Feminist economics

[beccaelizabeth]

Guardian: From welfare to wages, women fight back against the uncaring market
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/welfare-wages-women-fight-market

When the women's movement began in the 1970s, women were the carers. Working-class women also did waged jobs, but the wellbeing of children and others remained the primary concern. Women formed the movement not to eliminate caring but the dependence, isolation, servitude, invisibility and almost universal discrimination that a wage-dominated (ie male-dominated) society imposed on the unwaged carer.

The women's movement faced a choice. It could embrace the market: careers for some and low-paid jobs for most. Or it could find another way to live: demanding that the work of reproducing the human race was recognised as central to all priorities. Getting wages from the state for this work, carers would help reshape all social relationships: reorganising work to incorporate men into caring and women into – everything.

Feminism largely chose the market. This enabled governments to demean rather than recognise caring. "Workless", according to New Labour, mothers are now urged to "do the right thing" – go out to work irrespective of workload, childcare, the needs of those who depend on us.

Also

perhaps the unkindest cut has been of the universality of child benefit, the money that recognises society's responsibility for children.



Society can only keep lurching on because of carers, for both adults and children, pouring their time into work that can't keep them fed. Something has to change, soon.

Comments

[philippos42]

Bringing most women into the workforce doubled the labor force and halved the price of labor. I've actually seen that used as a quasi-right-wing traditionalist argument, saying, "What have we lost?"

There has to be a better answer.