Gender Ideology and the Domestic Division of Labor in Middle-class Chinese Families in Hong Kong

Despite being engaged in full-time paid work, middle-class women continue to be responsible for the majority of housework and childcare. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese professional married women, this article explores their subjective perspectives, values and beliefs toward paid and unpaid work. The evidence shows that traditional gender ideology and a patriarchal familial structure, deriving from a Confucian culture, influence perceptions and allocation of housework and childcare, which women are expected to carry out or supervise. The employment of female domestic helpers further reinforces the traditional sexual division of domestic labor in the family. Women in Hong Kong continue to deal with the strain and contradictions of living their lives amidst countervailing modern and traditional forces.     

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 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

Mothers,communities and the scale of difference

Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of family values and community relations. With this paper, I argue that highlighting the social construction of scale suggests ways that the social imaginary of a domestic myth is spatially embedded within a nurturing local community. I outline some recent feminist discussion of local childcare cultures and critique of 'the public sphere' prior to raising scale as a way to open up static versions of justice and difference. Arguments in the paper that relate to the social construction of scale are illustrated by examples from a study of the impact of a new child and a residential move on mothers in San Diego. I argue that although the birth of a child highlights important questions that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, community and society, it is from within a politically structured notion of scale that many of the constraints and contexts of childcare arise. This paper focuses specifically on negotiating childcare as a basis of resistance through day-to-day contestations at multiple scales.     

Cape Verdean women on the move: ‘Immigration shopping’ in Italy and Europe

The central theme of this article is the notion that migrants ‘shop’ for opportunities of work, income and social advantages in different countries. Taking the case of Cape Verdean women migrants, the research is based on 25 in‐depth interviews carried out with domestic workers in Rome and Rotterdam. I explore ways in which these women have negotiated mobility, employment and family and household responsibilities within the context of a largely independent female migration which is well established from Cape Verde. Italy has a nodal role in channelling mobility from Cape Verde to various destinations in the global Cape Verdean diaspora. But while opportunities for stable employment as domestic workers in Italy have been a constant factor encouraging Cape Verdean women to migrate to Italy, difficulties over pay, working conditions, welfare and family reunion have led to much onward movement to the Netherlands and elsewhere.     

A widening gap? The political and social organization of childcare in Argentina

This article examines how social policies and programmes implemented in Argentina shape the political and social organization of childcare. The author seeks to analyse how welfare institutions are currently responding to emerging needs, and to what extent they facilitate the defamilialization of childcare for different social classes. Because Argentina lacks a truly unified ‘care policy’, four different kinds of facilities and programmes are examined: employment-based childcare services; pre-school schemes; social assistance care services; and poverty reduction strategies. It is argued that far from offering equal rights and services with a universalist cast, these ‘caring’ institutions reflect the ethos of the current welfare model in Argentina: a fragmented set of social policies based on different assumptions for different social groups, which in turn filter down to the social organization of childcare.     

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.     

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency,Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract:

This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.     

Counting them in,not out: Surveying Farm Women about Agricultural Leadership

This paper examines the efficacy of the survey method to investigate questions relating to women and agricultural leadership. I begin by reviewing the feminist critique of the survey using examples from the literature on farming women. I then describe two particular difficulties I encountered in surveying farm women about agricultural leadership in the Australian sugar industry. The first difficulty is the problem of constructing a sample of farm women using official data sources that is representative of the diversity of women in agriculture. The second difficulty is the impact that gendered agricultural identities may have on survey completion rates. The paper argues that, if we are to count farming women ‘in’, rather than ‘out’ when studying agricultural politics, we need to engage with methods which will be inclusive of the diversity of women in farming and which will also give consideration to the construction of gendered identities in agriculture.     

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.     

The Qing,the Manchus,and Footbinding: Sources and Assumptions under Scrutiny

Two sets of assumptions surrounding the Manchus and footbinding have crept into the historiography of the Qing period. A first set of assumptions claims that the Manchus attempted to ban footbinding among civilian Han on repeated occasions after the conquest but failed due to women’s resistance. Moreover, Qing attempts to ban footbinding made binding into a politically charged ethnic marker that embodied for Han anti-Manchu and anti-Qing sentiments and caused the bans to backfire and footbinding to spread further. A second set of assumptions claims that the overwhelming cultural allure and popularity of footbinding proved irresistible to banner women, who, thwarted by banner regulations forbidding the practice, covertly imitated footbinding by wearing platform shoes that hid natural feet and created an illusion of smallness. This paper scrutinizes the evidence put forward by Qing historians for the first of these two sets of assumptions. The claims are found to be unsubstantiated and evidence is offered that contradicts them. I argue that the weight of evidence shows that there was no prohibition on footbinding imposed in 1645 or at any time during the Manchu conquest, and that a 1664 proposal to ban footbinding was withdrawn before it could be implemented, for reasons misunderstood by historians of footbinding. Therefore there could have been no “resistance” by Han women or men to a ban on footbinding, and claims that footbinding became a politically charged ethnic marker of anti-Qing sentiment in the seventeenth century are groundless. With regard to the second set of assumptions, I provide evidence in a separate paper to be published elsewhere that banner women had distinctive roles and fashions uninfluenced by the culture of footbinding, and that in Beijing and the Northeast Manchu styles were emulated by Han, not vice versa.     

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.     

Rural masculinities and fathering practices

Fatherhood and fathering practices have been surprisingly absent from the literature on rural men and masculinity. This article draws on interviews with two generations of farm fathers in Norway to examine how rural masculinities are constructed through fathering practices. It explores how fathering creates potential for the development of alternative rural masculinities in two socio-historical contexts. Findings demonstrate that farm work is important for masculine legitimization in both generations, but, in contrast to the older generation, for the current generation farm work and fathering practices have become spatially separated. Their greater involvement in childcare within the domestic spaces indicates a slight shift towards more equal co-parenting driven by the movement of mothers into the non-farm labour force and the new fathering moralities in society. However, fathering practices through outdoor sports, wilderness activities and hunting constitute stable sites of rural masculinity. As fathering requires nurture and compassion, these ‘traditional’ rural activities display the fluidity of rural masculinity.     

‘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.     

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

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.