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

Category: Work

Screw the rules – The rules didn’t work

Finally, a not-completely-horrible article about women blending work and family. There’s no shaming or guilting of women, which is a welcome step. But there is the usual focus on a narrow slice of woman-dom.

Kelly represents a new generation of American mothers who are rejecting the “superwoman” image from the 1980s as well as the “soccer mom” stereotype of the 1990s. Mothers today are more likely to negotiate flexible schedules at work and demand fuller participation of fathers in child raising than previous generations did, giving them more time to pursue their own careers and interests. Some so-called mompreneurs start their own businesses. Nearly 26 percent of working women with children under 18 work flexible schedules, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 14 percent in 1991.

“Fifteen to 20 years ago, women in suits and sneakers…were playing by the traditional rules of the game, trying to live in a man’s world. Now women are saying, ‘Screw the rules—the rules didn’t work,'” says Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Co., a research firm. Conway, 40, the mother of twins who are almost 3 years old, started her business in 1995, allowing her to set her own hours and occasionally work from home.

The article doesn’t hand-wring over the “impossibility” of having it all, but it does point out that employers remain hostile to change:

Not that it’s always easy. Heidi Leigh, 34, a former theater sales manager and mother of a 1-year-old in South Plainfield, N.J., tried to shift her schedule a half-hour earlier in the day so she could get home in time to pick up her son from day care and make dinner. Her boss said no. “He wouldn’t allow it, because he didn’t want other people to do the same thing,” she says.

“More and more companies are hip to [flexibility], but it’s still not the norm,” cautions Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube.

My major problem with the article is that it comes from a very privileged place — the Average American Woman isn’t a highly-valued employee in a professional office who, if need be, can drop everything and start her own business. Self-employment is great, but most people don’t have the start-up capital to open their own family-friendly bakery.

It’s easy for someone like me to look at these issues with blinders on — after all, I’m entering the legal profession, and these work-life issues are much-discussed aspects of law firm culture. Firms boast about their family leave policies when they recruit new attorneys. There are entire collectives within the American Bar Association focused on strategizing ways to deal with these issues. The “working woman,” in my mind, goes to work wearing a business suit.

But that isn’t reality. The reality is that women dominate the low-wage pink-collar workforce, and “opting out” isn’t an option for lots of these women. For a lot of women, even adequate paid maternity leave is a pipe dream; the right to a flexible schedule in order to be home for dinner is a joke if you’re working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. My own mother was able to balance raising kids with a job she loves by working part-time, and by being married to a full-time breadwinner. Her mother, a single mom raising five kids in the 1950s, worked as a waitress in two restaurants and as a crossing guard — an article like this would be entirely irrelevant to her life.

So I’m glad to see that the most privileged women are making small changes to the traditional work rules. They’re in the best position to do it, and we’re all pretty fucked when it comes to work-life policies, so it’s great that they’re seeing some successes. I just hope that it doesn’t stop with the professional class. And I hope journalists start representing the diverse realities of working women.

Is there a prostitution solution?

Bob Herbert has an interesting column in the Times about the problems with legalized prostitution. He writes:

A lot of people more thoughtful than Oscar Goodman believe that prostitution should be legalized as a way of protecting and empowering the women who go into the sex trade. I’ve lost patience with those arguments, however well meaning. Real-world prostitution, in whatever guise, bears no resemblance at all to the empowerment fantasies of prostitution proponents. I have never seen such vulnerable, powerless women as those in the sex trade, legal or illegal.

Read More…Read More…

Forbes: 100 Most Powerful Women in the World

Angela Merckel, the first female chancellor of Germany rates Number One for the second time.

Our ranking system starts with a list of women who have crossed certain thresholds. Most of them run companies, governments or nonprofits, or are very close to the top. A handful have established power bases in other ways (an entertainment entrepreneur, a judge and an author have been on the list). The power ranking score is based on a composite of visibility (measured by press citations) and economic impact.

The latter, in turn, reflects three things: résumé (career achievements and titles, so a prime minister counts as more powerful than a senator); the size of the economic sphere over which a leader holds sway; and a multiplier that aims to make different financial yardsticks comparable. For example, a chief executive is assigned the company’s sales in the economic impact calculation, while a foundation executive is assigned the foundation’s assets. The assets get a higher multiplier than sales.

The article and the list.

