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

Saskia Sassen’s 2000 article asks how globalization is sustained by economic activity that mainstream accounts often leave at the margins. Her term “counter-geographies” names cross-border circuits—some formal, some informal or illicit—that intersect with global markets and communications infrastructure but are rarely treated as part of globalization’s central story. “Feminization of survival” does not simply mean that more women migrate: it describes the growing dependence of households and communities, and in some cases governments and businesses, on women’s earnings, work and remittances.

The article builds a structural hypothesis around debt and economic restructuring. Sassen connects debt servicing, IMF-linked adjustment, reduced state subsidies, unemployment, the closure of firms oriented toward local markets, and the shift toward export production with pressure to find other sources of income, profit and foreign currency. Her point is not that one policy mechanically causes every woman’s migration. Rather, these overlapping changes can narrow some livelihoods while increasing the economic value extracted from women’s paid work, mobility and remittances. That makes activities often coded as private, marginal or merely survivalist visible as part of wider political economy.

Sassen maps several different circuits: documented and undocumented labor migration, the organized recruitment or export of workers, remittances, and profit-making economies that include prostitution and trafficking. These categories must not be collapsed. Migration is not synonymous with trafficking, and the article’s structural argument does not establish that every woman in a cross-border economy is either coerced or freely choosing under equal conditions. Its feminist force lies in asking who captures value, who bears risk, and why women’s labor can become indispensable while remaining politically undervalued.

This is a theory-led article with a deliberately partial empirical map, not a new representative survey. Sassen juxtaposes bodies of evidence gathered for different purposes and draws on earlier research about the unequal effects of debt and structural-adjustment programs. She explicitly says the available data are inadequate to prove the full argument or specify all the proposed links. That qualification is essential: the paper offers a framework and a research agenda, not a universal causal law or current measurement of women’s migration. Its evidence is situated in the economic conditions and debates of the 1980s and 1990s.

Read today, the concept is most useful as a set of questions for newer, locally grounded research: when a household, firm or state depends on women’s work, which labor is counted, which remains invisible, and who receives the gains? The framework helps connect migration, employment, public spending and social reproduction without reducing women to passive victims. Its limit is the breadth of its “developing economies” frame; it needs to be tested against specific histories, policies and women’s own accounts rather than applied to a supposedly uniform Global South. Pair it with contemporary work by migrant-worker and feminist-economics researchers to distinguish the structural map from today’s evidence.