a flexible preindustrial institution" (Hochschild) and "an adaptive unit that responds to external forces" (Salazar Parrefias)—which is to say, the forces of corporate capitalism and industrial culture...
...Witness the trafficking of third world women into prostitution...
...Americans are painfully aware of this deficit's grievous effects on their own lives...
...To be sure, in 1995 men still devoted only 1.7 hours per week to housecleaning, and women were still doing far more-6.7 hours a week...
...In these essays, the globalized economy appears principally as a means of melioration for the gutsy women who exploit its singular opportunities...
...Cooking, cleaning house, and looking after children are physically demanding under any conditions...
...high unemployment, particularly among men...
...They will also have to envision ideals of comfort and prosperity that lead to more equitable outcomes than the ones engendered by the industrial goals of maximum production and consumption...
...Whatever the specifics, family life needs to be given its due...
...It may seem fatuous to speak of a moral injury sustained by the women of the first world, given the material hardships borne by the women of the third...
...On the contrary, they've generally abetted the commodification of personal relations and home life...
...Still more disconcerting is her closing equivocation...
...Less jarringly, the shift from "care" to "care work" has the same morally neutralizing effect...
...Moral relationships, on the other hand, are essentially personal and thus local...
...Echoing Sassen, Ehrenreich contends that we should not allow "the opportunities, however limited," that domestic service affords poor and immigrant women to hide the fact that paid housework allows those who are doing the paying to escape responsibility for the messes they make...
...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...
...A good start would be to demand shorter and more flexible hours across the board for both men and women...
...What draws them across the border to the north is the substantially higher pay than they can get for more prestigious jobs in their own country...
...Whereas women's work and family relations are fleshed out in vivid anecdote and subjected to detailed analysis, the situation of men, and in particular connections between male dereliction and the new economy, go largely unexamined...
...But interchangeability is inimical to moral commitment, which is founded in obligations between or among specific individuals...
...Almost without exception, men here are scoundrels who abandon their children and spouses (if they bother to marry in the first place), harass their female servants, own brothels, traffic in women, patronize sex slaves, and/ or squander their migrant wives' hard-earned wages on liquor...
...In this respect, the book achieves half of its admirable goal...
...Such an approach further challenges popular perception...
...What's true of love holds for any moral commitment: you have to be there to make it happen...
...the guilt that nannies and other professional attendants feel about bestowing on strangers the tenderness that they are unable to extend to their own, faraway loved ones...
...The authors aim their most vigorous criticism at moralizing backlashes against migrant females' assertiveness, while downplaying or disregarding altogether the depredations of transnational capitalism...
...For centuries the powerful have seized gold, oil, and other natural resources from the weak...
...That demand is being filled by fugitives from the pauperized third world, fleeing conditions that their first world employers' services to global capital help to produce and sustain...
...But rather than holding a gun to anyone's head, today's affective imperialists operate through indirect means of coercion, namely, the instruments of economic domination that have so impoverished the third world as to have impelled massive numbers of women to seek work abroad...
...And it takes resilience to do the work that most third world women do in the first world...
...In a tantalizing paragraph, Ehrenreich reports that between 1965 and 1995 American men increased their share of cleaning, "the most despised of household chores," by 240 percent...
...Instead, the focus is mainly on the failings of the first world mistresses with whom most migrant servants have the most direct dealings, even when they're working for a heterosexual couple...
...Yes, people can care for each other over great separations of time and distance, but it's hard to keep it going, as illustrated by Global Woman's stories of how love grows between migrant women and the strangers they care for, but languishes between these women and their own distant children...
...A superficial observer of a mistress and her migrant maid might conclude that only the servant is harmed by the gross disparities between their power and prestige...
...His nuanced analysis traces complex interactions among many factors: breakneck industrialization and urbanization, widespread political corruption, a flourishing sex industry nourished by newly rampant mass consumerism, and a tradition of polygamy...
...In particular, fathers and husbands have not shouldered their share of the burden...
...The impersonality of the cash nexus, "refreshing" to those who can avail themselves of its benefits, is debilitating to those who cannot...
...These efforts call out for vigorous feminist leadership in the first world and the third...
...But she, along with most of her sisterly cohort, misses two of the major tasks it involves: righting the skewed relations between the home and the marketplace and getting men to assume their fair share of responsibility for domestic life...
...The way to make that demonstration, say Ehrenreich and Hochschild, is to BOOKS approach third world female migrants as participants in "the new economy," a.k.a...
...With "the cessation of hostilities," she says, male improvement came to an end...
...globalization...
...This linguistic 96 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 makeover obscures the fundamental differences between care rendered in the context of a moral commitment and care rendered in the context of a monetary exchange, and it does so at the expense of the moral, not the monetary, variety...
...The appeal of paid work extends beyond the freedom that comes with having money of one's own, or, better yet, the ability to pay one's own way...
...The extent to which that nexus defines second wavers' priorities is further evidenced by their talk of "care work" and "sex work...
...But the problem, as she has shown, isn't that people can't see such labor...
...The feminists of my generation," writes one of its most celebrated representatives, "tried to bring some of [this indispensable physical work] into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled...
