Response to Glenn

In her essay “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Glenn comments that as family members spend more time outside the household, “they have less time and inclination to provide for one another’s social and emotional needs” (5). For me, this brought up an interesting comparison between Ehrenreich’s sentiments in her article “Maid to Order: The politics of other women’s work” that “one of the ‘better’ things employers of maids often want to do with their time is, of course, spend it with their children” (70). Although Glenn may not be specifically referring to children in her statement, it is still intriguing that she predicts a weakening of community/familial emotional and social interdependence when Ehrenreich seems to predict the opposite. The same variable – paid housework allowing the employers to spend more time out of the house – seemingly causes a breach of opinions between the two authors. What then would be an appropriate measure to gauge the accurateness of each perspective? Does this assessment vary by region, a theme which Glenn often employs in her essay? Or, do the different backgrounds of Glenn and Ehrenreich provide a cause for their difference in belief?

"From Service to Servitude" Response

Glenn’s article entitled “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor” addresses the role that race and gender have played historically in the work field to eventually debunk them by identifying these two as “socially constructed systems” (Glenn, 31). Glenn argues that historically, race and gender have not been mutually exclusive, static facts of life but rather interdependent and dynamic constructions in the work place. Glenn writes of domestic service in particular, “Whatever the specific content of the racial characterizations, it defined the proper place of these groups as in service: they belonged there, just as it was the dominant group’s place to be served” (Glenn, 14). This article on the surface seems to strike similar chords with the “Stratifying by Sex” essay we read for our last session. In this article, author Kessler-Harris addresses historically how women have been restricted to the domestic sphere in order to keep the industrial wheel running. In their historical explorations, “Stratifying by Sex” and “From Servitude to Service Work” are extremely similar. However, Glenn’s article seems to be more of a push forward for change than a simple exploration of the past. In her concluding paragraphs, Glenn writes, “race and gender are socially constructed rather than being ‘real’ referents in the material world, then they can be deconstructed and challenged…An initial step in this process is to expose the structures that support the present division of labor and the construction of race and gender around it” (Glenn, 35). Kessler-Harris’ article, while heavily implying that a change needs to take place, fails to provide any possible solution. In this way, Glenn’s article seems to me as a reader to be a more relevant and convincing article than Kessler-Harris’ simple history exploration.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn in her essay "From Servitude to Service Work:" continues the running themes of gender and race. Glenn nicely ties the Kessler-Harris and Ehrenreich essays with her own explaining how the categories of gender and race shape reproduction labor. She elaborates more on race, specifically African American, Mexican American and Japanese American, in different regions of the country and how the division of labor is mostly made up of these minority people. I like hoe Glenn extends Kessler-Harris's idea of the gender roles within the household and how these roles extend to the family economically and functionally. Glenn says that "Marxist feminists place the gendered construction of reproductive labor at the center of women's oppression." (Glenn 2) The idea of women doing the majority of the household work benefits men because they are effected "directly and indirectly." (Glenn 2) Men are able to enjoy and relax at home by the services they traditionally produce and this allows them to focus on issues outside of the house like making a pay check. There is an importance in acknowledgment between the relationship of race and gender because it "recognize conflicting interests among women." (Glenn 36) This conflict is tied to the working women because they need help not being around the house as much as they would if they did not work. Here gender plays its role because Glenn explains it is "women of color" (Glen 36) are willing to work: specifically immigrants. Gender and race can been seen as two separate categories but by looking at Glenn's essay and looking back on Ehrenreich and Kessler-Harris there is enough evidence that both complement each other really well.

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.  

Response to Glenn

In "From Servitude to Service Work", Evelyn Glenn argues that race is a key factor in analyzing the history behind female roles in the workplace. Previously, she says, women's experiences were all lumped together without regard to the stark differences between the treatment of "racial-ethnic" women and "white women". In this respect, Glenn has explored something that was lacking in the Kessler-Harris article, namely regional and racial differences. Glenn agrees with KH when she says, "sexual division of reproductive labor in the home interacts with and reinforces sexual division in the labor market" (2). This is very much in the same vein as most of KH thesis, but Glenn goes on to explore why "racial-ethnic women are disproportionately employed as service workers in institutional settings" (3), and is very much adamant that race and gender are "socially constructed, interlocking systems" (3), that can and should be unraveled for the benefit of all women.
Glenn also appears to respond to Ehrenreich by going into detail about women in domestic service, but again here she deviates by concentrating mostly on the experiences of racial-ethnic women, and what that actually means for white women. The thing I found most interesting was that Glenn claims that white women hired racial-ethnic women to do their domestic services instead of clearing up gender differences with their husbands. That makes me wonder that if that had never happened, and white women had continued to be 'oppressed' by males, without having racial-ethnic women to turn to, would white women have eventually revolted against the separate spheres, bringing racial-ethnic women up with them? This drew my attention. However, do we really expect women to go to their husbands and say that they refuse to hire a maid because it reinforces race and gender ideologies? This all makes me realize how interlocked race and gender situations are, and how difficult it is, indeed, to separate the two.

Glenn Response

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, in her essay "From Servitude to Service Work," explains how the division of labor is broken into two categories, gender and race. Glenn's essay is a nice liaison between Kessler-Harris's article "Stratifying by Sex: Understanding the History of Working Women" and Ehrenreich's essay "Maid to Order." Glenn links the two by including the racial divisions in the work force as well as the gender differences in the work force. Like Ehrenreich, Glenn speaks of how immigrants and minorities tend to be the more common in the field of house hold work (maids, home/child care, etc.). However, I feel that the beginning of Ehrenriche's essay provides more of a feminist movement than that of Glenn's. Glenn's essay is almost entirely geared on minorities in manual labor and the common labor race in particular regions ("African American women in the South, Mexican American women in the Southwest, and Japanese American women in California"). 

I was perplexed about how geared toward race that this essay was and how many examples and facts that were given. Thus, I wondered what background and race that Glenn actually was. I did a little research that informed me that Glenn is an Asian professor at UC Berkeley. She is actually an Asian American Studies professor, but still has had many other articles published about racial inequality and gender inequality.