There are motherless villages in Indonesia where so many women have entered domestic service overseas that their whole communities of children grow up unmothered. Living with relatives, or old enough to take care of their own siblings, these children receive remittances from distant mothers. The women are hired as domestic help and, in doing the work for other families, they can’t afford to personally take care of their own.

Mothers who work for wealthy families in countries far from their own are an international underclass of women without whom the world’s upper-class women who strive to have it all could not even attempt it. The only way wealthy mothers can unburden themselves of motherhood and pursue their economic value in the workforce is if there is an underclass of women who do the work of mothering, for which their families pay a high price.

Red Further