Blog #11

The movie that stands out in my mind concerning poor working women is Erin Brockovich. This movie details the life of a poor working mother trying to provide for her three children while at the same time do her best at a job she truly loved. The movie starts out showing how difficult her living situation was due to the fact that she was poor, uneducated and had had children had a young age. She struggles to make ends meat and keep a roof over her family’s head which is a constant worry to her. In one scene she finds a huge cockroach in her broken kitchen causing her to reflect on the bad conditions she is putting her children in yet she has no other choice and is doing all she can to get them into a better situation. She starts to work as a secretary at a law firm and stumbles upon a case that interests her so she starts researching it and working longer hours. This causes her to have a miscommunication with her boss and results in a powerful scene when he fires her and you can see her whole world cave in around her because she needs the job so desperately and invested so much time away from her children for it. Her long hours working cause her to rely on a neighbor to watch her children when her primary care arrangement falls through and later she even brings them to work with her at times when she has no other care options. Once Erin receives her job back, she puts many long hours into it due to the nature of the case but also the feelings of accomplishment and worth that her job gives her which she has not received from a job in the past. This results in even more time away from her children which turns into a hard thing for Erin to deal with once she realizes how negatively it is affecting her children yet she continues to work in hopes that her job will soon allow her greater time and economic freedom to spend more time with her children. While in the end Erin wins the big case and starts off towards a path of great accomplishment both personally and economically which pulls her out of the poor working mothers world, her beginnings do show the struggles she must face in the workforce and also the sacrifices to her children she must make in order to get to that point.