Gender Through the Prism of Difference

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Gender Through the Prism of Difference

• Chapter Five
• Families

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• Early Twentieth Century witnessed changes in
  world economy and cultural systems which in turn
  have affected all families and households
  structures
• Despite all these changes traditional family
  institution is still idealized as natural based
  on loving mother hood and child bearing remains
  in our minds with warmth and longing
• The ideal of unconditional love as a refuge
  against the outside pressure and competitive
  world remains as our vision that we yearn to
  attain
• Motherhood and Fatherhood, childbearing and
  childrearing tasks are central to the image of
  the traditional family structure
  
• Work and changing gender roles within families
  due to women entering into public sphere gave
  women an opportunity to undertake different roles
  in addition to her domestic duties
• Despite these changes women have not been freed
  from the demands of domestic labor and
  responsibilities. Now, her domestic tasks under
  global migration have been transferred from
  unpaid household labor to a transnational
  domestic paid labor

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• Labor market, class, race, and gender lead to
  economic marginality of mothers and the lives of
  single women changed due to the transnational
  corporate economy, which disrupted the
  traditional agrarian family life, woman began to
  perceive love and marriage to be more risky than
  rewarding

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Im am here, but I am there

• Mothering is understood as a sacred duty that
  represent preservation, nurturance, and training
  of children into culture and tradition
  
• Latina immigrant woman work and live in the US
  while their children continue to live in their
  original countries
  
• Transnational motherhood when immigrant mothers
  leave their own children to take care of children
  of other families
  
• These special and temporal separations are
  imposed on families by the new global economy
  
• Similarly African American woman leave their
  families back home seeking work for survival in
  the North
  
• Most of these mothers leave their children to
  grandmothers and other family kin or their
  fathers or even their older daughters
  
• Mexican mothers work in LA in most gendered and
  racialized occupations
  
• This shifts in family relation structure closely
  connected to the late Twentieth global
  capitalism
  

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• Transnational motherhood is rooted in
  socio-economic needs and demand for Latina
  immigrant women for particular domestic paid
  labor
• Civil War economic crisis, scarce job
  opportunities for women and bad development
  strategies lead to increased female headed
  households
• Immigrant Mexican mothers are building
  alternative construction of motherhood. This
  improvising a new approach to mothering is a
  brave move, but one with deep costs!

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• Attempts of free structuring and rethinking
  motherhood feminist negate monolithic notion of
  family and dominance arena of private and public
  dichotomies and claim that a privatized mothering
  is socially and culturally constructed
• They go as far as calling domesticity as a cult
  that was constructed by Industrial Revolution
  husbands paid wages and wives stayed home through
  the reproductive duties supply capitalism with
  labor force
• Working class and women of color rarely had
  access to permits mothers to be solely devoted to
  their children in early years, hence, mothering
  is gendered, racialized, and differentiated by
  class
• Mothering other children while leaving their own
  middle class white women entrust her children to
  immigrant mothers under industrialization and
  urbanization
• Pre-industrial cultural construction and rural
  peasant society allowed women to work while
  tending to their children
  
• Post industrial seclusion and exclusivity of
  domesticity have prevented women from continuing
  her other roles
  
• This was supported by symbolic model of maternal
  virgin Madonna figure served to control Chicana
  women in restricting their sphere of social
  activities by prescribing idealized vision of
  motherhood

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• Consequently women had to innovate income-earning
  strategies under economic pressure by doing paid
  work at home
  
• Some involving their kids such as sewing and
  vending activities or clean houses with their own
  daughters
  
• Today transnational work prologue distance, time,
  and space that separate mothers from their
  children
  
• This in contrast to mother-child integration in
  the work place under old systems as to the
  separation and isolation of the new system
  
• Consequently transnational mothering resulted in
  spatial and temporal gulfs are more and more
  prolonged
  
• Trans mothers come to the USA with intention to
  stay for a short period of time but time passes
  and economic needs remain, this leaves to
  prolonged leave and separation
• When a man immigrant to work he is paid to
  fulfill familial obligations/bread winning for
  family, when women do the same, they are
  embarking on a journey initiating separation from
  children, and husbands and other community
  duties

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• Additionally, women have to deal with the social
  stigma and guilt
  
• Trans women are paid for reproductive work of
  other peoples children
  
• Trans mother require them to be around the clock
  at their employers services
  
• Who takes care of nannies children?
• Mothering and bread winning providing for
  children sustenance, preparing for their future
  education all are major concerns of motherhood
  
• Women who are involved in transnational mothering
  are intent to ensure present and future well
  being of their children through wage earning
  overseas, but this require long term arduous
  physical and emotional separation from their
  children
• In this case, there is no daily face to face
  mothering and caring but primarily through bread
  winning
  
• Consequently motherhood definition expanded to
  include bread winning financial responsibility in
  order to provide better in nutrition, school
  needs, clothing's, and etc
• These mothers recognize this trans relations
  incur in painful costs and its negative effects
  on their children
  

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• In the absence of domestic life transnational
  mothers experience deep loss, loss of daily of
  physical contact with their family, sharing with
  them daily life experiences, you cant give love
  through money
• Bonding with employers kids and critiques of US
  mothers trans mothers observe the lack of
  affection their employers children experience,
  giving them affection make those trans mothers
  feel consoled too because they feel they have
  someone to give love too
• Other trans mother feels they have to safeguard
  their emotional ties fearing abrupt and
  unexpected severing their emotional bond when
  their job terminates

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Conclusion

• Latinas transnational mothers represent new
  mothering trends and their care giving goes
  beyond geographical boundaries and time, it goes
  beyond joint custody and other more closely bound
  childrearing models
• Contemporary trans-motherhood incorporated into
  the USA through coercive systems of labor that do
  not recognize family rights and the continuation
  a long historical legacy of people of colored
• Color, all in order to maximize economic
  productivity offering minimum support for family
  life
  
• Given appropriate circumstances, these trans
  national mothers wish to be with their children
  in their home country
  
• Demanding the rights for women workers to chose
  their own motherhood arrangements would be the
  beginning of truly just family and work policies,
  policies that address not only inequalities of
  gender, but also inequalities of race, class, and
  citizenship