In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Paid sick days

Many women have to choose between earning money to provide basic necessities for themselves and their family, or staying home sick or with a sick family member. It’s not really much of a choice, is it?

Not Another Mummy Blogger

Hi. I’m the writer from blue milk and I’m thrilled to be writing at Feministe. I write about motherhood from a feminist perspective and I sometimes write for the Australian feminist group blog, Hoyden About Town and other times I write for a couple of mainstream commercial publications. I also work half the week as an economist but I don’t know anything about personal budgets, sorry, as evidenced by my own household budgeting, which is woeful; so, if the figure doesn’t involve at least $100 million then I’m clueless.

I write about juggling work and family, about art and pop culture, about sex and arguments with my partner, about a bunch of traditional feminist topics like rape, breastfeeding, abortion, and the sexualisation of little girls, and I also write about politics. By and large, my writing is pitched squarely within the framework of motherhood and technically, I think this probably makes me a ‘mummy blogger’. I’m not all that offended by the term. I can see that it’s meant to be somewhat insulting, even children get embarrassed calling you ‘Mummy’ once they get to school, it is just that I am too tired to care. And there is a part of me that feels if a label is stigmatised like that then maybe it’s worth defending. After all, the belittling of mummy blogging has a lot in common with the ways in which mothers are marginalised.

There’s a lot we could do to improve the public discussion of motherhood but here is where I would start. We would not be so judgemental towards mothers if we recognised that mothering is work. If you aren’t yet able to accept mothering as work then you have some reading to do – it will involve economics and history. Start with the emergence of industrialisation when family work first became invisible. And if you can’t see that breastfeeding a baby was every bit as important as collecting firewood for family survival, then keep reading back through feudalism. But once you knock that patriarchal lens of distortion from your eyes you will never see mothers and children quite the same way again. Everywhere you look you will see something a little bit horrifying – hours and hours and hours and hours of unpaid labour. It is work performed very often with love; it is work with possibilities of personal reward and great satisfaction, much like some other jobs, except it is unpaid.

We would have better public policy and better rights for women if we were able to acknowledge more honestly that capitalism is not a marketplace, it is rather, a system that involves the intersection of the market with government, families and communities. We are talking about the greatest heist in capitalist history, because it is estimated that unpaid work in the USA amounts to 50 per cent of all hours of work performed. Imagine any other resource vanishing from the national spreadsheet like that. Capitalism, in its present form, could not survive without that unpaid support. It is not mothers who are draining the system, it is mothers and carers who are propping up the system.

I don’t want to over-complicate what is supposed to just be an introductory post here, but it says something about living in a patriarchy that we would have women specialise in a very demanding area of work that is both vitally important to us and utterly worthless in terms of monetary compensation, doesn’t it?

And there’s lots of other stuff to consider – children are not ‘units of production’, they’re small people who deserve to be nurtured with love and dedication; and yes, mothers are driven by an intense maternal desire to be with their children in spite of the sacrifices; and yes, self-ownership through individual wages was an incredibly important step in feminism and who am I, a mother in the workforce, to deny it? All I am saying is that you do not need to believe in universal minimum incomes and legislated entitlements for at-home parents/carers (though it would be nice) to know that there is a problem here when we penalize mothers through regressive tax systems and workplace discrimination for providing essential care work.

And while capitalism helped women mobilise collectively and seek ownership of resources you cannot pretend that capitalism and the patriarchy are not also mutually reinforcing, which is what you are doing when you tell mothers to just stop looking after kids and get a real job, already. Because whenever a mother enters the workplace a deal is being cut somewhere for childcare. Thinking care work vanishes when a woman’s time is suddenly accounted for in paid employment is patriarchal thinking. Either she is negotiating with a partner for him/her to stay home with the children (and obviously, this favours partnered parents over single parents and high-income couples over those in minimum wage jobs); or she is asking a female relative or friend to help out (more unpaid care on the balance sheet); or she is paying someone to look after the children (and fine, if she can afford to and is willing to pay a fair wage to someone for the task; but let’s not kid ourselves, childcare is female-dominated, poorly paid, and has a history of exploiting poor women for the task).

