Blog Assignment 3

One of the most interesting articles that we read was “Global Women” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, because it showed how globalization truly affects everyone in the world, and how one women’s feminist actions can have global implications. The migration of women doing household jobs like cooking, cleaning, and nannying from lower income countries to high income countries is one that is not looked at very much. Women in developed countries think of domestic tasks as beneath them, and yet the women they hire achieve great success for their families by taking these jobs. Unfortunately the success comes at a cost. Many women, like the woman featured in the article, are not able to live with and support their own families. Having domestic servants used to be a status symbol in the developed world, but now most domestic work is done behind the scenes. The modern woman in a developed country is expected to be able to do it all: cook, clean, take care of kids, and have a career. This high standard that women are held to is incredibly unfair. Most father’s do very little housework and child rearing, even though many wives work outside the home just as much or more than their husbands.

I also thought that “How Working-Class Chicas Get Working-Class Lives” by Julie Bettie also raised some interesting points. As a white girl going to a private school in a pretty well off neighborhood in Seattle, I never had to deal with or even witnessed much of what Bettie describes. It seems to be a vicious cycle, one which very few lower class girls manage to escape. Even if the lower class girls are very smart, they are often tracked into the vocational school, meaning that they have no hope for college. The idea of the Business school is just a hoax to give them something to aim for, yet none of them even end up going their anyway. I also thought it was interesting how they perceived themselves moving up in society as they moved towards “clean” jobs, like secretaries instead of labor jobs, yet still they were making very little money. The girls had no role models to look up to, no one to show them how to get to the other side of life. Even if they wanted to escape, they couldn’t because they had no idea how.

In response to Messner’s question about situated knowledge, I believe that it is definitely an impediment. We all see the world through our own lenses, depending on what our past life experiences have been like. Because of this, everything we experience we subconsciously skew to fit into our perception of the world, even if it might break our mold. Unfortunately, we cannot escape our situated knowledge, so we must be careful when observing things to acknowledge the bias we put on our observations.