During my winter break from college, my friends and I went on a cruise to celebrate our hard work. Within this time, we realized what hard work really meant. On the cruise, we engaged and befriended the individuals who cleaned our cabins and served our food. We noticed that these employees served our needs from morning till night, 5 am to 10 pm to be exact.
We spoke to the servers including a bartender who had gone back to the Philippines to see her four year-old daughter, but while on the two month
stay, her daughter had fallen deathly ill, and she had to stay a few extra weeks to make sure she was ok. Upon returning to the cruise line, she found out that she had
been demoted, her title taken from her, and her salary reduced. However, her
duties remained the same.
It was then I recognized what a struggle it must be to leave your family behind in order to provide for them. A separation that causes much hardship and a unreconcilable angst and longing to be both a mother and a provider at a distance. This economic pressure that Global South women make "creates not a white man’s burden
but, through a series of invisible links, a dark child’s burden” (Global Woman, p. 27). Migration is viewed as a choice, the emotional extraction of Global South women as a personal choice, and the consequence of this displacement as a third world child's lot in life.
The book,
Global Woman, addresses this very issue and provides three possible approaches within the first chapter. Two of these approaches were quickly disregarded based on the lack of acknowledgement on human cost. The first one was “all woman should stay home and take care of their own families” and the second one was “a supply
of labor has met a demand—what’s the problem?” (27). Approaches one and two are disregarded because they cease to consider the consequences that would follow should they be utilized. If all women stayed home to take care of their families' physical and emotional needs, how would that solve the financial issue at hand? Also, a supply of labor is found in these Global South women, and there is a demand for this supply in Global North countries, but what are the consequences of displacement for these third world women, what about the people they leave behind? All of this needs to be taken into consideration in order to understand that the solution is not as black and white as those two approaches suppose.
The first chapter finishes
with an approach that leads us in the right direction; the “raise the value of caring work itself”, and that men
also needed to share in the care of family members in order for “care [to] spread laterally instead of being passed down a social class ladder” (28). Whether it be fathers, sons, or brothers who take the time to care for their family members, the value of care would be raised and the idea that caring work should be secluded only to women or become a low-wage job for migrants would fall away or at the very least, start to break down the feminization of this type of work.
There are costs to living in a globalized world, but we, as a society, do not
need to succumb to the negative effects, but instead need to continue to find
solutions to the many issues that are being introduced in this rapidly changing,
interconnected world. Living as an interconnected society means that there is a never ending pool of information to be sourced, culture to be learned, and commerce to be earned, but it also means that "the personal is global" (30), whatever issue affects one portion of society, now affects the entire global community. Therefore, the solution to global issues is found in the combined efforts of the global community.
