short response to chapters 3 and 4 in The Curious Feminist

Cynthia Enloe’s chapter’s on big sneaker companies was very interesting to me. This is because I was always interested how things that are sold in the US are made. Most articles of clothing usually say made in China or Korea. But I wondered if things were really made in sweatshops by girls and children and if the conditions were as bad as how the media described it. I’m very naive because I thought, “No Way!” America would never be involved in things of that nature. I over looked American’s greed and thought of us as the good guys trying to stop things like unfair wages and dangerous working conditions. However according to these chapters that is not the case; American businesses, specifically shoe companies like Nike and Reebok, used this cheap labor as a means of making more profit. Cynthia Enloe particularly talks about the exploitation of women in South Korea. These women were told by their government to go and work in the cities so they can help industrialize the country. They were seen as patriots and respectable daughters enabling themselves to get married. So these women had to work in these factories or they would not marry and therefore would live in poverty for the rest of their lives. Working in the factories was only the beginning, they would only work their till they found a husband and then they would leave and new girls would be introduced. This is clever by the Nike and the South Koreans because before the women could band together they would be out of the job. When these women finally decided not to take it anymore in the mid-1980s, the Nike factories decided to shut down and more toward Indonesia and China. “The regimes were authoritarian regimes. Both shared the belief that if women can be kept hard at work, low-paid, and unorganized they can serve as a magnet for foreign investors. Each of these regime attributes proved very appealing to American and European sneaker company executives as they weighted where next to set up their factories (Enloe 49).” Basically the sneaker companies were glad that women were repressed because they can now make a greater profit. By using their labor these companies are saying they don’t support women’s rights in these foreign companies. And if they think that they probably think the same of the women here, what’s the difference? I wonder what excuse was used by the big shoe companies when they shut down there companies in South Korea. These chapters by Cynthia Enloe really make big shoes business’s like Nike and Reebok look bad. I guess since no law is being broken in those countries these companies can’t get in trouble, what a shame.