Valuing Childcare: Troubles in Suburbia

I unravel a complex weave of practices in metropolitan Vancouver that lead to the persistent devaluation of childcare. These include the assumptions that women alone are responsible for paying for childcare, the difficulty that parents have determining how skills and educational qualifications relate to high-quality childcare and the tendency to insert childcare workers into various familial scenarios that cheapen the costs of their own social reproduction. I look closely at outer suburbs, because this is where wages for childcare are lowest and parents experience the most difficulty in arranging dependable care. Although various women doing paid domestic work are positioned differently, they share with each other the effects of gendered assumptions about domestic work.     

Shift Work,Childcare and Domestic Work: Divisions of labour in Canadian paper mill communities

The growing prevalence of shift work and non-standard working hours is challenging many taken-for-granted notions about family and household life. This article examines how rotating shift schedules shape household strategies with regard to childcare and unpaid domestic work. In 1993-94 in-depth interviews were conducted with 90 predominantly male newsprint mill-workers and their spouses living in three communities located in different regions of Canada. The analysis in this article is based on these interviews as well as data collected in a questionnaire survey administered to a much larger sample. The article focuses on the effects of rotating shifts and the extent to which household strategies differ between households with one or two wage-earners. The findings reveal that the onus for adjusting to shifts fell mainly on the spouses of mill-workers, who felt constrained in their own choices regarding employment and childcare by the demanding regimen of their partner's shift schedules. In the vast majority of households a traditional division of labour predominated with regard to both childcare and domestic work. When women quit paid employment to accommodate the schedules of shift-workers and ensure time for the family to be together, traditional values reassert themselves. Surprisingly, a high level of satisfaction with current shift schedules was found, despite the significant adjustments to family life they had necessitated. By comparing families employed in the same industry but living in three very different communities, the analysis underscores the importance of local circumstances in mediating the strategies households deploy in coping with shift work, especially with regard to childcare.     

Social Policy and Gender Divisions of Domestic and Care Work in France

A number of cross-national comparisons of gender divisions of paid and unpaid labour have highlighted the mismatch which exists in France between on the one hand a narrow gender employment gap due to the full-time and continuous nature of women's employment, supported by extensive state-provided or subsidised childcare, and on the other hand, the persistence of an unexpectedly traditional gender division of domestic and care work. This results in high levels of work–life conflict for French women, and particularly for mothers. In much social policy analysis, the question of how policy might influence the extent to which domestic and care work is shared within the couple has been largely overlooked in favour of discussions of how the state facilitates and encourages the employment of mothers of dependent children. This article therefore focuses on why and how state policy in France, whilst being successful in bringing women and particularly mothers into the labour market, has not brought about a fairer gender division of unpaid domestic and care work in the home.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Gender equality in housework among professional Filipinas in Melbourne: painfully slow and illusory?

This article analyses how professional Filipinas in Melbourne negotiate housework with their partners in the absence of the domestic workers they were accustomed to in the Philippines. To some extent, the absence of maids revealed the informants’ escape from classism and sexism. I argue that as a result of the women’s persistent strategising, household work division did eventually become more egalitarian although variously insufficient to be able to relieve them from extreme stress. The women’s ambitions and career demands were important drivers in renegotiating the domestic realm. Yet the slow change towards gender egalitarianism is seen as a response to changed circumstances rather than to commitment to ideals of gender equity.     

