Lexington Books
Pages: 162
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4985-6445-8 • Hardback • November 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-6446-5 • eBook • November 2017 • $105.50 • (£82.00)
Martha Donkor is associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Chapter 1: Women, Globalization, Migration, and Work
Chapter 2: Ghana in the Global Political Economy
Chapter 3: Ghanaian Women and the International Migration Process
Chapter 4: The Chance and Choice of Live-in Caregiving
Chapter 5: The Dynamics of Live-in Caregiving
Chapter 6: Organizing Family from a Distance
Chapter 7: Live in at what Cost?
Chapter 8: Rethinking Immigrant Women’s Care Work
This book makes an extremely important and original contribution to the literature on globalization of domestic work, to the emerging literature on the care economy which is dominated by transnational immigrant women who enter private live-in care arrangements with clients, and more generally, to the study of women in the domestic work industry as well as the local and global forces that explain why an increasing number of women from the global South seek economic opportunities in the global North. The study’s central concern – the lived experiences of Ghanaian live-in caregivers – breaks new ground. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first text that seeks to place the experiences of Ghanaian women in the U.S. squarely within the burgeoning literature on the care economy. This is long overdue given the rapidly expanding involvement of Ghanaian and African women in live-in care in the U.S., an area of increasing importance in an aging economy. This book gives visibility and voice to a group that is seldom seen and rarely heard through rich research details and histories of individual live-in caregivers.
— Darko Opoku, Oberlin College
This work is a vivid exposition of the realities and experiences Ghanaian women immigrants encounter in domestic care work. It's an emerging trend requiring reading and understanding by gender activists, teachers, students, and practitioners in care work and public health.
— Clara Ohenewa Benneh, University of Ghana
Dr. Donkor has shown a light on a hidden part of the immigrant story that complicates our understanding of class and social status as it relates to domestic work in the U.S. She has expanded our knowledge of paid care-giving, and given us a new —and surprising— layer to a story about race and gender and class and globalization, this one not quite so heavily laden with exploitation and undervalued labor.
— Joan Woolfrey, West Chester University