Charlotte McCarthy
Prof. Rifkin
10.30.17
Choice Versus Coercion In Arlie Russell Hochschild’s, “Love and Gold,” she depicts the economic influences that turn choices of mothers in Third World countries into a precondition. Similarly, in Toni Morrison’s, Sula, a recurring theme of the struggle between independence, the ability to choose, and doing what’s best for others, or coerced decisions, is imminent throughout the entire novel and revolved around the main character, Sula. Often times the factor that weighs down choice is responsibility. Choices are seemingly infinite until you factor in what choices will affect which people and why. Both mothers and caregivers have to put their dependent before themselves, therefore limiting their
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This large disparity in pay encourages the discerning idea that children living in the Third World might be better off without a mother physically with them. Survival is dependent on funds for necessities rather than love and affection. When mothers can’t provide both money and affection for their family simultaneously, they face reality and choose one. And while it may be sad, the obvious choice is that which will nourish their family more effectively, money. While these mothers choose to move to First world countries, no other wants to abandon their children, Hochschild says, “most [mothers] feel the separation acutely, expressing guilt and remorse to the researchers who interview them” (Hochschild 21). However, economic predicaments coerce these choices. Hochschild depicts these economically coerced choices by sharing the story Rowena Bautista a Filipino mother who left her own children to nanny two new children in the United States. By choosing to provide for her family Rowena has consequently missed watching her children grow up. She has even missed holidays with her children, and in turn, the bond between her and her children suffers. While First World mothers are returning to work to provide for their children, Third World immigrant caregivers are filling
Does your marriage still felicity as same as your dating time with your wife? Most of people’s love is affected by children, work and stress after married. Therefore, more and more family was broken, only 30% people get happy marriage. In essay “Masters of Love” by Emily Esfahani Smith, She introduced two kinds of couples that is the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years, but the disasters were broken up or had really bad marriages. Those people who are masters all have a same characteristic that is they understand how to use kindness to manage their marriage, so I extent Smith’s claim “Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated---feel loved.”
To begin with, Sacrificing Families by Leisy J. Abrego, draws on the narratives of many Salvadorian families to tell the stories on how illegality and gender shape their lives. In Chapter five, Abrego accurately captures the gender roles of immigrant parents in transnational families. Abrego makes it clear that there are inequalities between genders, men have always been privileged individuals, and regardless of the work, they make more money when compared to women. Through her interviews Abrego provides evidence for the structural reality of gender-stratified opportunities and the gender roles that benefit men and constrain women. According to Abrego, “For women, the three most common occupational sectors were domestic, garment and hotel house-keeping work (102). With this we can see that how the occupations of women are tied to their gender roles. Women are supposed to stay at home, clean the house, and nurture.
In the novel, Divided By Borders; Mexican Migrants And Their Children by author Joanna Derby, accessed in November 2017 summarizes the main ideas of the effects on transnational family relationships over time and the adaption of the family system. Derby explains her motivation into creating the novel is sparked by her own divided family experience and the emotional aspects that tie to real life connections to audiences who may relate or lack knowledge of. Derby effectively designs her research based on 12 groups of families; this gives the audience the interpretation of the children's side and the migrant parents leaving them to caregivers. The novel utilizes interviews to showcase the children's point of view on their parent's migration
(Hochschild, 20). Ehrenreich and Hochschild explain this as a “care deficit.” This is the shortage of care available to a woman in a First World country, whereas women are entering the workforce, it “pulls migrants from the Third World and postcommunist nations; poverty pushes them.” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 8). As described in “Love and Gold” by Hochschild, this care deficit makes love and care into “the new gold” (26). Once, gold was traded and sold to others, but the growing need for domestic help has caused that to be referred to as the new gold. Women in America, for example, are joining the work force that has been primarily male dominated. Instead of having to stay at home with the kids, this woman is busy with her work life and must hire someone to clean her home and to give her children the love she cannot give them as often. This is explained by Bridget Anderson in “Just Another Job? The Commodification of Domestic Labor” in Global Woman. In the essay, Anderson states, “employing a cleaner enables middle-class women to take on the feminine role of moral and spiritual support to the family, while freeing her of the feminine role of servicer, doer of dirty work” (105-6). Women in First World countries have agency of their own lives now, compared to just decades before, causing women from
The book “Global Woman” edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild focuses on the lives of women that leave their third world country to work in homes as nannies or servants and others even sex work. These women take on that labor without knowing what results will come from their desperate action. The authors explain and recount the stories of many of the women whom have had to sacrifice their lives. These women sacrifice it all to provide for themselves and their families and give them a better life, this is told through different chapters.
