One of the author's central perspective is the idea of globalization and how it has helped develop a gender-wide revolution. Moreover, the author suggests that due to poorer country women going abroad to do domestic labor in other country households, this has altered the gender roles.
The examples further reflecting this idea the author mentions is Josephine's experience working for a Greek family. Rather than Josephine working in her home country fulfilling her role as a mother, she leaves behind her family to live with a new family to earn income to help support her family back home. Therefore, this now makes her a breadwinner and even the ultimate income generator in the family, as more and more of these women are living divorced, or with a hopeless husband. Due to this, the traditional view of "womanhood" is becoming "revolutionized," as in the past women weren't known to work, other than doing domestic labor, and being homebodies. Furthermore, the article mentions the role of "soldier" being played by the man, and the role of "mother, wife" being played by the woman. Yet, the view the author takes it is that the government is using this idea, to create a sense of empowerment in the women."
Moreover, just as a soldier has an empowerment for serving the country, the globally domestic working women have an "empowerment" for being working women, impacting the Philippines on a global scale. Therefore, this notion transfers into a gender-revolution one, as woman are being recognized as if they are men going out and serving the country. Additionally, they are providing an income to share with their family, as male breadwinners would, and lastly, the government is encouraging this, calling them heroes, not due to the sake of the women's working conditions, but because it will benefit from all that money being brought into the country by the women going to work as, maids, nannies, and even sex workers.
The way the author's idea of "gender-wide revolution" ties into the broader whole is because this common notion of the husbands being the ultimate breadwinner and the wife staying home and watching the kids is no longer the norm. In fact, it is even common to find the wife as the ultimate breadwinner nowadays. Therefore, the average household income has increased in the recent years on a global scale due to two-parent working households. Yet, in the poorer countries, there still needs work to be done as women are the ultimate breadwinners, whom cannot even be in touch with their kids, but have to do the invisible work being maids, nannies, and even sex workers for the foreign upper middle, upper-class households.
Based on my understanding of the article, the gender-wide revolution is almost a gap between the better off and the poor class, as women are being put into invisible work, without any awareness of what the government is doing with their money earned. Additionally, they aren't present in the upbringing of their own children, having to have to raise the foreign children. They're doing all this just to help make a living back home.
The theme I would like to further discuss is the conditions of invisible work, and whether the government is lying to these women saying working as maids, nannies, sex slaves is all to surely help them and their families.
I agree with the fact that this ties into the general patriarchal idea that men are the breadwinners and women are the homemakers. I would tie this into the concept we discussed during class "A Shift in Globalization" where we learned that rich women are now dependent on poor women. One could say that rich white women are climbing toward the level of men and that these poor migrant women are hardly scraping by as becoming the new homemakers. The biggest difference, in my opinion, from when the rich white women were housewives is that they were treated a bit more humanely perhaps. I think this idea would be much less of an issue if the migrant women had more freedom and were able to bring their families with. Your evaluation was great and surely captured the author's perspective well.
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