http://www.inthesetimes.com/ehrenreich2326.html

In These Times

11/29/99



Doing it for Ourselves: Can feminism survive class polarization?

By Barbara Ehrenreich



Here's a scene from feminist ancient history: It's 1972 and about 20 of us

are gathered in somebody's living room for our weekly "women's support

group" meeting. We're all associated, in one way or another, with a small

public college catering mostly to "nontraditional" students, meaning those

who are older, poorer and more likely to be black or Latina than typical

college students in this suburban area. Almost every level of the college

hierarchy is represented--students of all ages, clerical workers, junior

faculty members and even one or two full professors. There are acknowledged

differences among us--race and sexual preference, for example--which we

examine eagerly and a little anxiously. But we are comfortable together, and

excited to have a chance to discuss everything from the administration's

sexist policies to our personal struggles with husbands and lovers. Whatever

may divide us, we are all women, and we understand this to be one of the

great defining qualities of our lives and politics.



Could a group so diverse happily convene today? Please let me know if you

can offer a present day parallel, but I tend to suspect the answer is "very

seldom" or "not at all." Perhaps the biggest social and economic trend of

the past three decades has been class polarization--the expanding inequality

in income and wealth. As United for a Fair Economy's excellent book,

_Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap_, points

out, the most glaring polarization has occurred between those at the very

top of the income distribution--the upper 1 to 5 percent--and those who

occupy the bottom 30 to 40 percent. Less striking, but more ominous for the

future of feminism, is the growing gap between those in the top 40 percent

and those in the bottom 40. One chart in Shifting Fortunes shows that the

net worth of households in the bottom 40 percent declined by nearly 80

percent between 1983 and 1995. Except for the top 1 percent, the top 40

percent lost ground too--but much less. Today's college teacher, if she is

not an adjunct, occupies that relatively lucky top 40 group, while today's

clerical worker is in the rapidly sinking bottom 40. Could they still gather

comfortably in each other's living rooms to discuss common issues? Do they

still have common issues to discuss?



Numbers hardly begin to tell the story. The '80s brought sharp changes in

lifestyle and consumption habits between the lower 40 percent--which is

roughly what we call the "working class"--and the upper 20 to 30, which is

populated by professors, administrators, executives, doctors, lawyers and

other "professionals." "Mass markets" became "segmented markets," with

different consumer trends signaling differences in status. In 1972, a junior

faculty member's living room looked much like that of a departmental

secretary--only, in most cases, messier. Today, the secretary is likely to

accessorize her home at Kmart; the professor at Pottery Barn. Three decades

ago, we all enjoyed sugary, refined-flour treats at our meetings (not to

mention Maxwell House coffee and cigarettes!) Today, the upper-middle class

grinds its own beans, insists on whole grain, organic snacks, and vehemently

eschews hot dogs and meatloaf. In the '70s, conspicuous, or even just overly

enthusiastic, consumption was considered gauche--and not only by leftists

and feminists. Today, professors, including quite liberal ones, are likely

to have made a deep emotional investment in their houses, their furniture

and their pewter ware. It shows how tasteful they are, meaning--when we cut

through the garbage about aesthetics--how distinct they are from the "lower"

classes.



In the case of women, there is an additional factor compounding the division

wrought by class polarization: In the '60s, only about 30 percent of

American women worked outside their homes; today, the proportion is

reversed, with more than 70 percent of women in the work force. This

represents a great advance, since women who earn their own way are of course

more able to avoid male domination in their personal lives. But women's

influx into the work force also means that fewer and fewer women share the

common occupational experience once defined by the word "housewife." I don't

want to exaggerate this commonality as it existed in the '60s and '70s;

obviously the stay-at-home wife of an executive led a very different life

from that of the stay-at-home wife of a blue-collar man. But they did

perform similar daily tasks--housecleaning, childcare, shopping, cooking.

Today, in contrast, the majority of women fan out every morning to face

vastly different work experiences, from manual labor to positions of power.

Like men, women are now spread throughout the occupational hierarchy (though

not at the very top), where they encounter each other daily as

unequals--bosses vs. clerical workers, givers of orders vs. those who are

ordered around, etc.