Ok, so this mother is now at work and by being there she sends important signals to her colleagues and employers about the role of women, she also sends a message to her partner (if she has one) and her children about her identity, she’s feeding her family, and hooray! she officially exists in the marketplace. Good for feminism, but as long as we don’t get ahead of ourselves and expect her to be the entire gateway for female liberation. In fact, it’s an uncomfortable notion but dual, high-income households have seen poor households slip even further behind since women joined the workforce. Turns out when rich women are working and marrying rich husbands, who are also working, that this only widens the gap between them and poor households. Go figure. Obviously, I’m not against women in the workforce but I’m saying this stuff is complicated. It will take a few bites of the apple before we get it sorted out.

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

It is an uphill battle though, some of the fiercest defenders of mothering as a task too precious to be sullied with the term ‘work’ are mothers, themselves. There’s a lot invested in an identity when it is all you have. This does not mean that we can’t question the decisions mothers make or criticise the institution of motherhood. In fact, I would be lost as a mother without feminism and its difficult questions. But as feminists we must ask questions and listen to the answers, we must be prepared to change or expand our theories when we get it wrong, and I advise that we tread lightly in these discussions – that we tread as someone walking over the toil of unpaid workers.

Millennials and Economic Justice

I’m a millennial.

I’m a recent college graduate—no matter how much more established colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties say, “I know how hard it is to be a recent grad” or an MSNBC (or any other news network) panel of non-millennials (read: older white dudes who seem to be the sole media mouthpieces of the economy) discussing student debt blindly compare it with their generation, as if this is going to advance the conversation on how to solve this problem further, they have no idea what it is like to come of age and into adulthood during a triple dip recession in a country and culture that keeps being gnawed away by privatization and crisis capitalism.

A few weeks before I graduated, a statistic came out stating that more than fifty percent of recent college graduates were either unemployed or underemployed. But what does “employed” even mean these days? I’m employed—but I need to juggle multiple jobs and freelance gigs to make what begins to look like a salary, forget about benefits. I have friends that are employed full time with actual salaries—but their jobs wouldn’t even think about giving them any benefits. Does that make us underemployed? What the does underemployed even mean? I’m sure there is an official economic definition, but it still sounds like a phony excuse to me.

Millennials are frequently cited as demographic statistics in articles—but the young people who are forgoing health insurance because they don’t have any other choice or are teetering on the precipice of defaulting on their loans because they ignored Sallie Mae for too long are rarely acknowledged as being trapped in a new culture of precariousness.

Saving money for the future has become a hilarious joke.

I see a lot of my friends in my generation having serious problems abusing drugs—of all kinds—as a form of escapism that becomes an obsession. I see a lot of my generation working minimum wage jobs—kicking themselves for their college degrees that they were always told they were supposed to get along with enormous burdensome debt–because they are unable to break into a career in their field of study. Others of us are constantly hustling, juggling multiple jobs and trying to find ourselves a viable space in the brave new economy. We know that even though we are working our asses off—laughing at eight hour work days as we continue to our serial jobs once our first is over—any of these gigs could evaporate at any given moment.

Our role in the labor force is precarious in a way that changes how we think about the future. Most of our future plans logically have to prioritize work, but many of us have no idea whether or not we will have still have certain gigs. We don’t commit to anything. We rarely have much savings. It is impossible to make plans. It is difficult to answer “long term plan” questions in job interviews. My personal definition of “long term” is September—and yes, I have no idea where I will be then.

Still, I have a difficult time saying that it is “hard” to be a recent grad—there are so many who are in the same, or worse economic predicaments from all ages, that these conditions are too universally normal to call “hard” for one group more than others. What I personally would call it is divisive—whereas many others have been affected by the recession, we were somewhat born into it, and are constantly coming up with a whole new set of rules to navigate what makes up the new “normal.”

It makes it difficult to take advice from older generations who do not realize what it is like to have this economic climate as the starting point of our careers. My father always tells me that my uncle used to say, “If you don’t like your job, quit.” My uncle clearly wasn’t living in 2012 in a double/triple dip recession that just keeps on dipping.

It is also difficult to know what standards we should hold for ourselves—how can you demand more when you are told that you should be grateful for anything and know that you are the last ones hired and the first ones fired? How do we know how long to put up with certain conditions—sexual harassment, late pay, expectations to be on call and responding to e-mails around the clock—before our need for sanity outweighs our need for economic livelihood? How do we convey that we are trying our hardest?

In addition to all of this, how do we talk about our place in the economy with each other? With so many of us coping with the same conditions in different ways, it seems insensitive to talk about the trials and tribulations of the workday with unemployed friends, roommates and partners. But when you work sixteen hour days regularly, what else do you have to talk about? Does it affect a relationship if one partner is struggling and another is not? How do we overcome this? (Can we?)

