Although I do agree with Diane that pre-feminist “women owe so much of their freedom to Electrolux” I actually think that modern, successful, post-feminist, working parents owe so much of their freedom to the poorer women who are willing to take care of their families, raise their children, and keep their home, at the expense of their own families, children, and homes.
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Interestingly, it isn’t always “poorer” women who sacrifice their lives to take care of American middle class families and households. In her article “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” Arlie Russell Hochschild describes how middle class women migrate from region of the world to another in order to leverage the global wage gap, to potentially earn up to ten times what they earn in their countries of origin. For example, it isn’t uncommon for a nurse from the Phillipines to give up her prestigious position to become a nanny in Los Angeles, just because the pay is better as a domestic worker in the United States. Of course, in abandoning their white or pink collar jobs, women who migrate to foreign lands develop a subordinate relationship to those who employ them; as Hochschild states, “…[t]he value of the labour of raising a child – always low relative to other kinds of labour – has, under the impact of globalization, sunk lower still.??? But the global care chain does not end with the migrant worker who leaves her country of origin; instead, she lengthens it by hiring workers to take care of the family she has left behind. In essence, a woman who attempts to increase her financial status by seeking employment outside of her country of origin may very well exacerbate inequality by advancing the course of development and gobalization.
What would be harder for you: giving up caste or giving up money?
Neither, as I have learned not to become attached to either.