Worker’s right to not starve to death for the job

I received a note reminding me to introduce myself. So here it goes. I’m Trudi Evans. I hail from Nova Scotia, Canada. I volunteer with an organization that works on body image, self-esteem, and eating disorders issues. I publish an online magazine (shameless plug). I’m fumbling through the whole publishing arena and making it a viable business with great plans to grow from that one publication into a feminist publishing house with an aggressive marketing department and a woman-focused workplace. Right now, I work in various rooms of my home, share my keyboard with my cat, raise a child, smooch on my partner, and chase the squirrels out of my teeny tiny garden. And feel a lot of pressure to blog interesting things here at Feministe.

 On with the show…

The modeling industry has been under scrutiny for pushing models to attain unnatural thinness by any means, and in the end, seeing them die for their profession. So what’s a government to do to protect its workers? Investigate the models instead of the industry, of course.

Read More…Read More…

Career women in Japan

I finally have more than five minutes in an internet cafe and I’m going through the massive folder of Feministe-related emails, and finding a ton of great stuff that people sent me that I never wrote about. Apologies. Once I get back to Germany and regular email access, I’ll be better at posting all the interesting articles and links you send on.

In the meantime, check out this article that Fauzia sent me, about the issues facing career women in Japan:

Even with cases of blatant discrimination, lawsuits remain rare because of a cultural aversion to litigation. Another big problem has been that the equal opportunity law is essentially toothless. Despite two revisions, the law includes no real punishment for companies that continue to discriminate. The worst that the Labor Ministry can do is to threaten to publish the names of violators, and the ministry has never done that. As a result, Japan ranks as the most unequal of the world’s rich countries, according to the United Nations Development Program’s “gender empowerment measure,” an index of female participation in a nation’s economy and politics. The country placed 42nd among 75 nations surveyed in 2006 — just above Macedonia and far below other developed nations like the United States, ranked 12th, and top-ranked Norway.

Interestingly (and infuriatingly), the conversation has to turn to Muslim women, with women who are veiled serving as the ultimate comparison point in the Oppression Olympics:

“It’s a pathetic situation,” said Kumiko Morizane, deputy director of the equal employment division in Japan’s Labor Ministry. “Even in Pakistan, where women cover their faces, they had a female prime minister.”

Women getting elected in countries where women cover their faces? Now that’s just crazy-talk.

Articles about obstacles women face in other countries are always interesting, particularly since the American media tends to focus, obviously, on American issues. But the discussion about these articles never fails to get under my skin. Inevitably, someone will point out how backwards and regressive the people of the (usually darker-skinned) other culture are, unlike us here in the USA. Someone will inevitably lecture all the feminists about how we aren’t doing enough to save the women who are really oppressed, and we should stop whining because we don’t have it nearly as bad as those poor, voiceless dears over there have it.

So, you know, read the article and comment, but don’t do the obnoxious oh-those-poor-oppressed-not-like-me-other-women thing.

Sleeping with the Enemy, Part 2

I know I promised to make Sleeping with the Enemy, Part 2 about what happens in your community, family & culture when you go from over a decade of queer relationships to dating a straight cisgender man, but honestly, I’m fighting off some narsty illness that’s swollen my throat nearly shut and made me run a temp last night, and we’re still (unbelievably) debating the validity of gender essentialism in the thread for Sleeping with the Enemy, Part 1 (on working with men as feminists/feminist allies), so I’m gonna go a little lighter today. We’ll get into all that mess tomorrow.

For today, I need to tell you about my friend. (And if you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m frank enough about my own life that “friend” isn’t some slantwise way to refer to myself.) She’s an old friend. College roommate. The kind of good friend you can fall out of touch with for months or even a year or two and then pick up where you left off, because you just know each other and love each other and it’s all good.

Well, that recently happened — we just got back in touch after a period of not connecting, and she’s involved with this guy. Or, rather, she’s involved with That Guy. That Guy who makes jokes about wanting to watch when he found out she & I would be sharing a room on a recent road trip (not that she & have ever been sexually involved).  That Guy who is hostile and condescending to waitstaff because he thinks it will amuse the people he’s with. That Guy who so couldn’t deal with the time my friend was spending on a creative, important, career-crucial work project last year that they broke up for a while. That Guy who doesn’t understand why she likes to read about people who are different from her.

My Current Guy & I had lunch with the two of them recently, and it was… surreal. I won’t go into all the details here, in the interest of maintaining anonymity for the innocent and the pretty darn guilty, but suffice it to say we spent the greater part of the afternoon listening to a story that featured prominently the theme of him treating a prostitute more nicely than anyone had treated her before. Say it with me gals: Our Hero!  