Our current economic climate is creating individualistic competition and exhaustion—as well as massive depression and drug addiction. In addition to being an economic crisis, it is also a psychological and existential crisis. If you think this is a dramatic statement, look at the suicides committed over student loan debt and joblessness.

However, as society is structured right now this is only going to be further institutionalized as the new and unshakable reality of living and working—or not working–in the twenty-first century. It’s not just the statistics of capitalism gone awry—it’s a whole generation that is characterized by the social and psychological effects of wild, unabated capitalism and privatization. It’s a feeling of worthlessness and defeat at the foot of this machine. It’s depression and escapism and refusal to confront the world. It’s suicides—more and more of them. It’s the sick desperation of scrambling for jobs that aren’t even that good. It’s knowing that this is not “the way things are” but that the “way things are” is rigged for profits and the beneficiaries of income inequality. It’s knowing that these beneficiaries were bailed out, and that this was at our expense.

Occupy Wall Street may have lost momentum as a movement. There may be no more camps or massive rallies, or echoes throughout downtown Manhattan. But its demands are never out of style—we need economic justice for our survival and we need it now.

Feminism + Housewifery

I realize the rest of the feminist internet is going to disagree with me on this one, but I loved this Elizabeth Wurtzel piece on 1% housewives.

Is it mean? Yes. Is it representative of most women’s lives? No. But maybe it’s time modern “internet feminism” made room for polemics and hard-nosed viewpoints and positioned itself as a serious social movement, instead of focusing on identity and making everyone feel good.

A night at the Oscars (“Phew. There. I solved racism!”)

Managed to miss this year’s Oscar nominees, and now you’re biting your nails because the big night is coming and you aren’t prepared?! Me, either. But the good people at Jest have us covered in adorable fashion, with Kids Reenact the Oscar Nominees. For instance, if you missed The Help, little kids can show you what you missed.

Class war? Or one-sided attack?

If I don’t have it, why should you?

It’s the basis of the resentment I hear and see on the part of people who snarl about those unions (who get so! much!) those striking Verizon workers, those students on the J-1 visa, teachers, public service workers, and others. Instead of thinking, “Hey, that’s fucked. We should both make a living wage and be treated with dignity and respect by the places we work for, your fight is my fight,” a lot of people seem to think, “Why should you get this when I don’t?” or “You should be grateful for what you have.”

One thing that struck me about the foreign exchange student protest in Pennsylvania is that they were quite clear in their desire to not take jobs away from Americans. Our fight, as far as they were concerned, is their fight. They’re linked.

So when I hear lectures from yet another person who embraces Voluntary Simplicity (something I practice as well, by the way, though I am ambivalent about some aspects of it), I have to roll my eyes at the preaching–“You all are too materialistic. The people in many Global South nations are poor but happy.” And I think to myself, Really? Have you been to an EPZ? I mean, without the official minders flanking you? Have you actually bothered to talk to some of the people there, who are trying to unionize in the face of sometimes brutal repression?

I think sometimes it’s too easy to snark on people and roll our eyes when we perceive ourselves as having less. But the thing is–like with the Verizon workers–what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another, and a living wage is more than the bare bones minimum. These jobs are not easy, the people who do them work hard, and it should make us all livid when pundits declare that CEO’s make so much because they work hard (and imply that the striking workers–or any worker–isn’t working hard and that’s why they aren’t making about $6M a year in salary and bonuses). I mean, not for nothing, but the people who teach our kids work hard, the nurses and assistants who care for us in the hospital are working their tails off, the people who pick up our trash and vacuum our offices are not exactly slacking, and the people who ring up our sales and make our coffee do not have what I’d call cushy jobs.

What you get when you point this out is a boatload of contempt–These people could just start their own business, and then they’d be fine. They should work harder! They all have flatscreen TV’s and rip off the system–I know because my sister’s coworker’s cousin saw someone buy steak with their food stamps five years ago. I don’t have the pay they want/their benefits/their job protection, so why should they?

