"Global Woman" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds.

A new book explores the hard lot of America's domestic workers -- and suggests that it's ethically wrong not to clean your own house.

By Michelle Goldberg

Jan. 27, 2003 |

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild are America's preeminent writers on the politics of women's work. "The Second Shift," Hochschild's 1989 book about couples' power struggles over housework, both coined a phrase and ignited a debate over men's failure to share domestic burdens with their working wives. She furthered that discussion with her 1997 book "The Time Bind," which explored the reasons people have come to spend more time at work and less at home. More recently, Ehrenreich's 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed" did an enormous amount to illuminate the invisible but Sisyphean struggles of ordinary women trying to make ends meet in low-wage, dead-end jobs. In the best muckraking tradition, she gave up her comfy writer's life for a few months to work as a waitress, a maid and a Wal-Mart clerk, surviving exclusively on her meager pay, which meant at one point working two jobs and living in a crack-infested trailer park.

So it's hard to think of two journalists better suited to editing a book like their new "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy." This collection of essays details the "care drain" from the Third World, as women leave their own homes and families in poor countries to serve those of first-world, upwardly mobile professionals. The feminization of the migrant work force is an enormously important, underreported subject; as Hochschild and Ehrenreich write, "Throughout the '90s women outnumbered men among migrants to the United States, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Argentina and Israel." Female migrants, they report, "overwhelmingly take up work as maids or domestics." The causes and implications of this are complex and earth-spanning, grist for a fascinating study of how globalization changes even those most intimate of institutions, the home and family.

"Global Woman," unfortunately, is not that study. There are some fascinating insights, illuminating anecdotes and harrowing revelations in this collection, but they're often suffocated by self-righteousness, anger, opaque academic jargon and muddled anti-capitalism. Some of the writing reaches levels of impenetrability worthy of the postmodern journal Social Text -- elaborating on the routes migrant women take to rich countries, Saskia Sassen tells us, "These circuits make up, as it were, counter-geographies of globalization. They are deeply imbricated with some of globalization's major constitutive dynamics: the formation of global markets, the intensifying of transnational and translocal networks, and the development of communication technologies that easily escape conventional surveillance." Oh.

The strong sections of this wildly uneven book offer terrifying glimpses of the abuse of trafficked women and sensitive appraisals of the complicated relationships that emerge among caretakers and the charges they're paid, essentially, to love. Hochschild gives a nuanced account of Filipina women who leave their own families to care for others -- sometimes even hiring their own nannies to raise their children in their absence. She makes the crucial point, echoed by Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, that Third World children often pay the price for women's migration, losing their mothers so that first-world children can have mothers, fathers and nannies.

Too often, though, the writers direct their rage not at the system that drives Third World women out of their own homes and into those of others across the world, but at the first-world women who hire them. It becomes a simple story of exploited victim and exploiting bitch, ignoring both the fact that many migrants move abroad willingly, eager for a chance at economic advancement, and the economic pressures that lead first-world women to work long hours and hire household help. (Interestingly, Denise Brennan's essay about Dominican prostitutes and sex tourism hews to a contradictory line, writing that those who cast prostitutes as victims "deny that poor women are capable of making their own labor choices.")

Since many of the writers in "Global Woman" are attacking the whole institution of domestic service, they don't bother to discuss policy changes that could really improve life for women who do choose such work (and it often is a choice, even if it's one constrained by circumstance).

The book's problem lies, in many ways, with Ehrenreich herself, who too often lets her valiant solidarity with working-class women congeal into bitter contempt for their middle-class sisters. Along with some of the other essayists in "Global Woman," she strongly suggests that the mere act of hiring a cleaning woman -- as opposed to mistreating or underpaying her -- is in itself immoral.

In "Maid to Order," an essay that originally appeared in Harper's magazine, Ehrenreich speaks about "moral losses ... as Americans increase their reliance on paid household help." Insisting that hiring such help is qualitatively and ethically different from other market transactions, she writes:

"Someone who has no qualms about purchasing rugs woven by child-slaves in India, or coffee picked by ruined peasants in Guatemala, might still hesitate to tell dinner guests that, surprisingly enough, his or her lovely home doubles as a sweatshop during the day. You can eschew the chain cleaning services, of course, hire an independent cleaner at a generous hourly wage, and even encourage, at least in spirit, the unionization of the housecleaning industry -- and of course you should do all these things if you are an employer of household help. But none of this will change the fact that someone is working in your home at a job she would almost certainly never have chosen for herself."

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