The unfinished business of feminism

By Kathy G.

Tom S. at Rust Belt Intellectual has a lovely post up about the unfinished business of feminism. He argues that the right and the media have caused us to misunderstand feminism because they've focused a disproportionate amount of attention on feminist elites -- theatrical activists and the like. But he and says more attention should be paid to what's been called "the other women's movement," aka working class feminism:

These feminists defined their struggle primarily in economic, not cultural terms. They represented blue and pink-collar women who, by the mid-twentieth century, were entering the paid workforce in increasing numbers, despite the pervasive rhetoric about the normative family headed by male breadwinners.

For these blue and pink collar women:

feminism really mattered. Against the odds, working-class feminists raised their wages and undermined sexist hiring practices, even if both victories were incomplete. Working-class feminists demanded better benefits and affordable child care and fought for family-friendly workplace policies. The feminist workplace revolution is still unfinished. And in fundamental respects it has been rolled back in the last two decades by biparisan indifference to the issues that matter most for ordinary working people, male and female alike.

Blue-collar and pink-collar women experienced the promise of feminism and its limitations. Today they have real reason to be bitter. In most states, family leave policies are still appalling, day care is expensive, and working women's wages are stagnant. Women are disproportionately represented in the ranks of part-time and contingent workers, both sectors of the labor market that are volatile and insecure.

This is a working world that is largely invisible to the young and to the privileged. And I think it helps to explain why so many older women gravitate toward Hillary Clinton.

Tom is skeptical whether Clinton, if elected, would actually do anything for these women. As for Barack Obama, Tom says:

it’s time for him to take off his bowling shoes. Rather than hanging out with men in blue-collar bars, he needs to reach out to middle-aged, working-class women who are the backbone of the expanding service sector, who dominate employment in the now-struggling retail sector, and who are the underpaid care workers who take care of the sick and elderly while usually returning home to take care of their own aging parents or children or both. Their votes will really matter in November, given the persistent gender gap in voting between Democrats and Republicans. It is folly to ignore these struggling working women. Their lives are a reminder of feminism’s unfinished business. Their continued economic insecurity is a reminder of the failure of our public policies. Women, carework, and workplace rights should not be a fringe issue. They matter to us all.

A-fucking-men to that! Obama would do well to listen to that advice. I don't think he's addressing economic issues nearly enough. And personally I haven't heard him say a word about work/family issues. Though I'm sure he's said something about those issues during this campaign, clearly it's not a priority for him.

I'll add that of all the candidates, I think John Edwards is the candidate likely to have done the most for working class (and middle class) women, which is one of the main reasons I supported him.

And I do really need to check out the historical scholarship on working class women in America. The women's history courses I took in college focused heavily on elite women, but as Tom describes it, the history of working class feminism sounds fascinating. I'm sure Historical Agent knows something about this subject and I invite her to weigh in on it, if her studies are not too overwhelming at the moment.

Comments

[sistercoyote]

I need to check out the same scholarship you do, but I seem to recall that there's a sort of symbiotic relationship between the elite women and working-class women: Without Katie-Nana and Cook, Mrs. Banks wouldn't have been able to go out and work for suffragism.

Which is to say that I agree with this post.

[Historical Agent]

Never too busy to share a bibliographic citation or two.

1. Check out "Not June Cleaver," edited by Joanne Meyerowtiz. It's a collection of essays about women during the 1950s who aren't included in traditional narratives of the 1950s (in particular women who worked for a living). It's a great book all around, but of interest here is Dorothy Sue Cobble's "Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the Postwar Era."

2. Working women in the early 20th century often had an ambivalent relationship with feminism, or at least the more elite "equality" feminists who wanted to do away with protective legislation for women. Many working-class women saw things like laws that capped the number of hours a woman could work as helping protect them from exploitation. It sounds weird, but when you look at it in the context of what the entire labor movement had to face at the time (i.e. a continuing tradition of state repression, no right to organize, very few regulations in general), it makes more sense. Alice Kessler-Harris's book "Out to Work" is now a classic and it has a great chapter on protective legislation.

