Mistresses and maids : inequality among third world women wage earners / Janet M. Arnado.

As "Third World women" are often homogenized as poor, it is rare to find a book dealing with the power relations between wage-earning mistresses and their live-in maids in a Third World setting. Fillingthis gap, mistresses and Maids demonstrates the complexity of the multiple positions of women in the Third World, and how these positions create, sustain, and reproduce inequalities. Using narrative accounts, Arnado examines class inequality among working women in the Philippines in the context of mistress-maid employment relationship. In addition to the Third World context, this book broadens existing literature in four ways. First Arnado examines the class and status differentials between mistresses and maids not only as employers and empoyees but also as wage earners within a post-colonial, patriarchal,and capitalist society. Second, she shifts her analysis from micro to macro dynamics, from local to global, and from class to the intersection of gender, etchnicity, age and class. Third, this study adds to the growing feminist discourse on the social contruction of differences among women. While much of the debate has focused on racial differences, little attention has been directed toward class inequality. Fourth, it enriches the scholarly discourse on feminist fieldwork methodologies, particularly with regard to an indigenous woman conducting research in her own peripheral country, sharingthe language, ethnicity, color and religious heritage with her interviewees. Moreover, this research puts Filipino women's voices in the forefront in such a way that their real standpoints are documented as diverse strata. Given these contributions, this book is a good resource for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars in women's work, feminism, and social inequality.