Reference: England, K. (1993). Suburban pink
collar ghettos: The spatial entrapment of women?. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83(2), 225-242.
England’s article seeks to re-evaluate and interrogate
the spatial entrapment theory that has been applied to suburban women. This
theory suggests that women’s occupational prospects are being limited to those
that she can find within the context of so-called “suburban pink collar ghettos,”
which are most often filled with menial, low-paying jobs. Using a triangulation
method (which combines multiple data collection methods. In this case, these
include findings from other studies, local statistics, written questionnaires
and interviews among other methods to assure a greater breadth of knowledge and
more accurate results), England uses the data collected from other sources to
put her own data to the test. Similar to Hanson and Pratt (1995), England chose
a city that reflects national average trends in the United States, which in
this case was Columbus, Ohio.
Even though I was able to draw many parallels
between this article and Hanson and Pratt (1995) almost to the point of
regurgitation, I have done my best to locate and explore the different ways
that England approaches the relationship between women and work with the
following quotations and accompanied commentary:
“Suburban women are presented as an attractive
labor supply because they place a premium on their domestic roles and are
secondary wage earners by choice, viewing their husbands as the ‘breadwinner’”
(226)
Just as Hanson and Pratt (1995) discussed,
although this may not be as prominent today as it was twenty years ago, women
were and in many cases continue to be important contributors to jobs that are
predominantly menial and part-time (like retail for example) because they would
rather focus their time and energy on their children and their home. It
honestly makes me a little frustrated to write this because it reminds me that
women are in many cases choosing this way of life as though housework is the
extent of their potential. I’m not trying to put anyone down here, or
disrespect the choice, but I can’t help but wonder what some of these women
could really be capable of if they handed over domestic responsibilities to
their husband and took on a meaningful, thought-provoking career.
“Essentially suburban women, especially if they
are married, White, and have young children, are viewed as being spatially entrapped in their place of
residence. If firms wish to accrue savings from employing this spatially
entrapped labor force, they must locate near these suburban areas” (226)
As a result of these women who are vying to
provide a secondary income while also keeping in close proximity to their
domestic lives, the spatial makeup of businesses has changed to accommodate these
desires, with more businesses moving from the cities and into the suburbs.
“…suburban women possess a combination of characteristics
that make them a preferred pink collar labor supply. They are relatively
well-educated, nonunionized, married, White women with dependent children, who
consider their wages to be a ‘secondary’ source of family income and,
therefore, will accept lower wages than central city women” (226)
With the idea that suburban women are more
likely to accept lower wages, it seems like there would be greater opportunity
to take advantage of them. On the other hand, however, with these businesses
targeting and hiring these women for employment, they must also realize that
this must come at a price knowing that their families come first (for example,
they might lose workers on any given day if a child is sick or there’s some other
sort of family emergency).
“…suburban women have the language skills that
are important in customer interfacing, while the class structure and related
home-ownership characteristics of suburban women are believed to enhance worker
stability and productivity, and to limit feelings of militancy” (226)
These assumptions really bother me. I don’t
understand how being a suburban woman connects to having the language skills
necessary in customer service environments, but I have an idea. Is it possible
that the connection being made here between suburban women and language skills
is that it is more likely that these women have adopted the attitudes and
values of the dominant culture (especially since most of these women are white
and middle- to upper-middle class) and thus are more successful in expressing
and communicating the attitudes and values of said dominant culture, which is
consequently the same as the company’s? I feel like nothing I’ve been writing
has
Purpose and summary of research: “This paper
presents an empirical and theoretical investigation of the widely accepted and,
I argue, “taken-for-granted” concept if the spatial entrapment of women.
Columbus, Ohio is used as the case study, and the empirical portions of the
paper employ a ‘triangulation’ by layering various overlapping datasets and
types of analysis. I selected this approach to facilitate the investigation of
the spatial-entrapment thesis from two directions: the labor demand-side
(focusing on the work-place and employers) and the labor supply-side (examining
characteristics of the female clerical workers within particular communities)”
(226-227)
Method: “I adopted a triangulation approach
because a diversity of methods and overlapping datasets were employed in the
study (other terms to describe this process include multiple strategies and
combined operations)” (227)
The choice to employ this method allowed for
England’s findings to be more reliable and allowed for her to be able to check
certain findings against others to detect similarities as well as discrepancies.
“The clerical labor forces of these firms were
also highly feminized; in no instance did the female proportion fall below 70
percent” (228)
Why is there such a high percentage of women in
clerical work? Is it because these jobs are more flexible as opposed to more
prestigious occupations (no doubt in many cases dominated by men) so that these
women are able to fulfill their domestic duties? Or is it because clerical work
has been branded as “girl’s work” and thus has become a taboo for men?
Reasons for why women statistically have shorter
commutes to work than men: “First, the domestic division of labor usually means
that women have greater domestic responsibilities than men, and are more likely
to trade off commuting time to accommodate their domestic roles. Second, the segregation
of women into low-paid, low-status waged work means that they are not
sufficiently well paid to ‘justify’ lengty commutes” (230)
While the first part of this argument has also
been found in Hanson and Pratt (1995), the second reason for why women have
shorter commutes was not addressed. If women are choosing to work these menial
jobs just for a little bit of extra money and maybe something to do while their
kids are at school, they don’t want to be spending all of that extra money on
transportation costs. It makes complete sense.
“…Hanson and Johnston (1985) found that
unmarried women with no children (supposedly the least spatially entrapped
women) had the shortest work-trips and that among the other households, the
presence of neither children nor another adult reduced women’s work-trip length”
(230)
While England acknowledges that these findings run
in contestation with other findings such as with Hanson and Pratt (1995), I
feel like a single woman having a shorter commute to work makes a lot of sense.
