Under such conditions, the powerful fist of authoritarian dominance comes to the fore and leads to even more forceful and often violent assertion of external control. As a result, women living in a world filled with the demands of work have lived in a culture of helplessness and hopelessness. There is no way out of their current job. Many of these women do not have the money to leave their job. While they might not have been members of the lower class of poverty, they are subject to the multiple sources of trauma that arise from poverty. While they might not formally be called “slaves”, they certainly live under conditions that might be identified as modern wage slavery (Chomsky, 2008). Furthermore, this trauma and the accompanying psychological states of helplessness and hopelessness might be passed on to the next generation. To paraphrase, Oscar Lewis, it might be easier to mitigate the abuses associated with inhumane work than to eliminate the culture that is created by these inhumane conditions.
Community: Isolation, Support and Heart
Community is a bedrock theme in any exploration of the interplay of work and life. Communities play a critical role in determining how women living in a world of work experience their life. Is life for them aligned with or alienated from the community in which they reside and work? Communities can provide support for our women. By contrast, they can serve as barriers and sources of isolation that disallow either justice or freedom. Put simply, communities can be good or bad depending on the perspective from which we view the life of the women we have brought to this book.
Given that community seems to be important in understanding and appreciating the work and life of the women Rosalind Sun and I studied, it might be important to reflect for a short while on the nature of community. What exactly is community and how does it play a role in the life of women for whom virtually their entire world consists of work?
Community as Territory
Originally, community was defined by physical location. The cluster of people (tribe) with whom we lived became the community. People residing in other locations were defined as the enemy or at least as the “other”. This distinction is not unique to human beings. Many other animals are territorial. However, humans may be near the top of the list as territory-obsessed animals–as noted by Robert Ardrey (1966) in The Territorial Imperative. Many of the conclusions reached by Ardrey have been challenged since his best-selling book was published, and there is considerable controversy concerning the extent to which territorial competition is a primary source of violence in primate communities (Goodall, 2010; Sapolsky, 2017; Wrangham, 2019).
