Preview

Women's Work and Labor Issues

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1100 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Women's Work and Labor Issues
Gender and Women’s Studies
Essay Assignment

Women’s Work and Labor Issues

It has been known that throughout many centuries the women’s role was to provide domestic care in the household. During the nineteenth century, modification was in the air and the industrial revolution involved the movement of labor and resources away from agriculture and towards manufacturing industries was in progress. As a result many women were moving from domestic life to the industrial world. The family economy was replaced by a new patriarchy which saw women moving from the small, safe world of family and home-based work to larger factories and sweatshops. Prior to these changes, career options were limited for women. The wife’s work was often alongside her husband, running a plantation or farm and the household. Cooking for the household took a lot of the time out of the day, after the revolution the women’s work was even more as she had to provide prime care for her children and household as well as work.
Labor systems divided immigrant workers by ethnicity so that the experience of European ethnic groups would be different from that of non-European ethnic groups. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was an increase in the migration of women from their homelands; which were Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. They became an essential part of a migrant surge which was responding to the call for cheap and willing labor in numerous parts of the country. (Glenn, Evelyn)
For immigrant women who migrated to North America initially to work, found that they had become settlers and their main priorities became their families and the provision of a comforting environment to their surrounding communities. Male members of families earned very low wages to support their families; which allowed women’s labor to become the main source for the family’s survival. These women manufactured goods that were to be consumed by their families; they were forced to balance out



References: -Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Women and Labor Migration” in Grewal and Kaplan, 444-449. -Salzinger, Leslie. “A Maid by Any Other Name” The Transformation of ‘Dirty Work’ by Central American Immigrants” in Grewal and Kaplan, 449-453. -Watenabe, Satoko. “From Thailand to Japan; Migrant Sex Workers as Autonomous Subjects” in Grewal and Kaplan, 458-462. -Dwyer, Augusta. “Welcome to the Border” in Grewal and Kaplan, 463-466.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Because of this very reason and the unfavorable conditions that single women were put through, most of them would decide to marry and once they did so it was mandatory that they quit their job. A woman’s happiness relied on the ability of keeping her husband content. The Separate Spheres both empowered and oppressed women in the 19th century. Women tried to introduce family values into…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Tilly, Joan W. Scott and Miriam Cohen, who are disagree with Shorter’s points, and they are stating that his claims have no supportive evidence. They argue that no evidence found to support the point Shorter made about women that they were powerless in traditional families. Instead, there are some evidence that showed the women had power within a family because importance of their roles. They point out that vast majority women did not work in the factories, but in customary women’s jobs. Women did not work because of rebalance or to seek for independence, but to add to the family finances. Woman who worked they add only small amount to the family finances they did not make much money. Tilly, Cohen, and Scott proving different point as to why women sought work. Unlikely Shorter, the explanation they offer why women were employed was because the problem generated from industrialization. Industrialization gave new opportunities for women, it also contribute for young girls were sent out to the cities for work. Even though, young women were sent far from home their independence was very limited. Some countries had nuns, who were placed watching and restraining young women behavior and social lives. Women did not make much money and very poor, female got paid significantly less than male did, and female work was seasonal and irregular. Authors point out that young women were deficient income with unstable jobs…

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In their book “Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,” Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild describe the lives of primarily non-white, migrant, and poor women who have taken a part in the feminization of the new economy. Every year, since 1945 and especially during the 1980s, women have migrated from third world countries, such as Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and others to first world countries to work as nurses, maids, nannies, and sex workers. Many of the positive effects of the labor are associated with the money they are able to bring back to their families, while the negative effects often include emotional hardships, such as leaving behind children and facing physical strains while in foreign…

    • 123 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Evelyn Glenn argues that race and gender shaped the development of both citizenship and labor in the United States. She explains that citizenship created boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the sociopolitical order while labor privileged the economic order and determined which groups had access to autonomy, standards of living, and access to goods and services. White masculinity was the norm that maintained these spaces of exclusion and oppression. The shifting requirements of citizenship were influenced by the shifts in labor organization. Anglo men produced commodities outside of the home while women maintained social reproduction in the domestic sphere. As new class formations and conflicts emerged, the increase of a need for wage labor…

    • 189 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dance In The 1920s

    • 571 Words
    • 3 Pages

    During the 20’s, a majority of the workforce was mostly strictly males professionals, although some women in previous years worked it never measured to that of a male’s job. The social shifts in the social environments with gaining the right to vote confused many males whose mindsets remanded in the traditional past roles of women in the home. However one of…

    • 571 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Before the Industrial Revolution, families were interdependent on the roles of each other to survive, and each family member worked together to ensure the happiness of the family as a whole. Most work occurred at home or on the land belonging to the family and there was very little distinction between the roles of women and men, or between work and home. As people moved to the cities, work began to be something that was performed away from the home. Men were considered to be more valuable workers and therefore were paid more. Women were seen as less valuable than men, and were expected to have less of a role in the public sphere.…