When you’re single and childless, you don’t have to worry about negotiating
with anyone concerning where to live. You don’t have to take your husband’s job
location into account, nor do you have to take your children’s school locations
into account, either. These women are free to find a place to live right around
the corner from their place of work if they wanted to, and they have no one to
hold them back.
“It is noted that lone mothers, who, ‘conventional
wisdom’ tells us, are the most spatially entrapped, not only have the highest
modal class, but commute greater mean distance than to nonparents in one-adult
households (supposedly the least spatially entrapped)” (233)
This is interesting to me. One would think that
a single mother would want to be close to her children, but evidently this is
not the case. I would hypothesize that economic stability, over domestic
responsibilities, are more important to these mothers and thus they travel
greater distances to attend work that is (presumably?) higher-paying. On the
other hand, I wonder why these women do not just move closer to their jobs.
Perhaps many of these women are divorced and do not want to uproot their children
from school and friends. At the end of the day though, these are all just
guesses.
In the interviews England conducted, the
response from a woman named Liz really caught my attention. She has dependent
children (youngest child being seven years old) and she kept her job when her
and her second husband moved regardless of the distance because she liked the job:
“I wouldn’t take a job in Westerville just because it’s near home, that has no
effect on me…I stayed with this job because of the job itself. I’d never change
jobs just because of location, unless I was driving for over an hour. Because
this job pays what I want and it’s mentally stimulating. I haven’t changed and
won’t change because of moving house” (235)
I want to read about more women like Liz. In
everything that I’ve read so far, women seem to be portrayed as victims to
patriarchy whose ultimate goals in life are to raise children and keep their
houses clean. Clearly for Liz, her job is a big priority for her. While I can’t
say it is her biggest priority over her family since this article does not
offer that information, there is no doubt that work is important to her. I want
to know if there are more women like Liz in the Niagara region. My mother, for
example, is similar to Liz: even though her commute is not terribly long, she
still works five days a week, sometimes over ten hours a day. Without any
disrespect for the pink collar workers of the world, I want to know more about
women like my mother and Liz because these are the kind of women that I see
myself becoming one day. I can relate to them and their ambitions outside of
their family life. I want to know if these women are happy with their career
choices, and if they have any regrets with not making domesticity a priority.
“…the interviews with suburban women showed
that a short journey-to-work is not always tied to a woman’s negotiation of her
multiple roles; nor, on the other hand, is a long journey-to-work necessarily
characterized by the absence of such a negotiation” (235-236)
This quotation points to a problem with using
primarily quantitative data when conducting studies in human geography. A
statistic is not always going to point directly to the reason behind that
statistic, so by executing a qualitative method such as through interviews,
generalizations can be avoided and a greater wealth of knowledge and
understanding can be discovered. In this case, it is easy to assume that the
large percentages of women in pink collar jobs who have shorter commutes to
work choose this in order to be closer to their domestic responsibilities.
Based on the responses by many of the women in this article, however, this is
clearly not the case. The next step for me after reading England is to figure
out if these findings can only work in isolation, or if they might also be
applied to Niagara (hopefully I will find an even larger number of women who
are not making all of their decisions around their families!).
Conclusion as a result of evidence: “In short,
it would seem that, at least for the northern Columbus area, the evidence is
not especially strong with regard to women being trapped in their place of
residence, waiting for employment opportunities to come their way” (236)
“I suspect that the varied results of previous
commuting studies reflect the transitional patterns of women’s paid employment
in the 1970s, as women (especially those who were married with young children)
began to fit less easily into the stereotype of being spatially entrapped”
(236)
What I gather from England’s statement here is
that the differences in findings from one commuting study to the other reflects
the time period from which they derive, assuming that the Western world is
continually improving with regards to women’s equal participation in the labour
force. This article was written the year I was born! That’s twenty-two years
ago! Surely, assuming that this trend of improvement has continued (and I
believe it has!) I’m sure the results of a study done in 2015 profiling women
of the Niagara region would yield even more favourable results.
“…everyday life is not separate from, but
rather integral to the processes of economic, social and spatial
(re)structuring. By putting human agency center stage, emphasis is placed on
the reproductive and the
transformative capacities of people as they engage in the mundane, routine
practices of everyday life” (237)
“Essentially, the sociospatial system in which
a woman in the paid labor force operates is not a closed one. Her work-place
location is affected by more than just her residence and vice versa” (238)
This quotation once again cautions against
making generalizations and jumping to conclusions. In a way, it also makes me
think about Bondi’s discussion of dichotomies and keeping women in the context
of the private sphere as opposed to the public. This study serves as an
excellent example of the futility of using binaries in order to draw
conclusions about gender dynamics by showing just how complicated a woman’s
relationship with both the private and
public sphere can truly be.
“Many women I interviewed considered their jobs
to be at least as important as their domestic roles” (238)
“Increasingly, both partners’ jobs are
important, and this serves to make the household’s web of sociospatial
relations even more complex” (238)
I’ve actually thought about this on numerous
occasions: if I decide to marry someone one day (someone who, I would like to
think, would also be career-oriented like me) how are we going to juggle where
our careers may lead us? What if I’m pulled to one side of the country and he’s
pulled to the other? What happens then? In marriage it’s all about compromise…but
I’m not sure that’s a compromise I’d be willing to make!
“Clearly, spatial fixity does lie at the heart of women’s (and men’s) experiences of paid
employment, but the spatial-entrapment-of-women thesis, as it presently stands,
is an overgeneralization and over-simplification” (239)
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