The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality / Edition 1

by Christa Wichterich

Overview

Globalization creates growth without jobs in the North, structural adjustment in the South, privatization in the East and the dismantling of states everywhere. It is a process which unifies through market integration and new information technologies, yet separates through growing social polarization. It is also a process which depends on the feminization of employment; rather than liberating women into the workplace, globalisation has bred a new underclass of low paid or unpaid women workers.

Demonstrating exactly how women, all over the world, have become the call-girls of the global labour market, the author of this extraordinary book uses a mixture of case studies, examples and quotations to illustrate some hard facts. She looks at women across the world - to show how their lives have been turbaned upside down by industrialization in the South and a returban to homeworking in the North. We meet Martha, 17-year old mother of two in Harlem, who cannot afford medical provision on the salary she has been forced to accept; Margaret, former secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture in Nairobi, now trading in second-hand clothes; Li Thi, a Vietnamese woman who is paid $500 a year for stitching the same running shoes that a top US basketball player is paid $20 million a year to promote.

From New York to Phnom Penh, from Moscow to Dakar, we see the devastating effects of the unfettered power of transnational corporations on women's lives. This book charts that devastation and calls for urgent action - by states across the world and by women themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781856497411
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/01/2000
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Christa Wichterich is a freelance jourbanalist.
Christa Wichterich is a freelance jourbanalist.

Table of Contents

Introduction
 
1. The Global Conveyor-belt
Women as a comparative advantage/ Yesterday Upper Lusatia, today Bangladesh, tomorrow China/ Not every Eden is Paradise/ Trampling people down – just do it/ Hollow firms, quota hopping and ‘swallow’ companies/ The Third World in the First/ Pushing emancipation or forced labor?/ Global counterforce – or globalization from below
 
2. Worldwide Service
Postindustrial work/ Women fending for themselves/ The global office/ Isle of the blessed/ Towards the self-service society/ The international army of cleaners/ Body markets
 
3. Means of Living
Land for men, work for women/ Proteins for the well-fed/ Hunger and trade/ Fast food, junk food, novelty food – or the lost power of the cook/ Whose seed is it?/ A step further: the human cell economy
 
4. The Sweeper Women of Structural Adjustment, or the Feminization of Social Security
Unpayable labour/ Honour where honour is due/ The social state discharges its children/ Farewell to Arab socialism/ Adjusting to adjustment/ The acrobatics of survival/ Matrioshki of the transformation/ Winner takes all, or the splitting of society
 
5. Variants of Modernity
Consumption as global culture/ Decadence and independence/ Looking west, turning east/ Identity politics
 
6. Globalization of the Women’s Movements
Movements and networks/ Alliance for the right to a few square metres of housing/ The new international women’s politics/ Countering powerlessness/ Globalized woman
 
Select Bibliography
Index