Women's Studies 1022F/G Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Sewing Machine, Living Wage, Food Processing
Document Summary
Chapter 7- bananas, beaches and bases: women"s labour is never cheap. No one"s labour is automatically cheap, it has to be made cheap. It is the deliberate manipulation of ideas about girls and women and notions of femininity that create this. Many girls would start in the factory unmarried, and never end up getting married. When they would send back money to their parents, the parents stopped defining their daughter"s goodness by whether she would marry or not. Many bangladeshi women garment workers were unaware of the unfair and dangerous conditions they worked in: unclean toilets, long hours, poor ventilation, block stairways. Industrial productivity and profit-maximizing goals have contradicted prevailing cultural norms of femininity. Government economic strategies, industrialists, technology engineers, and their media supporters have had to find ways to deny or at least defuse the gendered ideological awkwardness. It allowed company owners to break down the process of making clothes into discrete operations-> rationalized factory system.