In

my last column of 2008,

I built on Linda

Hirshman’s idea

that an economic stimulus package offered under the Obama administration

should focus on making sure that job creation equally benefits

men and women. We should applaud the Presidential transition team

for embracing the idea of green

jobs , but, as Hirshman

points out, the jobs that have been proposed are mostly blue collar jobs in industries dominated

by men. Hirshman suggests that the Obama administration additionally prioritize building our educational system, which would employ

more women. I suggest that the country should view health care

reform as an economic investment that can create jobs women are likely to take.

Forty-six million Americans currently go without health insurance, and most of them have patchy access

to health care, avoiding preventive services and only seeing a doctor

when lack of prevention lands them in an emergency room — perversely, this

creates the very long lines we’re told to fear if said people instead receive

basic health care. Under most universal health care proposals, these 46 million would be able to purchase health insurance, dramatically elevating the labor demand for doctors, nurses,

pharmacists, and other health care providers. With doctors alone,

this improves women’s employment prospects, since female medical school

applicants outnumber male applicants.

But with the increasing emphasis on prevention, the demand for nurses

and other medical staff will rise even faster. These are professions in which women are predominant.

Obviously, the incoming administration

has an opportunity to kill two birds with one health care reform stone.

Applying the green job reform model to health care — creating a demand

for labor and creating a means to fill it — will work nicely for health

care. We have a nursing shortage in America, but it’s not for

a real lack of actual human beings who need the jobs. Most of

the women who might find nursing a good job can’t quite seem to get

into it, because cobbling together the time and money for the training

falls just outside of their means.

Making the leap from a minimum

wage service industry job into a higher income nursing job means, for

many women who would like to make that transition, finding money

to pay for it, and dealing with increased child care costs to cover their hours working

their normal job and the hours at school. For many women, these

are costs they simply cannot afford. But our federal government can

easily provide both the tuition money and the child care. It’s

been demonstrated in this country’s past, that if need be, the federal government

can create child care programs to free up women’s time

so they can take jobs that must be done. During

World War II, the federal government set up 24 hour day care centers

for female shipyard workers taking jobs that men couldn’t fill. This would have the added benefit

of employing more women, since child care workers are largely female.

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Should the demand rise high

enough, the government might even invest in on-the-job training programs

for female health care workers, so they can start drawing a salary immediately,

reducing their need to hold down an outside job while receiving the

training to be a nurse. Right now, one of the biggest barriers

between the many women (and men, too) who would like nursing jobs is

the long

waiting lists at nursing school.

Again, the federal government can attack this problem,

funding an expansion of the educational apparatus to increase the number

of graduates coming out of school and meeting the growing demand for

this kind of health care.

Just a couple of years ago,

the idea of widespread federal investment in infrastructure for the

purpose of investment and job creation seemed a

marginal idea that had been abandoned once we recovered from the

Great Depression. That changed in pretty short order, and if things

go as planned, historians will mark this as a time of a great paradigm

shift. And thank goodness. If this is a country that really is

committed to the equality of all, the federal government should consider

the needs of the working class to obtain and maintain decent work to be

at least as important as the desires of the wealthy to keep their stock

holdings from plummeting precariously when the latest economic scheme

collapses.

Federal job creation is a good unto itself, so long as the work is real and dignified, but we

have a unique opportunity to create jobs that really do pay us back

tenfold. Green jobs that set the standard for a modern environmentalist

society are one way to get our investment back beyond just the standard

good of full employment, and health care job creation does the same

thing. Everything in our society will improve when our citizens are as healthy as possible.

And we can do all this without

compromising feminist principles that advocate for an economy where

women don’t depend on men, and aren’t forced, as I argue in this

week’s podcast, to make compromises like staying in abusive marriages

because they can’t afford to escape. In opposition to the New

Deal of the 1930s, which glorified the nuclear family and female dependence,

we really can create a new New-er Deal that supports female independence

and truly healthy families formed out of full consent, economic and

otherwise.