It’s another side to the “I got mine, so screw you,” attitude that poisons the atmosphere. These folks who complain so bitterly about these supposedly spoiled workers never bother looking at the C-level executives, who make millions (I am not exaggerating. Check out their proxy statements sometime–it is eye-opening.) and who get very generous exit packages when they’re fired. The pay of CEO’s went up 27% in 2010, compared to 2% for the average worker. And they aren’t taxed at a particularly high rate on their stock assets or stock sale profits, which are classed under capital gains taxes (which have been slashed since the Regan era). The ultra-wealthy aren’t paying nearly the percentage that any of us do, and asking that they start is making conservatives in the US hyperventilate. Oh, it’s fine for us to pay our share, but it’s horrible and awful to ask that someone who’s making six or seven figures to do the same.

It used to be that US citizens prided themselves on the fact that you could build a good life for yourself–work hard and save, and you could have a decent quality of life. But no more–our income disparity is growing here–and nothing good ever comes from such severe wealth inequality. You want to hear people singing The Internationale? Keep that shit up.

Now, I suppose that makes me a class warrior. Which is funny, since I’m seeing a class war, but it’s more of an all-out attack on poor, working-class, and even middle-class people. And if we want a more just and a more equitable society, we have to know that we cannot stop striving for that if we get a victory for ourselves. As long as working-class people are squeezed out of jobs and denied the right to collectively bargain, my life and my security is at risk. As long as poor people are shamed and vilified for being poor, we’re all at risk for being cast out the minute something catastrophic happens, we lose our money, and we make one “unwise” choice.

Happy May Day!

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” -Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Hellraiser.

Here in the U.S. Labor Day is a muted affair celebrated at the end of the summer. It’s mostly lost its meaning to millions of people as anything other than the time at which kids go back to school and we stop wearing white. (Some of us.)

But around the world, the real labor celebration is May 1. International Workers’ Day began here in the U.S. when, 125 years ago, police opened fire on a protest at the West Randolph Street Haymarket in Chicago in favor of the 8-hour work day, after a dynamite bomb was thrown by an unknown person. Eight anarchists were arrested and four executed, not for any evidence that they threw the bomb but for their role as agitators.

Socialists and labor supporters around the world began celebrating May 1 as workers’ day, but in the U.S. Grover Cleveland feared the association with the history of the Haymarket Affair and endorsed the Labor Day we now know. But in more than 80 countries around the world, May 1 remains the true Labor Day.

We have seen this year once again that symbolism matters. We have seen right-wing governors not only attempting to suppress workers’ rights to organize, collectively bargain, and negotiate their wages and working conditions, but also taking down murals that celebrate the history of labor in this country.

We’ve also seen a resurgence in the labor movement at home–Wisconsin workers and allies 100,000 strong rallying day after day in their Capitol building and now gathering signatures and preparing to recall the state senators who voted to take away their rights. Beyond the symbolism of workers sleeping in sleeping bags in the Wisconsin winter outside the building, there’s been a resurgence of an awareness of history within the labor movement.

April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as he rallied with sanitation workers in Memphis, saw “We Are One” rallies around the country as labor and civil rights groups banded together to fight the latest onslaught against union workers.

And this May Day, Chicago will see a remembrance of the Haymarket Affair as well as rallies for immigrant workers. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will march with Milwaukee’s workers and immigrant community in a solidarity march that celebrates not only Wisconsin’s leadership role in the fight against union-busting state politicians (who are, it should be noted, not all Republicans), but also acknowledges the 2006 May Day rally in which millions marched in support of undocumented workers and defeated anti-immigrant legislation.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the founder and executive director of Voces de la Frontera, one of the groups organizing the Milwaukee rally, said:

“We want to send a message to corporate America, politicians and others that working people will not be divided,” she said.

Allison Kilkenny has more about rallies around the U.S., and the AFL-CIO has a liveblog and Twitter feed. If there’s no action in your neighborhood, help spread the word and stop dehumanizing immigrants with ColorLines’ “Stop the I-Word” campaign.

It’s about more than just symbolism, after all–it’s about organizing for right here, right now. Remembering the past, as Mother Jones said, is important, but the “fight like hell for the living” bit is the one that really matters. We want to build on history, not just nod our heads solemnly at it.

This year too, we learned once again the importance of international solidarity, as people around the world tuned in to Al-Jazeera English’s riveting live reporting from Egypt as that country peacefully threw off its dictator. Wisconsin protesters told reporters repeatedly that they were inspired by Tahrir Square to keep coming back each day to their own capitol, and Egyptians responded by sending messages of support (and pizza) to Madison. And just recently Egyptian activists joined U.S. activists here in New York to share advice and support–U.S. activists who were in turn inspired by the UK group UK Uncut to protest corporate power. 

