Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-324).

Love and gold / Arlie Russell Hochschild -- The nanny dilemma / Susan Cheever -- The care crisis in the Philippines : children and transnational families in the new global economy / Rhacel Salazar Parreąs -- Blowups and other unhappy endings / Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo -- Invisible labors : caring for the independent person / Lynn May Rivas -- Maid to order / Barbara Ehrenreich -- Just another job? : the commodification of domestic labor / Bridget Anderson -- Filipina workers in Hong Kong homes : household rules and relations / Nicole Constable -- America's dirty work : migrant maids and modern-day slavery / Joy M. Zarembka -- Selling sex for visas : sex tourism as a stepping-stone to international migration / Denise Brennan -- Among women : migrant domestics and their Taiwanese employers across generations / Pei-Chia Lan -- Breadwinner no more / Michele Gamburd -- Because she looks like a child / Kevin Bales -- Clashing dreams : highly educated overseas brides and low-wage U.S. husbands / Hung Cam Thai -- Global cities and survival circuits / Saskia Sassen -- Migration trends : maps and chart / Robert Espinoza -- Appendix: Activist organizations.

In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide. Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women's traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny-- or cleaning woman, nursing care attendant, maid-- eases a "care deficit" in rich countries, while her absence creates a "care deficit" back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels, "Global woman offers an unprecedented look at a world shaped by mass migration and economic exchange on an ever-increasing scale. In fifteen vivid essays-- of which only four have been previously published-- by a diverse and distinguished group of writers, collected and introduced by best selling authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, this anthology reveals a new era in which the main resource extracted from the third world is no longer gold or silver, but love.