I wish I could give you more info about more recent history, but my knowledge base of this issue kind of trails off after about 1960.

[drip]

This is a great point that needs to be emphasized over and over. To me, most of the history of sexism and racism in this country has boiled down to pitting the working class against itself. I do not believe that the the establishment of a substantially more just economic system would end invidious distinctions based on sex or race, but I believe that it would leave us a great deal closer to that end.

I would like to see some discussion of abortion rights as a wedge issue and the failure of abortion rights advocates to emphasize the economic discrimination of the anti-abortion position. Safe, legal abortions are available to rich folks and not poor folks. This seems to fit into the points about suffrage, divorce and similar issues which have divided working class and elites in the past.

[Sir Charles]

Barbara Ehrenreich generally does a terrific job of dealing with such issues through the prism of both a feminist and economic leftist. She has written a number of books that touch on these issues including "Nickeled and Dimed" and many others.

She is for Obama by the way.

[James]

yeah, it's funny, it's only on reading this post that it occurs to me that "Nickel 'n' Dimed" (which I thought was great) is a profoundly feminist book, not just one about the working class.

[Ike]

I know I'll probably get skewered for this but the first thing we need to do to get feminist issues on the table front and center is to stop calling them "feminist" issues.

I'm an African-American father of two and being a minority I relate to the the feminist movement just like I relate to the civil rights movement. My view, however, is that as soon as these issues are pigeonholed as an identity-politics issue then as a policy proposal, it's DOA. Frankly, we need to think bigger

Besides, in my opinion, daycare, equal pay for women, sexual harassment, education, LGBT rights, Health Care, etc... are not "Women's" issues. They're my issues at well. My wife works hard, we both take care of our children, we both bear the costs of daycare, we're both watching our insurance premiums shoot up while the coverage shrinks and most people that get up and go to work for a living know this.

It's been a failure of both Clinton and Obama to highlight these issues in their campaigns, but I truly believe that it has more to do with the false narratives being pushed forward by the MSM.

What we in this society need to decide is whether in a "globalized" economy we can afford to marginalize more than 50% of our available talent due to some pre-historic notion of gender roles or whether we will move to the front of the pack as the nation that finds ways to allow that talent to flourish. I can fully understand feminism's role in getting that conversation started, but unless we can successfully re-frame and refute the perceptions that these issues only impact women, I'm afraid that we'll have little success. Especially since the most fervent supporters of such policies are already overburdened with too many other responsibilities to have the time to even get involved.

[emjaybee]

Ike, a great deal of what feminists have tried to accomplish is in your post; to make issues of childcare, work equity etc. etc. *not* "women's issues." Because they are human issues, or should be. Feminism is still necessary so long as people continue to make the everyday assumptions that you are protesting--that the work all parents should do is women's work. And feminism did not set up that framing--patriarchy did.

As far as working-class feminists, the first one I ever knew was my mom, and she would never accept the feminist label. Nonetheless, she always worked, partly for money and partly because she needed to for herself, and I grew up thinking that was the norm. Her stories of how she was treated as a working woman from the fifties to the 80s radicalized me and made her a hero to me. She has a hard time seeing herself in that context, though.

[Bruce Webb]

I don't know if Obama's economics team is fully reflective of his policy preferences but I do know there is a lot there not to like if you are coming at this from a left perspective. Taken the top three as a group I don't see a lot of labor friendly approaches from any of Goolsbee, Liebman or Cutler.

I know some left economists who are giving outside advice to the campaign and I know of at least one meeting where a really big name met with Goolsbee, but whether any of that is getting through to Obama is of course unknown to me. But frankly the signs are worrying on this front. While I am totally satisfied that Obama is sound on the social justice front, I remain unconvinced he really is totally onboard the economic justice bus.

People like to say that Obama has an Issues section on his blog, but mostly it is just drawn from his public speeches and suffers from the same sense of vagueness. For example you can read pretty much anything you want into his Social Security policy, worrying to me because advisor Liebman is lead author on the LMS Plan, which at a minimum is very worker unfriendly and is particularly so for the low income one earner category which of course would disproportionately effect women.