Response to Parrenas essay

An interesting parallel can be drawn from the way in which the migrant Filipina domestic workers respond to their "deterritorialized national identities" and the way in which white women respond to the inequity in their relationship with their husbands. According to Parrenas' essay, "Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor," these migrant Filipina women are stuck in the middle of the international transfer of caretaking, victim to what Parrenas refers to as a "conflicting class mobility" (574). As a result, while considered to be professional women in their country of origin, namely the Philippines, these women are thought of as domestic workers in their receiving country, whether that be the Unites States or Italy. Parrenas explores how these women respond to such a conflicting class mobility; as she puts it, "they cope with their marginal status in the receiving country by basing their identities on the increase in their class status in the country of origin" (574). For example, when returning to their country of origin, these women hire domestic workers of their own in order to stress their status above poorer women. Parrenas uses an excerpt from an interview with Gloria Yogore in order to stress this point. According to Yogore, after working in Rome, she will return to the Philippines where she "will not lift [her] finger and [she] will be the signora" (575).  In a similar fashion, in her essay, "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor," Glenn shows how white women "pushed the burden onto women with even less power" (17). Instead of confronting the inequity in their relationships with their husbands, these white women coped with such inequity by asserting their authority over a domestic worker, a racial-ethnic woman of lesser status. According to Glenn, a white woman "gains privileges from the relationship," rendering her unaware of its blatant oppression. In short, there seems to be a striking similarity between actions taken by the migrant Filipina workers in Parrenas' essay and the white women in Glenn's essay, furthering Parrenas' thesis about the international transfer of caretaking.