My question for y’all is this: what can I do? I’ve learned through many mistakes that you can’t pass judgment on other people’s relationships, not only because you can never really know what it’s like on the inside of it, but because it doesn’t work — it generally makes the very people you think you’re trying to help get defensive and stop talking to you about anything negative relating to the relationship. But at the same time, I haaaaaate this guy and it makes my skin crawl to think of him touching my friend. My friend who is is particularly susceptible to people who suggest that anything she blames them for is actually her fault.

What do you do when someone you love isn’t in an abusive relationship, per se, but is really, actually sleeping with the enemy?

This week’s social ill caused by feminism is?

Magic 8-ball says: Childhood Obesity. Oh, noes! It’s because feminists hate children, isn’t it? No, not quite:

Middle-class mothers who work long hours increase the risk of their offspring being overweight or obese, according to an astonishing new study.

Astonishing is right, but some women have always worked:

Research revealed by The Independent on Sunday for the first time will turn perceived wisdom on its head with the revelation that the nation’s higher-paid working mothers bear much of the responsibility for the country’s ticking obesity time bomb, and not the poorer working-class families who are usually blamed.

You hear that, all you highly paid professionals with children(women only, sorry men)? Not only as feminists are you responsible for the destruction of families, but you make them fat too!

More shockingly, the risk of childhood obesity soars in direct correlation with family income. Children in families where household income is greater than £33,000 are significantly more likely to be overweight or obese than youngsters from families with the lowest incomes, the new study shows. And in higher income households, the longer a mother worked each week, the greater the risk of the child being overweight.

More shocking is that they are just now figuring out that families with low incomes have less disposable dollars to spend on things like soda and chips. Those conscious working mothers who chose childcare facilities because of the nutritional programs that they offered, you don’t get off so easily either:

Compounding the misery for working mothers, the study found that children’s weight problems got worse if mothers relied on a nanny to hold the fort while they pursued their careers. Children in childcare are 24 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than children cared for by their mother or her partner.

Ladies, if you are not aborting them, abusing them by not marrying the father, or abandoning them in childcare then you are plumping them up with your selfish work hours:

Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: “I do not wish to condemn these women but I do think the priority has to be the health of the child and its continued health into adulthood. We are in danger of raising a generation of young people with a much shorter life expectancy than previous generations.”

Next week’s edition of Blame Feminism/Working Women: Alzheimer’s, how parents with working daughters are at a higher risk.

Monday Afternoon at the Welfare Office

The following is a post I originally wrote for the now-pretty-much-defunct Our Word, and then reposted again on my site. It is still extremely relevant: I’m still on food stamps (but not welfare), thousands of moms and their kids are still forced into waiting long hours for minimum benefits, and their time is still treated as completely without value.

So I spent a lovely couple of hours at the obligatorily ugly welfare office today, me and about 200 other moms & kids, waiting to see my worker for my yearly review in order to continue to get my monthly allotment of $152 in food stamps that comes between my family and starvation.

This is really funny, this cinder-block montrosity in the middle of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhood (aren’t they all) surrounded by corner stores and cheap furniture stores. Anyway, the funny thing is that they closed it down a couple of years ago for “remodeling” and then temporarily relocated (for 1 1/2 years) to the courthouse downtown while they remodeled the ugly welfare building. I heard a rumor that there was a rat problem, but what I really think is the folks in charge just needed to spend some federal block grant money. And fast.

During the remodeling period moms & their kids, who already have to spend bus time, bus-stop time, and sitting-in-ugly-welfare-building time, now had to re-route themselves to the downtown courthouse, which wasn’t prepared for the mom/baby/toddler onslaught. Not to mention that the few moms who have cars had to keep running outside every few minutes to feed the parking meter, thus taking the chance of missing their call to see their worker and then having to explain to the bored receptionists why they simply COULDN’T reschedule their appointment, they just went out to feed the meter, and why couldn’t they still see the worker? Please? Please, goddamnit???

For almost two years Milwaukee shut down the main welfare office on 12th and Vliet and forced the moms to hang out in the downtown courthouse, and when the remodeling was finished and the finished product was unveiled—IT LOOKED EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME! Same concrete blocks, same boarded up places where windows are supposed to be, same dirty sidewalk and street where the only people allowed to park are the workers.

Except the city was nice and put a few frescos over the areas where windows are supposed to be, and re-named the building after some politician. So now I guess when a couple of moms are talking we aren’t supposed to say “oh I have to go to 12th & Vliet” which every poor person in the city knows about, but instead will feel a sense of purpose and self-worth when we talk about making our appointment at the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center.

