Customer Reviews

Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Parreñas, a scholar admired by many whose academic training, coupled with her linguistic skills, draws inquiring minds into the largely untapped world of Filipino international migration. The book critically situates the migration from a historical-structural perspective and yet focuses on the family as the unit of analysis which must negotiate between the state regulations of both sending and receiving countries, the financial realities of citizens from poor countries of the world, and the emotional hardships faced by family members. The study, in general, is an extremely important one because it taps into what is a "female" international labor migration, bound by related expectations of gender roles, thereby encouraging readers to rethink our gendered perspective of all labor migrations. In addition, the book offers an effective assessment of the critical role of the family to young children (the focus of her subsequent book), the challenges faced by poor populations of the world, and how the global economy is structured to benefit wealthy nations of the world. I highly recommend the book and have only a small criticism: though she has carefully helped us to see the gendered inequalities faced by female international migrants, at times in the book Parreñas herself seems quite unnecessarily judgemental of the very women whose predicaments she details.

Do not be turned off by this book because it is written by an academic. It is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time. In toronto, where Philipino nannies work for many families, the book's topics are acute and relevant. The book tells a story of extremely educated women, elite in their society, who take up domestic work in the West in order to provide their children and parents with better opportunities. The book will make you re-think many things that families in the West take for granted, such as being able to sleep under the same roof with their children, and being able to provide for them at the same time.