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Families could purchase clothing instead of making it at home, buy ready food and canned food as early as the 1850’s as an alternative to preserving it themselves. Americans began reconsidering gender roles in light of these changes and the sweeping promises had been made by the American Revolution. Argument arose over the role of women in society and men generally thought that women should concentrate at home and that due to their loving and caring nature were suitable for child caring and what they referred to as “domestic art”. The man’s world was thought of as tough, competitive and harsh compared to the soft emotional, self-sacrificing and loving world of women that historians refer to as “sentimentalization” (O'Malley, 2004). Through this capacity of logic, women were denied the right to vote, involvement in politics, and work outside the home and were only thought to be capable of working to reform society through child upbringing.…

    • 1542 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Women only job was to take care of children, cook, and undertake other tasks like sewing and raising animals. There was very little changed before the Revolution. Then a woman’s job changed to a whole new concept of republican motherhood. They were still in charge of taking care for the house, but now was given an actual important responsibility.They were in charge of the household and raising the children to be good Americans. This job, restricted women only to their homes and did not allow them to make money, forcing them to depend on their husbands for everything, making it impossible for them to become…

    • 363 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Only among the Irish and Scandinavian immigrants were there numbers of young, single women who settled in America on their own. While some of the early arrivals, especially Scandinavian and German families, were able to fulfill their dreams, by the end of the 1800s, as the Western frontier filled and the price of land rose, new immigrants discovered that they had come too late or were too poor to buy farms. The new immigrants changed the landscape of the United States. 2 Millions of immigrants turned such towns as Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo into cities, and such cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston into huge urban centers. Each shipload of immigrants provided factory owners with a new supply of workers. Immigrant women did not work in heavy industry , the mines, or construction, but like immigrant men they became part of the lowest class of industrial labor. The gap between immigrant mothers and their daughters was especially acute.…

    • 430 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    There have been many great exoduses in the history of mankind; men and women have traveled across deserts, mountains, and finally oceans. And the motivations behind this travel have ranged from economic to social to political in nature, often reflecting an overall attitude of change. Scandinavian emigration since the early 19th century has demonstrated a transitition toward women’s independence and a more prominent role in the economy. Initially, emigrants consisted of rural families, headed by a patriarch, seeking arable lands and better agricultural opportunities. Later, with industrialization and urbanization, many women found equal opportunity for employment in urban areas, expanding their prospects for independence. Moreover, with a redefinition of women’s gender roles and social emancipation supported by literary and social debate, many young unmarried women, as well as mothers, demanded more from life and freely sought opportunity abroad. So, with the emigration precedent of the generations that traveled before, independent women and families escaped what was thought to be the social and economic deterioration of Scandinavia. Thus, through a diversity of employment niches and a transitioning attitude toward women’s gender roles, Scandinavian emigration created occasion for equality.…

    • 2106 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    This essay is concerned with and will endeavor to explicate the connection between globalization and human trafficking as it pertains to transnational crime. My study will present concepts of recruitment and transportation of persons through coercion, deception, or other forms of illicit influence in labor and sexual exploitation. The goal is the acknowledgment of philosophical and ethical tensions in human trafficking, the ability to recognize the power relations through interpreting the question of human dignity, and the assessment of the prevalence of agency in the transnational crime of the globalization of the MS/HT industry.…

    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Migration is a complex issue and it cannot be explained by simple theories that attempt to define the reasons for migration, which ignore important contributing factors especially for women of color all around the globe. Migration not only perpetuates socioeconomic instability, but also reinforces the brutal legacies of the colonization of indigenous land, labor and people. In addition, mainstream theories regarding migration tend to ignore the ways in which colonial empires have continuously created conditions that force people to migrate in order to survive, and as a result, obliterates family dynamics and creates a commodification of third world domestic labor. The commodification of third world domestic labor is one prime example of how…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    And by “slavery” too often we think of past confinements of African Americans or different minorities, in this inhuman activity there is no color category that these victims are put into; no race or gender is exempt. According to the legislation, up to 800,000 individuals each year--80 percent of whom are women and girls--are internationally trafficked or commercially exploited for sex or labor. (Kennel-Shank, April 2006). In their case studies on the globalization of human trafficking, there is one that hits a chord that sounds strikingly similar to the jazzy chords familiar to our home city. Chicago, NFS says, is a place where a club owner can, with a simple phone call, “mail-order” girls from Eastern Europe that will appear in his club by the end of the week. There, they “dance,” which, in the global language of slavery, means sex trafficking. All too often, the victims are at an average of 17 years old–any older, experts say, and the adolescent prostitutes loose their “youthful charm.”…

    • 1052 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Best Essays

    Invisible Labor in Turkey

    • 3804 Words
    • 16 Pages

    Invisible female labor activities are diverse especially in global cities. As stated by Sassen (2008: 64), immigrant women live in bad conditions to take care children or dogs of professional women in those cities. Women started to migrate, became nannies, housekeepers, sent money to their homes within their survival circuits; and hence global cities became new places of low paid, subcontracted women workers’ survival attempts take place. Sassen…

    • 3804 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, women have made optimistical progress towards equality and their role in the society has been changed dramatically since the last century. Many women stepped out of their home and start to work at factories and offices. The number of working women with children has…

    • 673 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays