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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Disposable Women and Other Myths
Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism by Melissa W. Wright (Routledge, 2006).
The title of this book refers to the myth that Third World women are disposable, ensuring that they are only employed for a few years with no job security. Third World women are hired for characteristics that supposedly only they possess, including their agile fingers, patience and ability to focus on small objects but, more disturbingly, their supposed submissiveness and willingness to work for low pay. But, over the course of a few years, they lose these characteristics.
Supposedly, nothing can be done about their injuries from repetitive motion or depression resulting from monotony and lack of promotional opportunity. They are said to lose their obedience to authority if their supposedly chaotic female natures get out of control. Therefore, the companies do not have to give them job security or improve ergonomics and safety, but they do have to keep the women monitored at all times to keep them from going on strike or making their own improvements to their job.
Wright only studied a few factories in China and Mexico, but even so the book is indicative of the very exploitative way women workers are treated in general in these factories. In China, the women, unlike the men working in the building next door, are kept inside the building six or seven days a week for their own safety from violence and pregnancy. In both countries, their menstrual cycles are monitored, and they are often dismissed at the end of a few years because it is assumed that, as teenagers, "they hear that biological clock" and want to start a family.
Wright gives four case studies of Mexican women who resist these attitudes. Two became managers but used their social networks to crush union organizing. A third attempted to become a manager but failed due to her love of bright clothing. The fourth, a supervisor, improved the quality and rate of production of her product but, because she did so by relaxing unreasonable work rules, was fired for creating a "Mexican product." Wright shows that, even though these women resisted the myth of the disposable woman as individuals and made the job more tolerable for their workers, they did not change or abolish the poverty, job insecurity, or dangerous working conditions that go along with the disposable woman myth and with capitalism itself.
However, Wright states that women protesting the murders in the factory city of Juarez, Mexico, have been much more successful in causing the world to question this myth. She relates the murders of hundreds of young women over the past 15 years to the concept that women who leave the private sphere for the public one become disposable. Local politicians justify their lack of concern for improving safety and catching the murderers by saying that both the victims and the demonstrators had gotten sexually out of control by going out in public. The demonstrators try to get around this by saying that they are mothers mourning good daughters who had gone out in public to work in the factories to support their families. Wright says that, although this framing compromises their message, the demonstrators are "the public image of Third World women protesting their disposability."
This book is useful in describing the methods used to oppress women workers in Third World factories, the racist and sexist attitudes of the factory owners, and the sexist tactics politicians aim at the Juarez demonstrators. It would have been stronger if Wright had also written about the resistance to the disposable woman myth and to capitalism by the woman workers themselves. At least she does show how Juarez demonstrators resist the myth.
--Adele
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