Female domestic labor

Considering how the political economy of the City of Women, a contemporary art festival, has been marked by the economic subordination of women on the one hand and by unpaid labor in the arts on the other, this essay examines the contradictions arising out of the clash between the politics of equal opportunities and the cultural politics that govern artistic production in the underfunded independent art scene in Slovenia. Regardless of the fact that the festival City of Women has not shied away from addressing the questions of working conditions and has supported many artists that have tackled the problem in the arts and beyond it, the City of Women is nevertheless caught in the following contradiction (catch-22): while it does important emancipatory work concerning women’s representation, if it does not do so while accounting for the imbrication of class and gender, it can’t escape the effects of economic subordination. The concept of invisible labor is the point of entry for this issue because it is not only central to women’s inequality in a capitalist mode of production but also because it defines a pervasive form of labor exploitation in the arts.

İş ve aile yaşamını uzlaştırma politikaları, kadın istihdamını artırmak, toplumsal refah düzeyini yükseltmek, çocuk yoksulluğunu düşürmek, ev içi iş yükü ile çalışma yaşamındaki sorumlulukları dengelemek amacıyla geliştirilen politikalardır. 1990'lardan itibaren Avrupa ülkelerinde art arda uygulamaya konan bu politikalar, yakın zamanda ülkemizde de politika üreticilerin gündemine oturmuştur. Son dönemde gerçekleştirilen araştırmalar, iş ve aile yaşamını uzlaştırma politikalarının kadın istihdamını artırarak iş ve iş dışı yaşam arasındaki dengeyi sağlayabileceği gibi, ev içi ücretsiz işlerin kadınlar ve erkekler arasındaki eşitsiz dağılımını derinleştirebileceğini, kadınların tam zamanlı, nitelikli işlere erişimini engelleyici sonuçlar yaratabileceğini ortaya koymuştur. Bu makalede, kavramın ayrıntılı biçimde açıklanmasının ardından, söz konusu politikaların ülkemizdeki olası sonuçlarının ilgili literatür ışığında tartışmaya açılması amaçlanmaktadır. Anahtar Sözcükler: İş ve aile yaşamının uzlaştırılması, iş-yaşam dengesi, toplumsal cinsiyet eşitliği, bakım hizmetleri, güvenceli esneklik, doğum sonrası izinleri Abstract The work/family life reconciliation policies aim to increase female employment rate, improve social welfare, reduce child poverty and balance work/family life responsibilities. These policies, which have been put into practice successively in most of the European countries during the 1990s, lately sat on the agenda of the policymakers in Turkey. Recent researches show that the reconciliation policies have positive results such as increasing the female activity rate and balancing work and non-work life. However they also have adverse effects like deepening the unequal distribution of unpaid work between men and women and hindering women's access to full time jobs. This study gives detailed explanation of the reconciliation policies, examines the potential benefits and risks and discusses the possible consequences for Turkey.

Pushing against imperial cultural glorification of the empowerment of
Indian ayahs (nursemaids) sailing to Britain, this article uses official and
vernacular archives to chart a social history of the precarious predicament
of ayahs denied wages, facing caste death, or abandoned in Britain
without return passage. Precarity, rather than agency or victimhood, is
a useful lens to examine the lives of colonial maidservants traveling to
Britain. After the mid-nineteenth-century transition from East India
Company rule to Crown rule, the British liberal state’s policy of nonregulation
and formulation of the employer-ayah relationship as “private”
increased the vulnerability of ayahs. Despite Indian anticolonial,
nationalist critiques of British immoral exploitation, the class collusion of
British and Indian employers provides a valuable framework to examine
the lives of traveling ayahs. Instead of looking from employers’ perspectives— as studies of servants tend to do—this article foregrounds the
experiences, anxieties, and struggles of ayahs themselves to lead moral,
respectable lives by preserving their caste purity, chastity, and maternity.
This article puts into conversation the life stories of individual ayahs
with larger arguments about gender, caste, race, and empire.

Triangular arrow points (Madison points) vastly outnumber endscrapers on Iroquoian village sites; a fact that has not been satisfactorily explained. Endscrapers are assumed to have been used for scraping deerskins. However, the number of endscrapers recovered from most Iroquoian village sites is inadequate to account for the number of deerskins that must have been scraped in these villages. We conclude that Iroquoians typically scraped deerskins with bone or wood tools and used stone endscrapers for hides thicker than those of deer. At the Eaton village site whole endscrapers tend to be associated with longhouses and associated middens, suggesting the scraping of thick hides such as those of bear occurred inside, likely in winter. The concentration of broken endscrapers in one of three longhouses on the Eaton village suggests unequal use of endscrapers by households.

Some recent scholarship has proposed analysing housework within ‘time’ and ‘space’ to better understand the persistent gender gap in the division of household labour. This article presents the findings of an exploratory study of housework over the lifecourse of marriage and migration in 17 transnational, middle-class, dual-career Indian couples, married for 10 to 30 years and living in the UK for nine to 24 years. By applying Morgan’s (2011) family practices approach (which includes themes of time and space and subthemes of the practical, symbolic and imaginary), the analysis revealed how the temporally and spatially changing (gendered) domestic practices of the sample were underpinned by decisions made by active agents and informed by, rather than just being a passive enactment of, normatively decreed roles, situated within a framework of ‘cooperative conflict’, as described by Amartya Sen. These findings have implications for how housework is both researched and theorised.

In the Global Gender Gap 2020 Report, which tracks gender parity in education, health, politics, and economic participation, Japanese women were ranked 121st out of 153 (World Economic Forum, 2019), lagging far behind other Asian countries such as the Philippines, which came in at 16, Singapore, which ranked 54th, and Thailand in 75th place. Although Japanese women are highly educated and in good health, this represents
an all-time low for Japan and might be seen as a setback. although the number of working women has increased, most are not engaged in career-track jobs; the number of women in executive or managerial positions, as well as high level government jobs, lags far behind that of other industrialized nations (Shim, 2018). Shambaugh et. al. suggests the
less than stellar labor market outcome for Japanese women may be due to the possibility “that work other than full-time and regular employment is a better fit for the circumstances and preferences of some working women” and that they choose jobs which enable them to “balance employment with non-work obligations” (2017). In other words,
they may be choosing part-time or lower-level jobs because Japanese working women who are married with children still bear the brunt of childcare, housekeeping, and caring for elderly relatives. Furthermore, they are left with little time for career development activities which might lead to advancement. This, however, is not a uniquely Japanese dilemma. Women in other countries often hire workers to help with domestic tasks.
Hitherto, little research has been done to determine the effect of hiring help on gender disparity in the Japanese workplace. In this paper, we will examine the results of a survey on attitudes toward hiring help to better understand why working women in Japan tend to not outsource domestic work.

This study analyzes the process of the embodiment of reproductive labor by Muslim immigrant women and argues that it is not only the commodification of reproductive labor that alienates reproductive workers, but also the cultural conflicts that involve Muslim women's identity that is formed communally. The analysis based on secondary sources to the narratives of Muslim immigrant women concludes that the dynamism of space has a high impact on the level at which cultural values and the process of commodification of reproductive labor can act as determining factors in how alienation is generated.