Although Areno is not society’s definition of wealthy, she lives a comfortable life, living off a salary by managing 21,000 acres of land (154). Areno’s success from her life of hard work has led her to believe everyone can do it, no matter their circumstances. Hochschild uses her conversations with Areno on her past to understand the basis of her her beliefs. As a sociologist, Hochschild understands the importance of a person’s environment. Enlightened of Areno’s past filled with commitment and persistence, Hochschild delves into a problem Areno’s deep story of hard work does not address: the poverty cycle. In one of her conversations with Hochschild, Areno states, “I think if people refuse to work, we should let them starve. Let them be homeless” (160). She believes the taxes she pays with her hard earned money should not benefit those who do not simply attempt to get a job; however, Areno neglects to explain how to help those stuck in a cycle of poverty. Too many children are born into poor families and are given no escape. Her only solution for children to elude a poverty stricken household is for the children to take it upon themselves and “say ‘I’m going to work hard and get an education and good job and get myself out of this environment’” (160). Sadly, her position on children born into poor families is
The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reports that millions of children around the world are imprisoned daily into illegal child labor, depriving them of their childhood. The conditions of the work facilities are often life threating to their health. Instead of getting an education, these suffering children are working. Without an education, they really have no chance of escaping poverty. If you are thinking this only happens in poor countries, you are mistaken. It happens everywhere, including the United States. There are an estimated 50,000 children slaves in the United States. We can all agree this is horrific. In “The Color of Family Ties: Race, Class, Gender and Extended Family involvement”, Sociologist Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkistan challenge popular notion that minority families have weaker ties and are more fragmented than white families. They find if we only focus on nuclear families, thus ignoring extended families, it creates a biased portrait of families of color. Furthermore, we are missing much of what minority and families of color do for one another. According to their research, the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households contests stereotypes that Black and Latin families lack strong family’s ties. Most importantly they find social class is more relevant in revealing statistics than ethnicity. Their research also reveals Blacks and Latinos/as typically have less income and education than whites, so they rely more on their family for day-to-day needs: such as childcare, household task or rides. Furth more, Economic deprivation of minorities leads in many ways to higher levels of extended family involvement. The tendency of minorities to live near kin may also reflect their greater need for kin cooperation as well as decreased opportunity’s and pressure to move away, including moving for college. Because Whites tend to have more income than Blacks and Latins, they are more likely to give or receives money to/from family. They find races with the same amount of income have similar involvement with their extended families. Middles class families are more probable to share their private concerns and lend money to relative
As some women in first world countries go out of the home to work, women from lower classes immigrant women from the third world perform the functions of childcare, ‘homemaking’, domestic tasks etc. these women who constitute the transnational labor of care have bad working conditions, few rights and opportunities or work satisfaction. As some upper class women break the glass ceiling, other women enter the market to perform the transnational labor of care, at low wages and bad conditions, without these women to perform the domestic tasks, to perform this transnational labor of care( example of Filipino migrant maids), other privileged women would not be able to leave the home to work and take up white collar occupations. Thus some women
Bhabha (2014) declares that child migration is a contemporary phenomenon that needs to be understood in a broader context of economic and social inequality. Child migration has a cumulative impact on the fabric of the everyday
More and more women are becoming single parents and raising their children on their own without the help of the father or of any man. Lately, and for several years, it is more common for women to be doing jobs for “men”. ( Kaiser, Spalding) Women who have been left by a male figure in their lives are very more likely to become independent and do as they need to survive. This was unheard of in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as said several times before, women do as men say and they are expected to do what they are told and live by a code. The morals of the realism and modernism era are unheard of in today's world. Women, and even men, either get married and have children, have children and don’t get married, or do neither and live their lives that way. Women have been acting this way for years, but is it really their fault? The leadership it takes for a woman to be on her own, and all the negativity that comes with being a woman who does what she feels is the right thing to do or what she wants to do, is absurd. (Bongiorno, Bain,
Suzanne Collins through her novel makes it clear that love can be an influential motivation that drives someone to sacrifice his life in attempt to save someone else’s life.
Throughout this course and book, came to me the realization in which many women today are facing choices, which even their mothers never had to face. One of these choices is whether or not to go back to work after having a child or going to have a job without having a family first. Or how to deal with everything all at once if choosing it all? When did they have to have a limited choice set in stone? Why are mothers and young women plagued with these choices? When one thinks of the subject
Hicks-Bartlett, Sharon. (2000) Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Labyrinth of Working and Parenting in a Poor Community. In Caroline B. Brettell and Caroline F. Sargent (Eds.), Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective (6th ed.) (pp. 291-303). Boston, MA: Pearson Education,
How are you engaging with the ones closest to you? This is the question author James W. Pennebaker attempts to unravel to you in chapter 8 of his book Secret Life of Pronouns. He does this by analyzing conversations, essay responses, and Language Style Matching Scores to present his argument. Many different conversations are analyzed through this text starting with two college students in love over instant messaging. Through this conversation the author deciphers, "Both members of the couple are closely attentive to each other and repeat many of the same words and phrases" (197). The author categorizes this as LSM or Language Style Matching which is the matching of function words between two people. The author goes
growing inequalities between high- and low-income countries, and insecurity, vulnerability, and instability due to economic crises combine with gender-related factors such as abuse, family conflict, and discrimination to increase the numbers of women who migrate in order to obtain paid work.” Female workers from developing countries such as the Philippines are at high demand to take on ‘low-wage service labour’ in the global North. According to Ann Stewart’s work, Filipina workers characterized their work experiences as “the way in which state seemed to treat them as economic commodities rather than citizens and led to the immediate passage of the ‘magna carta’ of migrant worker rights” (Stewart,2011). She also references that there’s a high significant number of Filipinas working abroad depicting the Philippines as a “major exporter of its labour” (Stewart, 2011), this is because of the “low rates of foreign investment, instability, high unemployment, low wages and poverty” (Stewart, 2011) thus there’s no high paying jobs. The Live- in care giver program can be viewed as a liability determinant that has diminished the importance of migrant caregivers as active participant in the global market,