Motherhood and Independence

In Charlene Tung’s “Caring Across Borders: Motherhood, Marriage, and Filipina Domestic Workers in California,” women are faced with a tough decision. Many Filipina women must choose between staying with their children and providing for their family financially by becoming a live-in caregiver in the United States. After discussing our childhood daycare arrangements in class, I realized how different this concept is to me because my mother stayed at home while my father worked. This made life much more simple and my parents were not forced with the decisions many of these women were required to make. However, even today women have limited options for childcare. Many single mothers or families where both parents work must find daycare for their children. For families that cannot afford to hire a nanny or do not have friends or relatives available to watch their children, they must select work based on available childcare. This severely limits the availability of work for parents, and perhaps the solution is to have more daycare centers.

On another note, it is interesting that Filipina women went to the United States for better working conditions even though they were not paid well in comparison to other workers. This reinforces the idea that they had even fewer options in the Philippines and there was not an alternative to leaving their children. These live-in caregivers were often looked down upon because of their separated marriages and their traditional “women’s” work. Some women were considered failures because they created a broken home by leaving. However, if a man separated from his wife, he would experience little to no discrimination. Women on the other hand were treated as if they were living “in sin” and were not accepted by society. There is no justification for these attitudes towards women and not men, but it makes me support Filipina live-in caregivers more because they were overcoming more obstacles than leaving their children. If the community found out these women were separated and having marital troubles, they lost respect from society. Additionally, it was difficult for a woman to remarry while men often started new relationships after a failed marriage. Filipina women faced a lot of discrimination during this time period, but they successfully created a life for themselves despite the difficult conditions.

Although it may seem like these women were not breaking any gender barriers, they definitely showed strength and independence. The Filipina women left their homes and lives behind and started working in the United States to become financially independent. Some even started lives with new men in the Unites States even though they knew they would not be accepted back home. These women may not have obviously changed the idea of women in society, but they made it one step closer to equality by becoming independent. This was one of the first steps towards acceptance of Asian American women divorcing, remarrying, and being independent.