Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling Nickel and Dimed exposed the impossibility of living on the minimum wage in the USA. Now, with Arlie Russell Hochschild, she has widened her perspective to look at the effects global capitalism has been having on women’s lives all over the world.

In a time shaped by mass migration and economic exchange, women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent-flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Every year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to work in the homes, nurseries and brothels of the First World. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny - or cleaning woman, carer, maid - eases a ‘care deficit’ in rich countries, while her absence creates a ‘care deficit’ in her own country.

These fifteen vivid pieces confront a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to Mexican nannies in LA, from Thai girls in Japanese brothels to Czech au pairs in the UK. Global Woman is an important and disturbing new book. It a reveals a new era in which the main resource now extracted from the Third World is no longer gold or silver, but love.