Women's Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices / Edition 1

by Sharon Harley

Overview

Winner of the 2007 Association of Black Women Historians Best Anthology Award

Globalization is not a new phenomenon; women throughout the world have been dealing with the circumstances and consequences of an international economy long before the advent of the transnational corporate conglomerate. However, in a mercenary example of the tried clich "the more things change, the more they stay the same," women-particularly those of color-continue to be relegated to the lowest rung of the occupational ladder, where their indispensable contributions to global market capitalism are downplayed or invalidated completely through the perpetuation of stereotypes and the denial of access to better job opportunities and resources.

How women of color around the world adapt and challenge the economic, political, and social effects of globalization is the subject of this broad-minded and incisive anthology. From Mexico, Jamaica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka, to immigrant and non-immigrant communities in the United States-the women documented in these essays are agricultural and factory workers, artists and entrepreneurs, mothers and activists. Their stories bear stark witness to how globalization continues to develop new sites and forms of exploitation, while its apparent victims continue to be women, men, and children of color.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813540443
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
Introduction   Sharon Harley     1
Laboring in Transnational Public Spheres
Race Women: Cultural Productions and Radical Labor Politics   Sharon Harley     9
Of Poetics and Politics: The Border Journeys of Luisa Moreno   Vicki L. Ruiz     28
Caring and Inequality   Evelyn Nakano Glenn     46
Economic Crisis and Political Mobilization: Reshaping Cultures of Resistance in Tampa's Communities of Color, 1929-1939   Nancy A. Hewitt     62
The Global Politics of Labor
Surviving Globalization: Immigrant Women Workers in Late Capitalist America   Evelyn Hu-Dehart     85
Harassment of Female Farmworkers: Can the Legal System Help?   Maria L. Ontiveros     103
Caribbean Women, Domestic Labor, and the Politics of Transnational Migration   Carole Boyce Davies     116
Creatively Coping with Crisis and Globalization: Zimbabwean Businesswomen in Crocheting and Knitting   Mary Johnson Osirim     134
Surviving the Global Economy
Of Land and Sea: Women Entrepreneurs in Negril, Jamaica   A. Lynn Bolles     161
"My Cocoa Is between My Legs": Sex as Work among Ghanaian Women   Akosua Adomako Ampofo     182
Work as a Duty and as a Joy: Understanding the Role of Work in the Lives of GhanaianFemale Traders of Global Consumer Items   Akosua K. Darkwah     206
Gendering Sugar: Women's Disempowerment in Sri Lankan Sugar Production   Nandini Gunewardena     221
List of Contributors     247
Index     253