Maids In America - The Help

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Help is already a big success. Having blitzed the US box office, it looks like making more money than the Meryl Streep hit Julie & Julia.

Much of the magic has been worked by its pedigree. It's an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's bestseller about a group of black maids working in the households of Mississippi's middle class in 1963, one of the most volatile years of the civil rights movement - although the clamour and ferocity of the movement's battles with southern racism is heard only as distant thunder. Here, the front line is in the kitchen, the nursery - and the bathroom. Especially the bathroom.

The trouble begins when Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the bossiest and most brittle of Jackson, Mississippi's, fashionable young matrons, decides her black maid is to have a toilet of her own - or rather, an outhouse - so as to protect the family from any exotic diseases she may be carrying. And since Hilly is a trendsetter, the outhouse becomes a neighbourhood feature.

Women - Culprits of Domestic Abuse

From AllAfrica:

Abuse of women and children is gradually taking the better half of the society, and even the world today. Everyday there are reports about women and children being victims of either assault, defilement, rape, sexual harassment at workplaces, child trafficking, and exposure of children to burdensome labour.

According to research, one out of every three women has been abused once in her life time - all assumed to be by men.

Men are always being pinpointed as mostly the culprits of abuse, especially, that of women. Indeed, many of the incidents of rape, incest, and spousal abuse are mostly done by men. Yet, it rarely clicks the mind of society and gender group organisations that women are also contributors to some of the daily traumas their fellow women and children go through. Women are considered the weaker vessels, as certainly, the male power overshadows them at almost every instance, even at the workplace.

Caroline Harriet Haslett

From the Irish Times:

THE VITAL ROLE played by domestic technology in allowing for greater gender equality has been widely recognised for some time now. By liberating women from much of the drudgery of domestic chores and extraordinarily labour-intensive tasks such as laundry, these developments were critical in facilitating greater female workforce participation.

 

A sizeable body of academic work has been written examining the social and economic repercussions of domestic technology. However, it speaks volumes that while the histories of the “domestic industrial revolution” focus on how they altered the lives of the women who used them, we rarely give as much thought to those women who were instrumental in creating such a revolution.

Chief among those was Caroline Harriet Haslett, the pioneering early 20th-century electrical engineer who spent her working life encouraging the adoption of technology in the cause of female emancipation. In many respects, her story foreshadows the sweeping changes in the role of women in society, but as so often with innovators and pioneers, she had to forge her own path with few antecedents to smooth the way.

France: Nannies Flex Their Muscles

From the New York Times:

A stroll through any Paris neighborhood will bear out a trend that has already made it into official statistics. More and more foreign-born women are pushing the baby strollers, caring for the bedridden, ironing the shirts. With an aging population, and one of the European Union’s highest birthrates, France needs help at home, particularly as budget cuts take a bite out of social services.

Meanwhile, at a time of economic slowdown, more immigrant women are willing to take jobs to help lift the income of their own families.

“These may not be beautiful jobs, but they are jobs that are in demand, and we have identified an increasing number of women willing to do them,” said Jean-Pierre Garson, head of the international migration unit at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris.

According to the O.E.C.D.’s latest migration report, the employment rate for foreign-born women in France has risen steadily in the past decade — from 44.2 percent in 1995 to 52.3 percent in 2008.

Malaysia: 2000 Maids A Month

From the Star:

The Malaysian Association of Foreign Maid Agencies (Papa) brings in between 2,000 and 3,000 foreign maids from several countries every month to meet the needs of employers in this country since Indonesia froze the service to Malaysia a year ago.

He told Bernama that currently there were about 300,000 Indonesian maids working in Malaysia. He said most of the maids from Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines were non-Muslims because a majority of the demand for these maids came from the Chinese community.

Indonesia wants a minimum monthly wage of RM800 but Malaysia wants wages based on market demand and through discussions between the employer and the maid concerned.

"On average, the housemaids are now paid RM500 and above depending on the location of the workplace, whether it is in town or rural area. But if the maid gives quality service, the employer can consider a higher pay,” he said.

Trapped: 300 Malayali Women

From Sahil Online:

Almost 300 Malayali women who have been recruited illegally to Gulf countries as housemaids and forced into immoral activities are trapped in the Gulf countries.

According to a News portal of Kerala, Souda of Pathanamthitta and Ahamed of Kasargod together run the sex racket in UAE. People came to know about the sex racket when some traumatic stories were revealed by a woman, who moved the Kerala High Court.

The woman approached the court demanding an officer not less than the rank of an IG to probe the case. The plea was considered by a division bench of Acting Chief Justice P R Raman and Justice C N Ramachandran Nair.

The portal said in his report that the agents lure women from poor families promising them jobs in Gulf countries. A small amount would be given to their families after considering their poor financial condition. The passports have to be surrendered once you reach Gulf. The women can contact their parents only in the presence of these agents.