Chandra Talpade Mohanty - “Women Workers and Capitalists Scripts”

The case study on the lace makers of Narsapur was very interesting. While it’s no secret that women’s work has been historically trivialized, the connection between the title of “housewife” as well as the work these women did as being seen as “leisure time”, and the ways in which this adds to the heterosexualization of women’s work was something I had never given much thought to. I also liked Mohanty’s point in this section that “identity of the housewife needs to be transformed into the identity of a ‘woman worker or working woman’” (p. 387). This appears to tie into to Susan Okin’s emphasis on paid care giving for woman that stay at home and care for their children.

Something else I hadn’t previously thought about was pointed out in the section on electronics workers on the Silicon Valley. The notion that management was intentionally exploiting the ideology of factory work as being “unfeminine” makes sense in the context of reinforcing the idea that femininity and womanhood can only exist for these women in the private, domestic sphere, and that by making femininity contrary to factory work, it makes their jobs appear to be secondary.

I felt a certain connection to the section about women’s roles in family businesses. While I am obviously not a migrant worker, I found truth in Mohanty’s statements that women’s work in family business “is unpaid and produces dependencies” (p. 390). When I turned 19, I worked for my family’s business for over a year for free before I finally pleaded for a steady paycheck because I was put under the impression that my working for them was part of my familial duties, just as it was for the Cypriot women, and I was certainly not the only woman in my family that worked for free for this reason. What we did for the family business was seen by others as being less of a job, and more of a chore, like washing the dishes or taking out the garbage. Although the class dynamic is different between myself and my family and that of the women in Britian’s family firms, as Mohanty points out, our experiences are interconnected due to similar ideological patterns.