Where business goes on as usual. Where you wait on plastic chairs alongside what seems like every teething baby in the city. Where caseworkers routinely lose families’ paperwork so the worker has no choice but to sanction 100% of that family’s foodstamp allowance for the month.

The place where we come to beg our workers to give us back our foodstamps or our medical assistance. The welfare building where we sit sometimes for hours in those plastic chairs.

What always gets me about places like the foodstamp welfare building, or the shiny new W2 buildings (Wisconsin Works, our euphemism for cash welfare), is the absolute acceptance that life is about waiting in line without complaint, cuz that’s what you get for daring to be poor and looking for a handout. Or trying to keep from losing your cash/food stamps/childcare/medical assistance/home/children. I call it the welfare waiting-line mentality, and I see the same thing anytime the city or the state or some private charity decides to give some stuff away.

Toys for Tots is an example. I’m sure every city and town in America has something similar, where you get free toys if you’re too poor to show your kids the wonderful American Christmas tradition of spend-and-go-into-debt. So you go to apply for Toys for Tots. You wait in line outside of some building alongside a couple hundred other moms. Then you get inside and prove to some worker somehow that you’re truly poor and not a middle class person trying to scam the charity out of free toys.

Once you’ve verified your poor-needy status, you get a number to–get this–go stand in another line in a couple of weeks, once more outside in December in Wisconsin–while you wait to get called in to choose one–sometimes two–toys for your kids. And in addition you get a few generic wrapped toys that basically amount to department store over-runs (a few years ago my daughter got a Scott Baio coloring book, I kid you not).

Few question this welfare waiting-line mentality. We wait in line at the food pantry. We wait in line at St. Ben’s meal program, where I dare anybody in the city of Milwaukee to drive to 9th and State after 5 pm during the week to see all the people (hundreds!) waiting in line for a hot meal.

We stand in line to get Energy Assistance, a worthy program that keeps We Energies (our gas/electric monopoly) from shutting off our electricity and gas in the middle of the summer. They used to shut it off in the winter too, but activists shamed the utilities with all the deaths they were causing and now they wait to shut us off til we no longer need electricity or gas–i.e. the summer. Such fun camping out in the dark, with no refrigerator or fan or lights. Such fun for the disabled who die in the summer heat because our bodies/hearts/immune systems are too weak. Such fun having no hot water–but who wants to take hot baths in the summer anyway? Or cooking gas–but wait, all the meat and milk in the fridge spoiled when they cut off your electric anyway, so I guess that’s not such a big issue. Besides, there’s always the barbecue grill.

But back to the welfare waiting-line mentality. Wait in line for emergency shelters, even if you’re black and blue and have just got to escape that battering ram of a man who lives in your house.

Wait at the Social Security office. Wait at the clothing bank that will give your kids a used winter coat or shoes. Wait, wait, wait.

But don’t forget what makes waiting really interesting and fun–it’s toting along the kids. The brand-new babies, the toddlers with never-ending head colds, the babies still in the womb. Tote along all the kids’ accessories–diapers, change of clothes, bottles, backpacks, toys to keep them from driving you crazy, books, drawing papers, crayons, snacks, lunches, homework if it’s during the schoolyear.

If you’re disabled it’s a case of standing in line with your walker or cane or oxygen. Standing in line is no fun when you can only stand for a few minutes at a time anyway. Think about what else disabled moms have to tote: wheelchairs, canes, oxygen, scooters, babies, babies in womb, toddlers with runny noses, bored older kids, and the inevitable kids’ accessories. Plus we have to tote along our tired, disabled bodies.

And if anybody still doubts that every one of us waiting-in-welfare-line moms deserve a mother of the year award, remember that most of us get to that waiting line BY BUS. And almost every one of us finds time for the waiting line after or between or before long hours of low-wage work in some fast-food restaurant or nursing home or day care center or unpaid workfare-for-welfare.

And yet our kids are reasonably well-behaved, considering that many of them are either up too early or too late, are standing out in all kinds of weather, or spend inordinate amounts of their lives in day care centers. Our kids’ hair is combed and braided (well, except my kid, who often runs screaming from the comb). Kids do homework, help with taking care of the younger kids, and cope with the situation with remarkable aplomb.

I’ve decided that there must be a giddy sense of power that comes from being able to command poor people to stand in line, at the drop of a hat. Social service agencies and poverty pimps know that as long they either terrorize people with the loss of benefits, or lure them with the promise of something free (but of implied scarcity, such as Toys for Tots or Energy Assistance), they will be able to command already-exhausted and over-extended moms and kids to wait, wait, wait.