From Dissent Magazine: "Kicking Back, Not Leaning In" (Summer 2013) [View all]

snip:

Although working-class women held jobs outside the home long before second wave feminism, and organized for better conditions alongside their male peers, liberal feminism’s celebration of the “working woman” provided a moral façade to give value to women’s waged labor, no matter its flaws. “Endowing their daily struggles with an ethical meaning,” [Nancy] Fraser writes, “the feminist romance attracts women at both ends of the social spectrum.” Contemporary pop feminism encourages women in the boardroom and in low-level jobs to see their work as a facet of their independence. What is “leaning in” but an exhortation to see labor as liberation?

What was won from challenging the family wage, then, was only a compromised form of emancipation. In the place of the male-breadwinner household, the new ideal of a two-earner family has brought a reality of “depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift.” The fight against the family wage has inadvertently lent moral credence to changes in the work force that weaken working people. “The cultural changes jump-started by the second wave,” Fraser argues, “have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.”

snip:

Fraser is on to something here: Polanyi did not realize, she argues, that “social protection,” was not an unequivocal good. Rather, social protection can also preserve inequity and entrenched hierarchies. By treating women as the weaker sex, social customs and laws aimed to shelter women. Regulations of decency and financial independence also curbed their mobility. Recognizing this tension, Fraser adds a third motion to Polanyi’s “double movement”: emancipation, the force of non-domination. With this third movement, she proposes a more nuanced social analysis in which emancipation serves as a corrective to both marketization and social protection.

Fraser’s analysis helps explain feminism’s current bind. Fraser argues that feminists did not realize that by rejecting social protection, they might be allying themselves with marketization. “Focused on opposing oppressive protections, it [the feminist movement] was not always sufficiently aware of the triple movement’s third prong, namely, efforts to extend and autonomize markets.” By contrast, socialist feminists “tended to have an intuitive grasp of the logic of the triple movement,” and pushed for a transformation, not destruction, of protectionist forces. To these socialist feminists, she credits activism such as the valorization of care work and attempts to transform welfare.

Fraser synthesizes her values and concerns into a solution that is a successor to socialist feminism: the universal caregiver model. In Fraser’s ideal, work would be set up to accommodate caregiving. Everyone would have a shorter work week and support of services such as child care would ensure that parenting and domestic work did not overwhelm women’s lives. This model would promote gender equality by dismantling the opposition between bread-winning and caregiving. Under Fraser’s plan, both sexes would perform both duties. Further, by reducing the time spent on both of these activities, Fraser’s model promotes non-work time as well. In her ideal system, “citizens’ lives integrate wage-earning, caregiving, community activism, political participation, and involvement in the associational life of civil society—while also leaving time for some fun.”

More: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kicking-back-not-leaning-in

Provocative and challenging. Not sure if I agree with everything here...but I do think that there are some important issues addressed in this piece. I am still learning, like everyone (I hope).