Class was always an issue. Even before polarization set in, some of us lived

on the statistical hilltops, others deep in the valleys. But today we are

distributed on what looks less like a mountain range and more like a

cliff-face. Gender, race and sexual preference still define compelling

commonalties, but the sense of a shared condition necessarily weakens as we

separate into frequent-flying female executives on the one hand and airport

cleaning women on the other. Can feminism or, for that matter, any

cross-class social movement, survive as class polarization spreads Americans

further and further apart?



For all the ardent egalitarianism of the early movement, feminism had the

unforeseen consequence of heightening the class differences between women.

It was educated, middle-class women who most successfully used feminist

ideology and solidarity to advance themselves professionally. Feminism has

played a role in working-class women's struggles too--for example, in the

union organizing drives of university clerical workers--but probably its

greatest single economic effect was to open up the formerly male-dominated

professions to women. Between the '70s and the '90s, the percentage of

female students in business, medical and law schools shot up from less than

10 percent to more than 40 percent.



There have been, however, no comparable gains for young women who cannot

afford higher degrees, and most of these women remain in the same low-paid

occupations that have been "women's work" for decades. All in all, feminism

has had little impact on the status or pay of traditional female occupations

like clerical, retail, health care and light assembly line work. While

middle-class women gained MBAs, working-class women won the right not to be

called "honey"--and not a whole lot more than that.



Secondly, since people tend to marry within their own class, the gains made

by women in the professions added to the growing economic gap between the

working class and the professional-managerial class. Working-class families

gained too, as wives went to work. But, as I argued in _Fear of Falling: The

Inner Life of the Middle Class_, the most striking gains have accrued to

couples consisting of two well-paid professionals or managers. The

doctor/lawyer household zoomed well ahead of the truck driver/typist

combination.



So how well has feminism managed to maintain its stance as the ground shifts

beneath its feet? Here are some brief observations of the impact of class

polarization on a few issues once central to the feminist project:



Welfare. This has to be the most tragic case. In the '70s, feminists hewed

to the slogan, "Every woman is just one man away from welfare." This was an

exaggeration of course; even then, there were plenty of self-supporting and

independently wealthy women. But it was true enough to resonate with the

large numbers of women who worked outside their homes part time or not at

all. We recognized our commonality as homemakers and mothers and we

considered this kind of work to be important enough to be paid for--even

when there was no husband on the scene. Welfare, in other words, was

potentially every woman's concern.



Flash forward to 1996, when Clinton signed the odious Republican welfare

reform bill, and you find only the weakest and most tokenistic protests from

groups bearing the label "feminist." The core problem, as those of us who

were pro-welfare advocates found, was that many middle- and upper-middle

class women could no longer see why a woman should be subsidized to raise

her children. "Well, I work and raise my kids--why shouldn't they?" was a

common response, as if poor women could command wages that would enable them

to purchase reliable childcare. As for that other classic feminist

slogan--"every mother is a working mother"--no one seems to remember it

anymore.



Health care. Our bodies, after all, are what we have most in common as

women, and the women"s health movement of the '70s and early '80s probably

brought together as diverse a constituency--at least in terms of class--as

any other component of feminism. We worked to legalize abortion and to stop

the involuntary sterilization of poor women of color, to challenge the

sexism of medical care faced by all women consumers and to expand low-income

women's access to care.



In many ways, we were successful: Abortion is legal, if not always

accessible; the kinds of health information once available only in

underground publications like the original Our Bodies, Ourselves can now be

found in Mademoiselle; the medical profession is no longer an all-male

bastion of patriarchy. We were not so successful, however, in increasing

low-income women's access to health care--in fact, the number of the

uninsured is far larger than it used to be, and poor women still get

second-class health care when they get any at all. Yet the only women's

health issue that seems to generate any kind of broad, cross-class

participation today is breast cancer, at least if wearing a pink ribbon

counts as "participation."



Even the nature of medical care is increasingly different for women of

different classes. While lower-income women worry about paying for abortions

or their children's care, many in the upper-middle class are far more

concerned with such medical luxuries as high-tech infertility treatments and

cosmetic surgery. Young college women get bulimia; less affluent young women

are more likely to suffer from toxemia of pregnancy, which is basically a

consequence of malnutrition.



