Robyn Rodriguez,
"Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines"
(page 4 of 8)
Gendered Migration and the Family
The Social Weather Stations (SWS) was perhaps most critical in
beginning to engage the broader national public directly around the
issue of women's migration with several sets of surveys after the death
of Sioson and leading up to the execution of Contemplacion. While the
media certainly played a role in garnering the public's attention to the
issue, the SWS' survey research, by its very nature, would draw
individual Filipinos into the debate in more immediate ways.
While the results of the different surveys conducted by the SWS are
important, and I will discuss them in more detail below, more
significant perhaps is how the SWS surveys framed the issue of women and
migration and its impacts on Filipino families. SWS survey questions
about women's migration are both constitutive and reflective of gendered
anxieties about women's overseas employment. Feminists have long argued
that traditional social scientific methods, including survey research,
reproduce dominant gender relations through both the processes and
outcomes of research.[14]
The SWS is no exception, as the very questions
it asks of respondents are underlined by patriarchal assumptions of
women's labor and women's role in the family.
The 1994 "Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers:
Implications for Philippine Migration Policy" survey asked respondents a
total of fifteen questions. While the survey attempted to assess how
many Filipino families had a member working abroad and how many
individuals aspire to work overseas, a majority of the questions
centered on the public's perceptions of Filipina migrants. One of the
most notable questions in relation to women migrants and their families
was, "When the mother of the household is working abroad, there are many
problems and misunderstandings in the family."[15]
Querying whether
women's employment outside of the home produces familial problems starts
from the assumption that family stability depends on women's presence in
the home. While respondents had the opportunity to disagree with the
test statement, its very framing relies on gendered understandings of
women's role in the family.
If the SWS produced women's overseas labor as a problem for the
Philippine family, actual survey results affirmed the assumptions made
by survey takers. The SWS found that nearly a majority of respondents to
the survey believed that, in fact, the absence of Filipina women from
their families produces "many more problems and misunderstandings in the
family."[16]
The author of the survey report points out, "While many of
these issues also directly concern male overseas workers, the debate has
singled out overseas working women."[17]
This quote illustrates to what
extent women's migration specifically is seen by the public as
especially threatening to family stability. While on the surface it
would seem that these "public attitudes" reflect "traditional" notions
of men and women's roles in the family, these "attitudes," in fact, run
counter to the high prevalence of Filipina's employment outside of the
home, whether it is to work abroad, to work in other distant locations
in the Philippines, or to simply work in factories or farms.[18] In the
next section, it will become clear how what is really at stake here is
less women's absence from the home per se, but their presence as
low-wage and low-status workers in other nations.
Migrant NGOs' approached their research of migrant women's migration
and its impacts on their families similar to the SWS. In a discussion
surrounding their research questions and rationale for doing research,
SENTRO asks:
Why do women leave their families? Have the Filipinas,
especially the married ones, relegated their moral and family
responsibilities of being wives and mothers to the background in
exchange for monetary gains?[19]
Like SWS, the very questions that SENTRO pose rely on gendered
assumptions that women's primary responsibility ought to be to their
families. By framing its research of women's migration in this way,
SENTRO appears to further assume that women's employment overseas is
both selfish and utilitarian. WID's research relied on similar logics.
WID describes, for instance, how women migrants had left behind
children, "half of whom are in vulnerable and formative ages below 10
years old and needing maternal guidance."[20] By working overseas, WID
appears to suggest, women neglect to provide the "maternal guidance"
their young children require.
Though Filipinas' earnings abroad go towards the material and
financial support of their children and, as Parrenas points out, women
migrants continue to play an important role in caring for their children
transnationally (even if it requires the labor of other women).[21] Yet,
for these specific NGOs, women's absence both from their homes and the
homeland is inevitably problematic for their families. Ultimately,
migrant women's direct care of children (and husbands) in the home(land)
is seen as key to familial stability. The nationalist implications of
destabilized Filipino families for different civil society actors become
clearer in the following section.
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