At its height, second-wave feminism argued for socializing the labor of care. Shifting care from an individual to a social responsibility required then and requires today a redistribution of wealth from capital to labor. Social responsibility for care depends on the expansion of public goods, which in turn depends on taxing wealth or profits. Compensating workers for time spent in caregiving (e.g., paid parenting leave) expands paid compensation at the expense of profits. In addition, requiring (either by regulation or by contract) that workplaces accommodate and subsidize employees’ caregiving outside of work interferes with employers’ control over the workplace and tends to be resisted in the private sector, where jobs continue to be organized as if workers have very little responsibility for care. In other words, socializing the labor of care required confronting capitalist class power. It was here that twentieth century social-welfare feminism foundered. Confronting capitalist class power called for a broad, militant, disruptive social movement ― an anti-capitalist front linking feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, and immigrant rights to trade unions and workers’ struggles. What existed instead were bureaucratic, sclerotic, sectoralist trade unions that had neither the interest in nor capacity for building movements of any kind. At the very moment when social-welfare feminism was at its strongest, in the 1970s, the tsunami of capitalist restructuring arrived, inaugurating a new era of assault on a working class that had little means of defending itself. As people scrambled to survive in this new world order, as collective capacities and solidarities moved out of reach, as competition and insecurity ratcheted up, as individualistic survival projects became the order of the day, the door was opened for neoliberal political ideas to gain hegemony. Caught between a demobilized working class and a Democratic party overtaken by neoliberalism, middle-class social welfare feminists began to accommodate to the existing political realities. For example, leaving behind the “both/and” politics of the NWRO, middle-class advocates moved away from the maternalist discourses ― “young children need to be with their mothers” ― that, however problematic, had been part of their defense of income support to single mothers. And they adopted neoliberal discourses in the face of bipartisan charges that the welfare state encouraged dependency. They embraced the idea of self-sufficiency through paid work, even though it was quite obvious that the low-paid precarious jobs open to so many single mothers would never pay a living wage, that the childcare stipends provided (to the poorest women) were inadequate for quality childcare, and that after-school programs for older children were unaffordable. In other words, second-wave social welfare feminism was not so much co-opted as it was politically marginalized. And in the context of that defeat, not surprisingly, liberal feminist politics not only moved center stage but became incorporated into an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal regime. Which is only good for Madison Avenue, finance capital, and deodorant manufacturers. Womens rights, on the other hand, is then relegated to sloganeering and iconography. Never addressed: Their families, economic rights, social rights, equal protection, etc. Clever. Dangerously clever.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 04:39:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015