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Love globalisation

It is believed by many, that momentous measures have been implemented to improve the lot of women in the West. There has certainly been a sea change with respect to the role, profile and position of women in society over the last few decades. Accompanying this status shift we witness changes in attitudes to parenting, children, care of the elderly and the family structure in general.

A phenomenon emerged in America and Western Europe, during the late twentieth century known as the have-it-all woman. This woman is the very embodiment of success, happiness and tranquillity. She has managed to excel in her career, satisfied every whim and desire of her husband whilst bringing up balanced well mannered and well educated offspring. However, behind the powerful figure of an Armani suited women with Gucci briefcase on one arm and a baby tucked under the other, often lies a tale of the oppression of another woman. Domestic servitude has only been escaped by passing it down to another group of oppressed women. Armies of low-paid women, in America most of them foreign, have taken up the domestic duties along with the dirty washing, discarded by professional women who have fled the home for the workplace. Liberation for female high-fliers is only possible because battalions of unseen, unheard women care for their children, clean their homes and cook their meals.

Many of these women feel that they are juggling their lives on a knife-edge. Their own deep anxieties about their children and their high-pressured lives are all too often passed on to the women who work for them, making them exceptionally bad employers. In America this is a story of the mass importation of a precious new raw material, care and love, from the third world. A recent book (Global Women: nannies maids and sex workers in the new economy, by Ehrenreich and Hochschild) has outlined several case studies such as that of Rowena Bautista who left a village in the Philippines to work in Washington DC, one of about 800,000 legal household workers. There are of course many “illegals” that just go unaccounted for. In her basement room she has photos of four children, two of her own whom she has left behind and two other American employers. It is to these two that she has to some extent transferred her love and care.

Mrs Bautista is part of a chain of oppressed women. She left her own children in the care of her mother five years ago when her youngest was only three: she could find no work to provide for them. The children's grandmother is herself so hard-pressed that she works as a teacher from 7am to 9pm each day. So another local woman is hired to cook, clean and care for the family in her long absence, paid for using US dollars sent back by Rowena. Then the hired cook, in turn leaves her own child in the care of a very elderly grandmother. Rowena calls the American child she tends "my baby". She says: "I give Noa what I can't give my own children." Last time she saw her own son, he turned away from her, asking resentfully: "Why did you come back?"

The distress and damage done to such abandoned children is not being acknowledged. Their case epitomises an underworld of globally exploited women. The traditional roles of women are now being rejected by western women. So who is fulfilling those jobs that they used to perform? Babies still need to be fed. Toddlers still need to be read to. Children still need to be taken to school. Other mothers from the third world are now fulfilling these duties. Their love is bought, they give everything to their charges and yet they are often sacked on a whim, never to see their child charges again.

Imported cleaners, cooks, old-age carers, nannies and house-maids are joined by mail-order brides for men who like the submissive “old fashioned” values from the East. So there is a situation where highly educated Asian/Latin brides are paired up with lowly waged lowly educated American husbands. Along with all this imported affection comes imported love of a different form. The West also has a fertile market for sex workers and sex slaves. Some of whom know what they were letting themselves in for, whilst others would be tricked into their situation or even kidnapped.

The economies of countries such as the Philippines have become dependent on remittances from female workers. However they usually leave behind husbands, their skills are less in demand in the West than the skills of their wives. These men become demoralised by unemployment, many turn to hard liquor and gambling. It is not uncommon for these men to gamble away or drink the money that their wives send. Thus leaving the children worse off than if their mothers had just stayed at home.

The third world work force has been exploited to produce US tennis shoes, US electronic goods, US computer components and that very American export, fast food chains. But now the force of globalisation is even draining love from poor countries. What more does the US want to extract from the poor countries of the world. Is this the final act of destruction and depredation? The West has taken just about everything that was on offer, and many things that were never actually up for grabs. It is now draining the third world of the one thing left to sell – motherhood and sex. What a dire situation humans have reached.

In the UK the stats and trends are slightly different. In the UK social injustice is mainly indigenous: professional women pass their unwanted domestic work on to poorer British women at pitiful rates of pay. Only the richest 20% of working women can afford to buy childcare, paying very low wages to minders or nursery assistants. Well-paid nannies are confined to the upper echelons.

In the US, this topic is a race as well as a class issue: maids are mainly black, reinforcing rich kids' views that black means servant. In origin Africans were brought to America to slave for Europeans. After four centuries, the decedents of these two groups still have the same skin colour and the same job descriptions.

Capitalism has exploited every last drop of blood of the poor and weak. Now even a mother's love is subject to free market forces. A climate has been created of a long-hours culture in which women cannot compete and still be mothers. So in the post feminism period it is acceptable for some other woman to be exploited. The modern liberated have-it-all has it all at the expense of another.

Comment

Some parallels can be drawn with the above scenario with the Maldivian women.They too have to full time and part half of her salary with Indian(mostly from Tamil Nadu) maids to look after their children and perform household chores.In some cases,many Maldivians have to sacrifice their own comfort and privacy to provide accommodation to expatriate maids.And the electric and electronic retailers claim they have household products that can relieve the burdens of homemaking. These are just the symptoms and contradictions of a crooked system and it wouldn't be fruitful to chase each of these issues individually problems rather than diagnosing the fundamental basis from which all the problems emanate.