Women's Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival

Saskia Sassen’s article offers a crucial concept for understanding women’s labor under globalization: the feminization of survival. The point is not simply that more women enter transnational labor markets. Sassen asks why households, communities, firms, and indebted states increasingly depend on poor women’s earnings, remittances, care labor, and cross-border mobility to survive.

The article reverses a familiar story about globalization. Capital, finance, and information flows are often treated as globalization’s central processes, but Sassen shows that low-wage women migrants, informal labor, sex-industry circuits, trafficking, remittance economies, and state fiscal crisis are also part of globalization’s infrastructure. These counter-geographies are not outside the global economy; they support profit, foreign exchange, and social reproduction from its margins and shadows.

For FemRes, this paper connects global care chains, migrant domestic work, feminist economics, and debates around trafficking and sex work. Its value is structural: it places women’s cross-border survival strategies within debt, restructuring, and global inequality, avoiding explanations that reduce migration, remittances, or sexual economies to individual choice or moral failure.