Women and the Workforce

                The movie Spanglish is about a woman and her daughter who emigrate to America from Mexico to try and have a better life. The mother, Flor, does not speak English and she works many dead-end, low paying jobs, that is until she realizes she has to be home for her daughter who is just starting to discover boys. So Flor gets a job as a maid for the Clasky household; the father is a celebrated chef and the mother has just lost her job and is a stay at home mom. This movie shows two different aspects of women in the workforce, there is Flor who is a Mexican immigrant and does not speak the language or have the education to get a high paying job and then there is Mrs. Clasky who is a well educated women who had a good job and lost it due to downsizing so she’s trying her hand at being a mom. It shows the obstacles both women have to face when it comes to work and family.               

                “More women than men make up the working poor, and women of color are more than twice as likely to be poor compared with white women, they may be involved in the informal economy as maids, babysitters or gardeners” (Kirk and Rey, p.311). Flor faces many obstacles when she arrives in America, she does not speak English and she doesn’t really want to work outside of the small Mexican community she lives in, in Los Angeles. She works many low-paying jobs until she has to step outside her comfort zone and gets a job as a maid for a wealthy family. In taking this job Flor is exposed to a way of living she is not used to and the definite class inequality between her and the Clasky’s.

                In the article The Mommy Tax, Ann Crittenden writes that, “For most companies, the ideal worker is unencumbered, that is free of all ties other than those to his job. Anyone who can’t devote all his or her energies to paid work is barred from the best jobs and has a permanently lower lifetime income” (Kirk and Rey, p.337). In one scene Mrs. Clasky shares that she lost her high paying job due to downsizing and decided to become a stay at home mom. When companies today have to downsize I think it’s easier for them to let go of someone who is a mother because they think she is less committed to her job.

                I guess you could say this film represented the gendered division of labor. The jobs it showed the main character Flor working are typically considered “women’s work”, she worked in a dry cleaners, she was a receptionist at a Spanish traffic school and finally a maid. Mrs. Clasky had a career in a commercial design firm until she was let go and she became a stay at home mom rather than going back to work and the husband was a top chef, which is typically a male dominated field. In conclusion this movie purely displays a typical Americanized view of gender job placement.

Works Cited

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives. Fifth. New York, New York: McGraw Hill, 2010