Academic motherhood in the United Arab Emirates

Balancing the dual roles of mother and academic can be an intensive juggling act. Often, it is mothers who undertake the majority of domestic work in the household, and who tend to experience greatest consequences of this in the workplace; including stress, pressure and less likelihood of promotion. Research indicates that networks of support provided by families and friends can help alleviate these pressures. Academic parents who work outside of their home countries may not have access to these networks to share the work of raising children, but academics who work in the Arabian Gulf have inexpensive domestic help at their dispensation. The ways in which life as an expatriate affects academic mothers both professionally and personally is explored in this study set in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Interview data was gathered from ten expatriate academic mothers. It was found that, similarly to other studies in this field, mothers undertake the vast majority of coordination of domestic work and childcare in their homes, but that having domestic help enables them to enjoy more time with their families. However, there was no clear indication that having extra help at home enabled the women to partake more readily in their academic work. The majority of the women in this study considered that their lives as academic mothers are made easier by residing in the UAE, despite being far from family. This was in part due to ubiquitous domestic help, but also due to perceptions of the UAE providing a culturally family friendly working environment.     

The good, the bad and the confusing: the political economy of social care expansion in South Korea

Recent social policy reforms in South Korea indicate a progressive shift by a conservative government to modify the familialistic male breadwinner model that informs its welfare regime. The Korean government has demonstrated support for women through an increase in the provision, regulation and coordination of childcare and workplace support programmes for working parents. At the same time, labour market reforms have also created more pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. Conflicting social and economic policy objectives have resulted in a confusing mix of policies, advancing and impeding gender equality at the same time. This contribution examines the recent family–work reconciliation policy reforms in Korea and discusses why these reforms may be good politics but a bad deal for women.     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

Domestic Distinctions: Constructing difference among paid domestic workers in Toronto

Live-in paid domestic work represents a peculiar form of paid employment and employer-employee relations. Contradictions and ambiguities arise from the domestic worker's 'workplace' being her employer's 'home'; while intimacy, affective labour and a high degree of personalism veil the asymmetrical class relation between employer and employee. In Toronto, employers are often white women, while domestic workers are often (im)migrant women, especially 'third world' women of colour. Given this, we draw on in-depth interviews with paid domestic workers working in Toronto to examine ways in which the employer-employee relations are constructed through interlocking, relational systems of difference, especially gender, 'race'/ethnicity, nationality, immigration/citizenship status and language. We focus on three major aspects of the employer-employee work relation from the viewpoint of the domestic workers-living-in, being 'like one of the family', and feelings of respect, dignity and self-worth. We find that many of the women shared a number of common concerns and experiences. However, the specific articulation of systems of difference led to a range of experiences of the extent of asymmetry in employer-employee power relations.     

Local Childcare Cultures: Moral geographies of mothering and the social organisation of pre-school education

Child-rearing has not been a major focus of research in geography despite the fact that its organisation is both spatially and temporally variable. Geographical work on pre-school childcare provision in the 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on the implementation and implications of government policy; more recently there has been a growth of feminist work on child-rearing which has employed a diversity of approaches. These studies have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how mothers organise the care of their children, often whilst undertaking paid employment; nevertheless they can not always explain how a wide range of mothers negotiate specific aspects of 'maternal responsibility'. This article draws on an empirical investigation of pre-school childcare cultures in two areas of Sheffield, UK, in order to analyse the ways in which mothers' attitudes to their children's educational development and their strategies for accessing non-parental educational care are jointly shaped within the context of different local childcare cultures. The importance of two key components of these local childcare cultures, the moral geographies of mothering and the local social organisation of non-parental educational care, is emphasised.     

论工业革命时期英国工厂女工的状况

英国工业革命时期,工人阶级妇女最早离开家庭进入工厂做工,承受着繁重的社会劳动和家务劳动的双重负担。但是,由于柔弱、顺从的家庭妇女是当时英国社会所推崇的妇女形象．工厂女工进入工厂只是被迫而为,并非是为了经济独立,更不是为了寻求自身的解放和男女平等,因此她们的处境没有因为外出工作而有所改变,社会地位和家庭地位的提高只能是人为的一种设想,她们也不是最早获得解放的妇女。     

Work intensifications,injuries and legal exclusions for paid domestic workers in Montréal,Québec

