In this week’s readings, I was particularly struck by the notion of the “hierarchy of womanhood,” as Parreñas puts it. I think it all starts with this bizarre ideology that while a domestic mother is not just socially acceptable, but admirable, a paid-domestic worker is viewed as “unskilled” work. Barbara Ehrenreich’s article further illuminates this notion that “…if you clean, you’re a scumball,” a mentality that goes along with women who are paid to raise other people’s children. Whenever you watch a show like “Oprah,” there is always this incredible praise for women who are stay-at-home mothers. So why is it considered such “dirty” work when other women take on these tasks? But Perreñas and Ehrenreich write about just one source of this “hierarchy of womanhood.” What about Enloe’s essay about women in factory work? She brings up the division amongst women in a whole other context, the context of competition. It’s amazing to me that the global economy has literally turned women against each other, whether relegating Filipina women from professionals to the subordinates of rich white women, or exploiting the “women-versus-women distrust” in the work place. I think these articles speak nicely to the beginning of the semester and the “What is Politics Now?” conference. The thing preventing the feminist movement from truly progressing is this distrust and competition amongst women. My question is, how do we overcome this? How do we play off the “intersectionality” of women so that we create a stronger global alliance amongst women?