Egypt and Bahrain are two of the countries celebrating Labor day today even as they struggle for freedom.

 Paul Mason of the BBC tweeted from Egypt’s May Day celebration today:

“Enjoy the revolution” says graffiti on Tahrir. They are. Tomorrow a Lab Party to be formed: doctors to vote on strike; new music evrywhere

In Moscow, 30,000 are expected to turn out–many to express dissatisfaction with their government as well as support for workers.  In Turkey, 200,000 hit the streets in the largest rally since 1977, and in South Korea, 50,000 rallied. China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Spain, and Hong Kong also saw marches and actions.  

In the UK, despite the Conservative government’s wishes to move the holiday away from a day associated with workers, May Day coincided with the royal wedding and thus got even more police overreaction than usual–at least in Brighton.  

Internet organizing has gotten a lot of attention of late, particularly in relation to Egypt (and before that Iran), but May Day is a day to remember the importance of getting out in the streets. Facebook and Twitter can only take you so far. 

We need our holidays to mark the past, to look to the future, and to fight for the rights of all. As Emma Goldman said:

“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Sarah Jaffe is web ninja at GRITtv, a writer and rabblerouser. Follow her on Twitter or Tumblr.

Frances Fox Piven Has a Posse

I’m enough of an Internet Personality that I’ve had some hate-tweeters and hate-bloggers in my time. Not a lot, but a few.

But I’ve never gotten as many straight-up nasty responses as when I tossed off a tweet Friday night that “Frances Fox Piven is tougher than you. Fact.”

See, Glenn Beck has it in for Frances Fox Piven.

And I was at the Left Forum for an opening plenary featuring my boss, the fabulous Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West and Paul Mason (of the BBC). And as a bonus, we got Frances Fox Piven.

The story of how a 78-year-old sociology professor and (brilliant) author became the number one enemy of The USA’s Weepiest TV Host has been told elsewhere. Nancy Goldstein wrote:

Glenn Beck must have thought he had an easy mark when he targeted Frances Fox Piven. Let’s face it. On paper she’s a female widowed lefty academic now approaching eighty. Most of her life’s work has been focused on enfranchising the poor through welfare reform and voter registration. Surely Beck thought that nearly fifty broadcasts worth of inflammatory disinformation and hate-mongering about Piven and their inevitable result—hate mail, comments and phone calls that range from brutally nasty and paranoid to those that cross the line into the genuine death threat category—would shut her up.

So what’s Frances Fox Piven up to that has Beck and his crew so terrified?

She, along with Cornel West, is organizing a massive teach-in on April 5, designed to help boost the movement, begun in Wisconsin (as Meredith Clark wrote right here) to push back on so-called “austerity” cuts.

In other words, she’s organizing. Frances Fox Piven has a posse.

I mean, maybe Beck & Co. should be scared. I hear his audience share is down, and those protests in Madison look like an awful lot of fun–free pizza donated from around the world sounds far better than tea to me.

Nonviolent mass activism is scary, I suppose, when your main interest in life is protecting the interests of those who are already doing just fine. And when you’d done a fairly good job of convincing people who have been struggling that you’re on their side already, you might as well spend a bit of time demonizing your opponents and consolidating your own power.

But that can backfire on you.

Eventually, when you make a huge deal out of a woman that the majority of the US had never heard of, night after night, some people might actually go read her books. And figure out that some of her ideas are pretty appealing. You know, that poor people should work together to leverage what power they have. That maybe while we still have mass unemployment, it’s time for the unemployed to organize instead of waiting around nicely for our corporate overlords to throw us a few jobs.

That a gutted social welfare system is leaving people, often women and children, unprotected when those jobs disappear.

That working-class people have rights, maybe, and are just as valuable as those with FOX News microphones.

Glenn Beck hasn’t been able to shut up Frances Fox Piven. Death threats haven’t shut her up. In between the nasty comments at my Twitter feed the other night, I got responses from her students, present and former. One of them said:

first thing she did in a class was slam her fist on the table and say “you don’t think you have power? you HAVE power.”

That’s what the Glenn Becks of the world are really afraid we’ll find out.

I got a button at that event that says “I Am Frances Fox Piven.” But I’m not. I’m nowhere near that fierce. I hope to be someday.

For now, count me as just part of the posse.