There is increasing research on the intensification of work in the post-1980s time period. The focus on flexibility in management practices has resulted in more tasks being offloaded onto workers who must then adjust their time-use to accommodate the greater workload. Studies of work intensification are not new to manufacturing production and there is increasing attention to unpaid domestic labour and service sectors. One industry, however, that has been neglected by these studies is paid domestic work where employers are individuals or families. Drawing on the traditions of feminist political economy and geography, I argue that the socio-spatial specificity of paid domestic work contributes an emphasis on workplace injury and labour law exclusion to intensification of work paradigms. Based on qualitative interviews conducted in Montréal, Québec from 2013 to 2015, I show how paid domestic workers intertwine narratives about work intensification and workplace injury yet remain excluded from the Act respecting occupational health and safety and the Workers’ Compensation Act in Québec. Migrant women caregivers are disproportionately impacted by these exclusions and I show how the Filipino Women’s Organization in Québec (PINAY) is at the forefront of challenging these exclusions. In conclusion, I propose an approach that combines feminist geography and political economy to consider how time-squeezes impacting individual or household employers may be intensifying the workloads of their paid domestic workers and how labour law structurally excludes workers along the social dimensions of gender, race and citizenship.     

Men’s participation in childcare and housework and parity progression: a Japanese population-based study

ABSTRACT

Although Japan has entered a phase of population decline due to decades of low fertility, studies on the determinants of fertility choices among Japanese couples remain sparse. Previous studies, mostly conducted in Europe, suggest that men’s active involvement in household labour may promote childbearing. We tested whether men’s participation in childcare and housework has an influence on parity progression in Japan. Our results show a positive relationship between men’s participation in childcare and parity progression but no consistent relationship between men’s participation in housework and parity progression. We also observed that other factors such as the sex composition of existing children influences couples’ decision to have another child. Our findings add to the scarce literature on Japanese people’s fertility behaviour.     

Not everyone has ‘maids’: class differentials in the elusive quest for work-life balance

Work–life balance has come to the fore in Singapore as in other countries. Debates have focused on uneven gendered burdens. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which class matters in shaping outcomes for women. In this article, I argue that the work-care regime in Singapore is one that generates uneven consequences for women along class lines. The historical legacy of eugenics-influenced pronatalism, the pursuit of a corporation-centric development, the persistent reticence toward universal provisions and corresponding preference for ‘private’ solutions to care create a context in which women in low-income households have an especially hard time balancing wage work and familial responsibilities. The individualization and marketization of household needs, in Singapore and elsewhere, obscure the circumstances, needs, and well-being of women in lower class circumstances, and undermine the value of housework and care labor.     

CIRCULAR MIGRATION AND LIFE COURSE OF FEMALE DOMESTIC WORKERS IN BEIJING

This study examines the migration experiences of 24 female domestic workers in Beijing through in-depth interviews. Most of these women were involved in a circular pattern of movement between their home villages and cities. The pattern of reverse and circular migration was closely related to the life-course transitions of Chinese rural women and their socially-assigned gender roles such as marriage, childbirth, childrearing and caregiving for family members. For individual domestic workers, working in Beijing is a bittersweet experience. The women were subjected to unfavourable work conditions and pervasive forms of exploitation. Nevertheless, they benefited from the experience through increased access to income, knowledge and other resources unavailable in rural areas. Although these women challenged, through migration, the traditional social roles imposed on Chinese rural women, their own limitations and institutional barriers left them with few options for improving their social statuses in cities.     

中国内地女性主义地理学研究进展和展望

女性主义地理学主要研究女性与空间、地方的互动和重构,西方女性主义地理学发展源于20世纪70年代,我国相关研究进展相对缓慢。文章通过关键词搜索,利用主题分析法将研究文献分为女性与城乡空间、就业空间、家庭空间、女性人才与地理、文学艺术空间、旅游六个主题,归纳和分析目前研究进展,并提出相关建议,以期引起国内学者更多关注。总起来说,国内女性主义地理学的研究问题紧密地与国家和社会的重大问题相关联,体现了很强的现实关怀,结论对中国未来的政策有借鉴作用。但研究中主要借鉴了西方理论,缺少自己发展的基本概念和理论。未来学者们应继续以现实问题为导向,关注本土情境和中国经验,从性别、空间、可持续的交叉领域切入,生产本土女性主义地理学知识。     

IS THE GENDER DIVISION OF LABOUR CHANGING IN JAPAN?

