Week 1 Day 2 → Moving for Work
I recently read The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware as part of my self-imposed challenge to read more books for pleasure. The novel tells the story of a young woman who recently migrated from London to Scotland to work as a live-in nanny for an exceptionally wealthy family. While many of the fictional aspects do not compare to the experiences of immigrant live-in nanny/housekeepers, the premise of the book touches on the assumptions about live-in nannies. When analyzed with the experiences of Central American immigrant women working as live-in nanny/housekeepers in Los Angeles, The Turn of the Key offers a fictional comparison to the real-life experiences of live-in nannies that transcends borders and racial categories.
One key difference between immigrant live-in nannies living in L.A., as discussed in “Maid in L.A.,” and Rowan from the novel is that Rowan and her employers are all white, and English is Rowan’s native language. Immigrant laborers in this field of work are often hired based on racialized and gendered notions of docility and exceptional mothering. Rowan is a woman, and she is aware that there is an expectation that nannying should come naturally to her due to her gender. However, the racialized expectation that Latina immigrant live-in nannies are “more submissive than whites,” is not present in the novel. While “Maid in L.A.” spoke of racialized preference for Latina women over white, Black, and Asian women, the limited accounts of nannies other than Rowan in Turn of the Key discussed how a language barrier existed between the English-speaking employers and the non-English-speaking prospective nanny.
Perhaps Rowan’s whiteness served her in that due to her skin color and her similarities in culture to her employers, no need existed to “domesticate” her (Downwardly Global, 6). Immigrant bodies require a transformation to fit the white (upper-middle class), North American male norms of the skilled labor market (Downwardly Global). However, Rowan, in her whiteness and proximity to her employers in culture, circumvents this transformation. As an aside, it is essential to note that the domestication of foreign bodies for them to join the labor market would apply less in the case of an immigrant working as a live-in nanny. However, accepting “undomesticated” immigrant bodies in the unskilled labor market (and the necessary domestication to join the skilled labor market) reinforces racialized notions of who is worthy of what jobs. In the case of live-in nanny/housekeepers, as detailed in “Maid in L.A.,” their designation as “Latina” and the perception that Latinas are “exceptionally warm, patient, and loving mothers,” allows the racialized notion of Other to assist them in the job market (“Maid in L.A.” 57). However, “skilled” labor jobs require recolonization of immigrant bodies to fit them to whatever the norm is in that area. Therefore, a racialized preference forms for immigrant bodies in some jobs but not others. The need for immigrant women to convert to a more palatable worker reifies the dominance of the “white subject … by defining himself against the subjugated person of color,” (Downwardly Global, 17).
However, the job experiences of Rowan, a white woman, and immigrant nanny/housekeepers from Central America carry many similarities. In “Maid in L.A.” and The Turn of the Key, the delineation of home versus work for live-in nannies is blurred. For Rowan, the children infiltrate the refuge of her bedroom on a nightly basis. Similarly, in “Maid in L.A.,” one live-in nanny/housekeeper noted that she “found herself on call day and night with the child,” (“Maid in L.A.” 31). Both Rowan in Scotland and some of the live-in nanny/housekeepers in L.A. received their jobs with the condition that they were single and childless. However, Rowan has no children, but some nanny/housekeepers do, and their living arrangements and financial situations result in transnational motherhood; their children remain in their countries of origin with family members.
Along with the transnational motherhood forged by the separation of the immigrant women and their children, women employers and their children also exist in a transnational context. Due to job demands or personal preferences, the women often leave their children with live-in nannies for prolonged periods. While the borders between these women and their children are not the borders of nation-states, the social borders separating them (the woman’s demanding job, her lifestyle choices) involve her in transnational motherhood supplemented by the live-in nanny. According to “Maid in L.A.,” judgments of “la americana” due to her absentee parenting reflect class resentments that manifest in “the rhetoric of comparative mothering,” (“Maid in L.A.” 40). This class resentment was also present in The Turn of the Key, with Rowan remarking, “Do you know what it’s like for people who don’t have your money, and your protection, and your privilege?” (Ware, 85). The use of live-in nannies juxtaposes the low-income women with high-income employers in such an intimate way that class differences are more pronounced than if the low-income women worked for high-income employers at a typical office job.
While Ruth Ware’s work is fictional, a comparison with the real accounts of immigrant women working as live-in nanny/housekeepers demonstrates that even in fiction, assumptions about gendered labor, racial preference, and class resentment exist and cross racial boundaries. The transnational feminist exploration of Ware’s novel exemplifies how work that is gendered as “women’s work,” such as childcare, devalues the unskilled laborer as she is expected to have a natural affinity for the work. This leaves immigrant women seeking work stuck with an unskilled labor market where their compensation may not be commensurate with their work due to the ill-defined border between work and home. However, in contrast to the blurred border demarcating work from home, the borders between transnational mothers and their children are much starker; the live-in immigrant nanny/housekeeper has to navigate these borders with little instruction or guidance.
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