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Hired as a Caregiver, Demanded as a Housewife: Becoming a Migrant Domestic Worker in Turkey

Document number
1492
Date
2007
Title
Hired as a Caregiver, Demanded as a Housewife: Becoming a Migrant Domestic Worker in Turkey
Author/publisher
Ayse Akalin, European Journal of Women's Studies 2007; 14; 209
Availability
View/save PDF version of this document
Document type(s)
Media/News, Research/Study/Analysis,
Keywords
DOI: 10.1177/1350506807079011, Capacity, Caregiver, Domestic work , Feminization of migration, Housewife, Turkey, Sex work, Sexual exploitation, Labour exploitation, Domestic labour,
Summary
Women from post-socialist countries started migrating to Turkey in the second half of the 1990s to work in the domestic work sector. Migrant domestics have formed their niche as live-in caregivers, due to the disinclination of the existing local labour power to work in the care sector. Yet, the employer mothers, besides asking their live-in workers to tend their children, often demand that they also do the daily chores in the home, purposely leaving the heavy cleaning to their Turkish domestics. This way, live-in migrant domestics are promoted from the status of foreign employees to fictitious family members, to eventually embody ‘the ideal housewife’.
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