Housework. In the '70s, housework was a hot feminist issue and a major theme

of consciousness-raising groups. After all, whatever else women did, we did

housework; it was the nearly universal female occupation. We debated Pat

Mainardi's famous essay on "The Politics of Housework," which focused on the

private struggles to get men to pick up their own socks. We argued bitterly

about the "wages for housework" movement's proposal that women working at

home should be paid by the state. We studied the Cuban legal code, with its

intriguing provision that males do their share or face jail time.



Thirty years later, the feminist silence on the issue of housework is nearly

absolute. Not, I think, because men are at last doing their share, but

because so many women of the upper-middle class now pay other women to do

their housework for them. Bring up the subject among affluent feminists

today, and you get a guilty silence, followed by defensive patter about how

well they pay and treat their cleaning women.



In fact, the $15 an hour commonly earned by freelance maids is not so

generous at all, when you consider that it has to cover cleaning equipment,

transportation to various cleaning sites throughout the day, as well as any

benefits, like health insurance, the cleaning person might choose to

purchase for herself. The fast-growing corporate cleaning services like

Merry Maids and The Maids International are far worse, offering (at least in

the northeastern urban area I looked into) their workers between $5 (yes,

that's below the minimum wage) and $7 an hour.



In a particularly bitter irony, many of the women employed by the corporate

cleaning services are former welfare recipients bumped off the rolls by the

welfare reform bill so feebly resisted by organized feminists. One could

conclude, if one was in a very bad mood, that it is not in the interests of

affluent feminists to see the wages of working class women improve. As for

the prospects of "sisterhood" between affluent women and the women who scrub

their toilets--forget about it, even at a "generous" $15 an hour.



The issues that have most successfully weathered class polarization are

sexual harassment and male violence against women. These may be the last

concerns that potentially unite all women; and they are of course crucial.

But there is a danger in letting these issues virtually define feminism, as

seems to be the case in some campus women's centers today: Poor and

working-class women (and men) face forms of harassment and violence on the

job that are not sexual or even clearly gender-related. Being reamed out

repeatedly by an obnoxious supervisor of either sex can lead to depression

and stress-related disorders. Being forced to work long hours of overtime,

or under ergonomically or chemically hazardous conditions, can make a person

physically sick. Yet feminism has yet to recognize such routine workplaces

experiences as forms of "violence against women."



When posing the question--"can feminism survive class polarization?"--to

middle-class feminist acquaintances, I sometimes get the response: "Well,

you're right--we have to confront our classism." But the problem is not

classism, the problem is class itself: the existence of grave inequalities

among women, as well as between women and men.



We should recall that the original radical--and, yes, utopian--feminist

vision was of a society without hierarchies of any kind. This of course

means equality among the races and the genders, but class is different:

There can be no such thing as "equality among the classes." The abolition of

hierarchy demands not only racial and gender equality, but the abolition of

class. For a start, let's put that outrageous aim back into the long-range

feminist agenda and mention it as loudly and often as we can.



In the shorter term, there's plenty to do, and the burden necessarily falls

on the more privileged among us: to support working-class women's workplace

struggles, to advocate for expanded social services (like childcare and

health care) for all women, to push for greater educational access for

low-income women and so on and so forth. I'm not telling you anything new

here, sisters--you know what to do.



But there's something else, too, in the spirit of another ancient slogan

that is usually either forgotten or misinterpreted today: "The personal is

the political." Those of us who are fortunate enough to have assets and

income beyond our immediate needs need to take a hard look at how we're

spending our money. New furniture--and, please, I don't want to hear about

how tastefully funky or antique-y it is--or a donation to a homeless

shelter? A chic outfit or a check written to an organization fighting

sweatshop conditions in the garment industry? A maid or a contribution to a

clinic serving low-income women?



I know it sounds scary, but it will be a lot less so if we can make sharing

stylish again and excess consumption look as ugly as it actually is. Better

yet, give some of your time and your energy too. But if all you can do is

write a check, that's fine: Since Congress will never redistribute the

wealth (downward, anyway), we may just have to do it ourselves.



Barbara Ehrenreich is a contributing editor of In These Times.