| Summary: | 碩士 === 高雄醫學大學 === 性別研究所 === 97 === The main purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of women manufacturing clothing at home while also doing domestic work. As the pay for manufacturing clothing at home is not much, the work and its value are often regarded as insignificant. Domestic work is viewed as the main task of women working at home, so the value of their work is easily underestimated. How to look at the monetary value of the clothing manufacturing work done on sewing machines at home is one of the focuses of this paper. Secondly, this paper aims to discuss (1) the way women coordinate clothing manufacturing work with domestic work, and (2) how they identify their work at home, which impacts on their work experience. This paper adopted Glucksmann’s TSOL (Total Social Organization of Labor) Theory, putting an emphasis on the relationships between different types of work that are affected by the social structure, time, and space. Using a qualitative research interview method, 10 women doing clothing manufacturing work at home were interviewed. The findings are as follows:
Aside from the “additional income for the family” provided by a female manufacturing clothing at home, it is difficult to evaluate the worth of the woman because it is hard to put a price on her intangible contribution in the various domestic tasks she accomplishes. Nonetheless these should be considered.
The experience of women working at home is colored by their sexual roles. Their reproductive roles as wife and mother make it necessary for them to allocate their time and organize their jobs accordingly. As these women choose to work at home in order to be able to take care of the family simultaneously, their time for clothing manufacturing and their time for domestic chores must be apportioned in such a way as to fulfill the needs of both their boss and their family members. Working at home not only creates time-related pressure on them but also makes it more difficult for them to have any time to pursue their own personal interests.
In order to both take care of domestic chores while manufacturing clothing at home, these women have to consult with their family members and get them to agree to share the domestic work. How the female identifies with her work at home will determine how the domestic chores will be coordinated. Those who see themselves as mainly housewives tend to take on almost all of the domestic work themselves. Some women require the children to share the burden of domestic work, but this may cause conflict between them and create additional emotional stress for the women when the family members disagree. Those who view themselves as professional workers in clothing manufacturing spend less hours in domestic work and the standards they set for these are relatively lower compared to the abovementioned types of women. However, the conflict they face is in their not being able to be good mothers.
Based on the above mentioned, this study discovered that the experience of woman working at home manufacturing clothing can not be analyzed specifically using the rigid binary framework of public vs. private domain and between work with pay and work with no salary. Variables, such as changes in industrial structure, children''s age, marital status, etc., all contribute to the various and complicated facets of the experience of their work.
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