...Instead, they appear in the sympathetic guise of time-bound working mothers...
...It's above all migrant females' participation in the paid workforce that renders them plausible candidates for inclusion in contemporary sisterhood...
...and the drastic shrinkage of the middle class accompanied by increasing extremes of wealth and poverty...
...Such inequities are familiar to those who labor in private, unregulated settings...
...When labor has become a mere commodity, those who do it are likely to be treated like commodities themselves...
...Global man comes across as an incorrigible jerk...
...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 fact, it is happening everywhere...
...But the extent and nature of that recognition vary widely...
...To cite just one eye-opening example: "Care," writes Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, "is now the [Philippines'] primary export...
...At the end of her essay, where we might expect an appeal for accountability and a corresponding transformation of daily life, we find a mere call to make visible the physical labor "that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat...
...Though she bemoans affluent Americans' unwillingness to pick up after themselves, she also deems the "outsourcing" of domestic work "unstoppable" and regret over the loss of skills such as home cooking and sewing "reactionary...
...Women's lives are being consumed by the exigencies of paid work, be they the requisites of advancement in a prestigious institutional career or the terms of employment in a deadend domestic job...
...When the service has been rendered and the price paid, both sides are free to go their separate ways...
...THAT SAID, the job remains to be done...
...Ehrenreich points, unsteadily, to this double mission...
...And however fortunate a migrant worker's situation, she still has to cope with the first 92 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 world's general disdain for domestic work...
...Migrant women thus confront the same child care issues as do their first world counterparts, with the difficulties exacerbated by separations spanning hundreds or thousands of miles and lasting months or years...
...Ehrenreich's iconoclasm is, however, erratic...
...Nor does Bales blame sex slavery in Thailand exclusively on the country's globalized economy...
...nowadays, she says, they also extract love, or its facsimile...
...Along the same lines, Ehrenreich commends the "radical" character of the "wages for housework" campaign mounted by Marxist feminists in the early seventies and rues its decline...
...As for reforBOOKS mation: Hochschild cites Norway, where employed men are eligible for a year's paternity leave at 90 percent pay, as "a model to the world...
...Those who want to see the women of the poor "south" struggle with, instead of against, their sisters in the rich "north" will have to dispute the legitimacy of corporate authority and capital mobility and contrive alternative legal and economic modes of enterprise that can be held democratically accountable...
...What they haven't defended is unpaid moral commitment...
...What's truly new about the new economy is its scope—the unprecedented spread of forprofit exchange and the cash nexus into human affairs—and the speed at which this monetized system expands and operates...
...It's also the one of the four that does not view freedom from the vantage of second wave feminism, proceeding instead from the broader perspective of antislavery activism...
...Often the major if not the sole source of their family's financial support, migrant women can earn significantly more as a maid or a nanny in the first world than in any occupation available to them in their third world homes...
...Two jobs, actually—recovering the work that makes the earth a home and recovering the feminism that respects such work and the people who do it...
...The essential point, though, is that men changed for the better...
...Bales recognizes that industrialization has benefited women by affording them unprecedented opportunities for education and gainful employment, to the point where procurers are having trouble recruiting poor and ignorant Thai girls into prostitution...
...But the accounts here indicate that migrant mothers' lengthy removals usually signify exceptional dedication, above all to their children...
...In any case, shirking housework and child-rearing appears to be the least of men's offenses...
...Indeed," he writes, "the work of the modern slaveholder is best seen not as aberrant criminality but as a perfect example of disinterested capitalism...
...The pivotal tension no longer revolves around the "growing split between the rich and the poor" but the gap between the number of hours in a day and the cumulative demands of child care and career-building...
...Remittances—mostly from migrant domestic workers—constitute the economy's largest source of foreign currency, totaling almost $7 billion in 1999...
...To read Global Woman is to begin to see the work— paid and unpaid, mental and physical—that will be required for such leadership to emerge...
...By contrast, the ambiguities of globalization get short shrift, when they get any attention at all, in Salazar Parreflas's examination of the care crisis in the Philippines, Michele Gamburd's portrait of shifting gender relations in Sri Lanka, and Denise Brennan's study of prostitutes in the Dominican Republic...
...But it would be a mistake to regard trafficking as merely a repulsive sidebar of the more heartening main story about migration...
...Trafficking is of course roundly condemned in Global Woman...
...For most men and women, that means the commitment of marriage, an institution that second wave feminists have generally neglected, not to say, scorned...
...Saskia Sassen's less reassuring commentary offers a foil for the circumventions of this feminist discourse...
...DISSENT / Spring 2004 a 97...
...Today many feminists often equate personal empowerment with the ability to draw a paycheck...
...Presumably, the use of these neologisms is intended to elevate the activities they designate, otherwise known as care and prostitution...
...Global Woman aims to show, however, that third world female migrants not only face the same situation as their first world sisters but face it in the same manner: with determination ("as strivers") and with a strong commitment to family ("as mothers and wives...
...And because marriage vows, like other promises, stand the best chance of being upheld when the pledges at hand are practicable, women need to campaign for changes in the conditions of employment that will enable working men to come through at home...
