American University sociology Professor Esther Ngan-ling Chow did not have it easy growing up in China.
"I was brought up in a blue collar family... I worked as illegal child labor, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for four cents an hour and 50 cents a day," Chow said at a lecture at Tufts on Friday sponsored by the Women's Studies Department.
When she developed an ulcer that sent her to the hospital before the age of ten, Chow was forced to stop working and return to school. "I told myself when I was younger that I must write something about this," she said.
And she did. Chow has published several books about her research on women, East Asia, gender, and social inequality.
In her lecture, Chow used a combination of statistics and biographical anecdotes to illustrate how "globalization... the compression of the world in spatial and temporal terms" has benefited large corporations but has forced others, notably women, into low-paying jobs with poor working conditions, leading to wage dependency and depression.
"Every time [I have been] to China since 1993, I have seen the living standard increase... but who's paying for it, at what cost?" Chow asked. "Globalization is not just a social process, it is also gendered... [and it] perpetuates men's domination and women's subordination."
Globalization has created jobs for working-class women in East Asian countries, Chow said. A female assembly line worker making Happy Meal toys might find a degree of personal autonomy in the absence of men.
But globalization prevents women from getting better jobs, she said. Women are forced to keep low paying, long hour jobs far from their homes, which drives them into the bottom ranks of the social hierarchy. As a result, throughout the world, women are seen as workers instead of people, families are broken apart when women leave children and husbands at home, and gender based violence against women is on the rise.
Chow stressed the negative effects of a social structure that places women on the bottom and said that awareness is the first step towards social change.
Many in attendance at the speech said their views on globalization changed after hearing Chow's lecture about the changing world and its effects on women. "I found her definitions of globalism the most interesting - how feminism plays a role in the global process," said senior Shayla Donald, who attended the lecture as part of her Women's Studies class on feminist research.
Her "big point is about global forces being gendered," said Susan Ostrander, a professor of sociology at Tufts. "We live in a global society... I think that gender is a critically important piece of that society."
Emphasizing the importance of recognizing that our daily lives are affected by the labor of people in other countries, Chow showed pictures of the factories and workers in Taiwan and China that she has researched over the last decade. She used the images to relate women's personal struggles to the effects of a changing world. "You pay $115 for your dress here," she said, "guess how much the seamstress gets paid?"
Laborers in East Asia are mostly young women, some of whom send a part of their meager weekly wages home to children and husbands. Others send money home to parents, who help their daughters save to open small businesses. The biographies of these workers can be heart-wrenching, Chow said. In one focus group Chow worked with, everybody started to cry and it took 15 minutes to calm them down.
Chow has spent much of the past decade researching in China and Taiwan and gathering information from large factories and the women who work and live nearby. One study of a factory in southern China took a year and a half to complete. Chow and her assistants spent days surveying thousands of workers, and then between 1.5 to three hours in individual, follow-up interviews. "They took the time to tell me their stories," Chow said.
