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

Edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman assembles fifteen essays on the largely unnoticed movement of women into domestic work, childcare, elder and disability support, sex work, and transnational marriage. The collection’s lasting intervention is to locate globalization inside intimacy. Currency, debt, visas, and labor demand do not stop at the household door; they reorganize who touches, cleans, comforts, desires, and raises whom.

Hochschild’s influential image of “love and gold” describes a global care chain. A professional household in a wealthy country hires a migrant nanny; that worker may leave her own children with a relative or a lower-paid caregiver at home. Money travels back as remittances while time and emotional presence move in the opposite direction. The metaphor makes a care deficit visible, although love is not literally a finite substance that can simply be extracted and transferred.

The chapters refuse a single migrant story. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines children and transnational families in the Philippines; Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo follows the conflict and negotiation surrounding paid domestic work; Lynn May Rivas studies personal attendants; Nicole Constable and Pei-Chia Lan place Filipina workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Together they show that migration involves ambition and constraint, earnings and downward status, attachment and separation at once.

The collection also places domestic labor beside sex work and marriage migration. That juxtaposition reveals how states and markets regulate women’s mobility through ideas about sexuality, respectability, and rescue. It must nevertheless be read carefully: domestic workers, sex workers, trafficking survivors, and transnational spouses do not share one legal status or one relation to consent. A feminist analysis gains nothing by collapsing different forms of labor and coercion into a single victim category.

Several essays move outward to governments, recruitment systems, and what Saskia Sassen calls the survival circuits of global cities. Sending states depend on remittances, receiving states restrict settlement while demanding labor, and agencies profit from arranging mobility. Household convenience is thus supported by a public architecture of debt, documents, and unequal citizenship even when the employment relationship appears to be an informal agreement between two women.

This is the anthology’s difficult feminist question: what happens when advances for relatively privileged women rest on another woman assuming the work that men, employers, and welfare states still refuse to share? The answer is not that women should withdraw from paid work or personally solve global inequality. It is that equality cannot be measured only inside one household; public care, labor protection, migration rights, and men’s reproductive labor must enter the balance sheet.

Published in the early 2000s, the book uses language such as “First World” and “Third World” that now requires historical care, and it predates platform hiring, widespread digital surveillance, and newer worker-led policy victories. The “extraction of love” framing can sentimentalize care or assume heterosexual motherhood, while the anthology’s breadth leaves some chapters more reported than deeply situated. Later scholarship and workers’ own writing should update, contest, and regionalize its map.

Read Global Woman as a set of arguments rather than one continuous thesis. Choose two chapters on different forms of migration and compare who controls the visa, contract, residence, income, family narrative, and possibility of refusal. Then add a current source produced by workers in that sector. The book’s strongest legacy is not the tragic image of care flowing north, but the demand to build a world in which mobility, intimacy, and survival are not purchased by transferring deprivation down a chain of women.