...Redressing the new imperialism would mean restoring migrant mothers' love to their children, a restitution that can be accomplished only by enabling mothers and children to stay together...
...Homing in on the "global cities" where the management of the new economy is concentrated, Sassen marks the rise of a "transnational professional class" of global administrators...
...Because monetary relationships are essentially impersonal, they can be transacted and sustained over great distances...
...This is strong medicine...
...In the whole book, which presents the findings of fifteen authors who range across continents and cultures, there's only one example of a domestically active male—an unmarried, unemployed, and hence socially marginal Sri Lankan who keeps house for his mother and the children of his sister-in-law, who works as a domestic servant in the Middle East...
...When local manufacturing and agriculture no longer provide jobs, profits or government revenue," writes Sassen, "a once marginal economic wellspring industry becomes a far more important one...
...Folding heartrending sketches of migrant mothers separated from their children by years and miles into a larger, statistically detailed picture of "the growing split between the global rich and poor," Hochschild proposes that we regard the wholesale removal of third world women to first world nurseries as a new form of imperialism...
...Not just sex slavery, but the larger phenomenon that sex 90 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 slavery exemplifies in the extreme: activities formerly undertaken by first world women in their homes for free—keeping house, caring for dependents, having sex with a man—are increasingly being performed by third world women for a price, with unsettling effects on both servants and those they serve...
...Migrant women typically send home "anywhere from half to nearly all of what they earn," a figure that is all the more impressive given the meagerness of their wages...
...If she's lucky, her employers are people who treat servants with respect...
...So, FOR EXAMPLE, of the four essays that focus on migrants' places of origin, only one, Kevin Bales's study of sex slavery in Thailand, draws out the structural connections between female migration and the exigencies of unrestrained industrial capitalism...
...Meaning, as she goes on to say, "loving paid child care...
...GLOBAL WOMAN : NANNIES, MAIDS, AND SEX WORKERS IN THE NEW ECONOMY edited by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2003, 336 pp cloth $26 Owl Books, 2004 288 pp paper $15 THE MOST LURID news story to come out of Berkeley, California, in the past few years was the tale of two teenage sisters brought to town from their home in rural India by a wealthy, middle-aged Berkeley landlord, also of Indian origin, to provide him with cheap labor and forced sex...
...According to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, the crisis in care is basically men's fault...
...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...
...Besides liberating individuals from obligations to particular people and places, the cash nexus facilitates the recBOOKS ognition of merit based on objective standards: you first get the job and then get paid for doing it because you can do it, not because of your personal relation to your employer...
...But insofar as it ties the privileged status of first world women to the prerogatives of corporate capitalism and industrial culture, her discussion suggests the formidable challenges that await feminists seeking mutuality between migrant women and their female employers...
...She calls this option "ideal" but unrealistic...
...This change, profound and vast, involves tens of millions of people...
...The most obvious solution, Hochschild concedes, would be to increase opportunity in the third world to such an extent that there would be no economic advantage in leaving...
...If it can happen here," said American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Jayashri Srikantiah, "it can happen anywhere...
...If we want de94 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 veloped societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children...
...Instead, these writings expose contemporary feminism's difficulties in bridging the oppositions that now divide the rich and the poor women of the earth...
...For some women, migration does offer a way out of a bad marriage or other undesired personal relationships...
...By providing an abstract medium that expresses equivalencies among essentially disparate objects, money fosters interchangeability...
...The spatial qualities of these two modes are similarly disparate...
...This is perhaps the least considered subject in Global Woman, which is odd in light of the importance it's assigned...
...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...
...In Global Woman's most comprehensive overview of women, work, and the new economy, Saskia Sassen emphasizes that the conditions that foster trafficking are at bottom the same ones that motivate less vulnerable, more resourceful third world women to choose to leave home in search of a livelihood...
...She assails academic feminists for having lost interest in "the politics of housework" because, like "a sizeable portion of the nation's opinion makers and culture producers," they've stopped cleaning their own homes and started hiring somebody else to do it for them...
...massive and growing government debt...
...Given DISSENT / Spring 2004 • 95 BOOKS that, unlike class issues, these are matters around which the working women of the first and third worlds could even now take a joint stand, a feminism that neglects them is particularly remiss...
...Those who are employed by one of the corporate cleaning services, reports Ehrenreich in her essay on housework, are subjected to "punishing," Taylorized regimens...
...There's also the latitude afforded by what Ehrenreich calls "the refreshing impersonality of capitalism...
...Other contributors describe the genuine affection that frequently springs up between paid caregivers and their charges...
...It takes courage to choose to leave home to seek work in a strange place...
...Inspired by a vision of independent working women, second wave feminists have been far less forthcoming about the inherent constraints of wage labor...
...Prostitution" carries a moral charge...
...DISSENT / Spring 2004 • 93 BOOKS But it's when those depredations are acknowledged and subsequently discounted, as they are in Arlie Hochschild's article on cash and care in the new economy, that the obfuscating effects of contemporary feminism's faith in wage labor are most evident...
Vol. 51 • April 2004 • No. 2
