Glenn Response

Evelyn Nakano Glenn examines the role social reproduction plays in the hierarchy set up between differing races in her essay, "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor."  Glenn argues that this division could not take place, however, if there was not a distinct separation between men and women in the working world.  Social reproduction is the idea that men are seen to work outside the home and produce for his family, while women are supposed to take care of the tasks inside the home that make it possible to reproduce the male labor.  This ranking is seen in many aspects of life, where women are portrayed as lower then men.  Glenn provides an even deeper analysis of what goes on because of the gender roles, which prove that the gender and racial subordination go hand in hand.

White women could tell that fighting the standards set up by men would be a difficult task so they went to the only other option they had; to put their tasks onto a lower class women, and in almost every case of a different race.  This argument is helpful in adding to the arguments of Barbara Ehrenreich because her essay "Maid to Order" focuses on domestic work and servitude as well. Ehrenreich focuses mainly on the idea that with factors such as, more time spent outside of the house and bigger houses, the need for hired help was becoming more important.  She does hint at the idea that with the institution of the independents and hired services there is a tendency to then categorize workers into racial groupings.  This is not the highlight of her essay however which is why Glenn's essay is able to build off of it.

I think to fully understand where the interconnectedness of gender and race in the workplace comes from in Glenn's essay it helps to have read Ehrenreich's essay.  There is a foundation built in the idea of social reproduction through a gender perspective that can be applied to the ideas about racial discrepancies about labor.