The Will to Change

Abstract

This chapter introduces the ‘will to change’ of the Ethiopian women who migrate to the Middle East in large numbers each year, to take up jobs as migrant domestic workers. Their primary aim is to change their own lives and those of their families. This chapter describes the aspirations that contribute to the women’s decisions to work abroad and then goes on to lay out a theoretical framework for understanding their agency, drawing from migration studies and feminist scholarship. The chapter argues that we should move beyond the dominant depictions in media and policy discourses of migrant women as victims of abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. Instead, I outline how this book proposes to interpret the actions and inactions, the words and silences, of these women as multiple dimensions of their agency, even though such agency may often be heavily constrained by their employment circumstances. Further, I use the concept of social reproduction to understand the transformations their migration brings about in their own lives, the lives of their families, and at a broader level of social change.