The paper examines potential changes in housework and employment among married couples in Japan. The data are from national surveys in 1994 and 2000 of persons aged 20–49. Wives’ housework hours decreased and the proportion of husbands doing any housework increased. A majority of wives are employed, many work full-time and husbands work long hours and many return home late in the evening. While wives do less housework if they are employed, husbands’ housework does not respond to their wives’ employment. Large gender differences persist, with wives’ employment associated with family constraints. In general, changes were the same across categories of the population, though three of five significant interactions with time involved wives’ education. A positive relationship between wives’ education and any housework by husbands becomes stronger over time. The results suggest gender inequality in housework may decrease in the future, with potential relevance to future marriage and fertility.     

Criss-crossing Boundaries: Ultraorthodox Jewish women go to work

The most prestigious work in the ultraorthodox Jewish community is full-time, unpaid, religious study, which is allocated to men. As a result, married women are often responsible for both homemaking and breadwinning. This study examines the 'going to work' of these Israeli wives as an encompassing operation of two directions--the going to and the coming from work. First, it analyses the sociocultural evolution of ultraorthodox gender identities which induced the 'going to work' of the wives. Second, it probes the personal consequences of job-related exposure to modern values of work and gender, following the wives' 'coming from work.' In-depth interviews with 55 married women holding out-of-community jobs that increase their exposure to modern norms revealed discontent regarding domestic help and the financial contribution of their husbands. Dissatisfaction was articulated in subtle terms, by referring to fatigue and the hope that their husbands would eventually look for paid jobs. Such expressions of discontent, associated with the 'coming from work,' are suggestive of private resistance and the modification of personal values. The gendered geography of ultraorthodox women's work illustrates also the geography of their subordination and resistance.     

Masculinity and domesticity in 1930s South Wales: did unemployment change the domestic division of labour?

This article examines masculinity in an area suffering from sustained high unemployment and unremitting hardship during the 1930s: the South Wales coalfield had some of the highest rates of male unemployment and the lowest participation rates of married women in paid employment in Britain. Particular attention is drawn to power relations between husband and wife by looking at the domestic division of labour and whether male unemployment affected the split in domestic responsibilities. Personal testimonies are used to assess how men filled their time whilst unemployed and the meanings they attached to their activities and relationships. It will be shown that some unemployed men engaged more in the home and that many men were able to maintain existing power relations with their wives by finding or creating alternative manual work and maintaining an elastic relationship with the home by continuing to spend the majority of their time in the company of other men.     

Cross-border childcare strategies of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand

In discussing the challenges of cross-border childcare faced by migrant workers, most research focuses on ‘distance mothering’, assuming that children remain in the place of origin. In contrast, this article focuses on childcare at the place of destination in the context of migrant Burmese factory workers in Thailand. Since many of these workers are ‘undocumented’, they have few rights in their place of destination. This is especially problematic in the areas of reproductive health and childcare rights. Despite such obstacles, Burmese migrant workers strive to manage their childcare responsibilities by mobilizing whatever resources are available, as well as seeking to maximize the possibilities of citizenship and education rights for their children. According to our research, the specific strategies deployed vary according to the particular location in Thailand in which migrants are working. This study analyzes three locations in Thailand – one in the central Thailand, and the other two at the borderlands between Burma and Thailand. Through a feminist analysis of the ‘care diamond’, the study demonstrates how Burmese women migrant workers utilize the different migrant labor governance systems and porous international border as resources and opportunities to develop complex and changing strategies to juggle their childcare arrangements.