About this title: In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Granta Books
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9781862075887ISBN:1862075883
Description: Good. Good, never read-books may have a tear, creasing, or other defect. Apart from this, good condition. No.1 BESTSELLERS-great prices, friendly customer service-usually dispatched within 24 hrs. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Granta Books
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780965764230ISBN:0965764230
Description: Acceptable. Cover/corners/edges show some wear. Price sticker on Cover. Binding/Spine warped from use but intact. Few to No Markings in Text. Shows wear. read more
Description: Fair. 080506995X EX LIB. BOOK-BROKEN BINDING-EXPECTED WEAR MARKS STICKERS ETC-DELIVERY CONFIRMATION INCLUDED INCLUDED DELIVERY CONFIRMATION INCLUDED. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Owl Books
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780805075090ISBN:0805075097
Description: Good. -Good refers to Used Books only...New books will be in new condition The textbook professionals. Ships in 24 hours. (Not including weekends or holidays) Ship within continental USA only. Restocking fee may apply on returns. read more
Description: Good. Used-Good. May contain highlighting/underlining/notes/etc. May have used stickers on cover. Ships same or next day. Expedited shipping takes 2-3 business days; standard shipping takes 4-14 business days. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Date Published: 2004-01-01
ISBN-13:9780805075090ISBN:0805075097
Description: Good. Books may NOT include Online Access Codes (InfoTrac, MyEconLab). Books MAY contain highlighting, bent pages, and/or writing. We ship M-F. read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"This is a terribly depressing read, simply because it's a terribly depressing subject: white, Western women are able to enjoy their postfeminist equality, but only by (under)paying non-white migrant workers to clean their homes and look after their children. It's a damning, seemingly-unsolvable problem and one that I wanted to know more about. But I really had to force myself to keep reading, because it's a topic that contains such upsetting truths.
There are some great articles in the book, but I'm not crazy about their arrangement. From an editorial point of view, it seems slapdash -- almost as if someone ran a JStor search and threw together any article they could find that mentioned female migrant workers. As a result, some of the articles are pure academia, some are journalistic. It's an odd mix. The collection also ends up being very repetitive on some subjects.
I can't help but feel that Global Woman was thrown together to capitalize on the success of Nickel and Dimed -- and, really, this couldn't be a more different book. I enjoyed Dimed for its claustrophobic, personal slant -- this is just a collection of essays, with little to tie it together. It's a worthy subject, but a heavy read, and I wish more care had gone into its compilation."
This is 16 or so papers, most of them on the intellectual level of a good undergraduate term paper or maybe a master's thesis in a field like sociology or women's studies or third world studies or something like that.
The papers are extremely redundant in their few simplistic made-for-a-tv-audience themes and their simplistic predetermined assumptions, around which the life stories of the subjects are made to fit neatly. None of these papers has any of the rigor of real anthropological fieldwork or anything like that, but, at the same time, none of them has any kind of an engaging human interest hook, either, like you would need for any of these to be commercially viable as journalism.
They're just dull stories meant to drive home a few indisputable and very non-earth-shattering facts and statistics about third-world womanhood and female migrant workerhood. (These themes and premises are all very eloquently and succinctly laid out by Barbara Ehrenreich in the eight or ten or so pages of the introduction. If you read that and stopped there, you wouldn't waste any time and you'd be better for reading it.)
These papers do contain some potentially interesting mini-biographies of real individual women migrant workers, but as soon as it seems that you might start to know something about one of these women as an individual human being, with individual feelings and motivations, etc., the bio quickly turns her into an amalgamation of a thousand migrant women workers from all over the world with all of the attendant statistics and stereotypes, etc.
There are one or two exceptions. One is the paper by Denise Brennan about sex workers in Sosua, Dominican Republic. The author of this paper clearly got to know her subjects as individuals, and was able to present their stories as the stories or real human beings. The story about a "Viet Kieu" husband in Seattle and his soon-to-be Vietnam-Vietnamese bride in Saigon was also somewhat interesting insofar as their own stories went, but that story quickly got tiresome, too, as soon as the simplistic analysis began."
"After unsuccessfully starting two novels, I realized that I was in the mood for non-fiction. This is a great collection of essays about women who migrate (voluntarily or involuntarily through sexual slavery) due to modern economic pressures and various other causes linked to globalization. Ehrenreich's essay is a standout, while the loser (not surprisingly for me, since I couldn't stand her when I had her for a class at U of C) is Sassen's closing essay on global cities/migration. A couple of the case-study-focused essays move a bit slowly, but overall, it is an instructive book in the ways that some Third World women's lives are shifting. About half the essays actually offer conclusions about what could be done in terms of policy to solve some of these problems. The other half tend toward the generic social science description-without-solution type essays that made me dislike grad school. Nevertheless, fascinating information and strong guidance toward the fact that domestic employees' work needs to be recognized and brought into public light in order to curb abuses and give value to their contributions to a society that increasingly relies on them.
It's also made me never want to go to Thailand, where the number of enslaved sex workers has reached horrifying proportions."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
