I am concerned about the lack of urgency on most feminist blogs about the current economic disaster.
There can be no equality without economic liberty.
Simply put, woman will never have equal rights in a world in which they have no economic freedom. And a world we are heading into now, will almost certainly ensure that women will fall behind. Because we bear the brunt of the economic inequality.
We make less than male employees and among the first to be fired.
We are responsible for the raising of families, many of which lack a paternal partner to help with day to day living expenses.
It is still the delusion of society that women raise themselves up through good marriages. That women should be cared for by a husband. A job for most women is not something permanent but a temporary situation that she could leave at any time.
That society still persists in believing these fabrications when every evidence to the contrary exists is horrifying.
The people taken advantage of in modern sweatshops are women. I've seen it myself, here in NY. Women of different nationalities, Chinese, Mexican and Russian toiling away to create cheap clothing for the garment district. And working in conditions not too far different from the ones documented in Riis' photos. They take these jobs because there are no other opportunities for them and they need to support their families. I've seen no men in those places except for the supervisors. Marriage is not going to save any of those woman looking to get a little breathing room between themselves and poverty.
There are a lot of "edgy" articles now about high class escorts finding the market a little dry. But I say balderdash. I'm sure the lower class market is booming, filled with desperate women who need the extra money. Before the disaster it was a joke that men were helping finance college degrees. Well now they can rejoice and be as nasty as they wanna be because they are literally putting food on the sex worker's table. In the face of this desperation, they will have the ability to add more zing by haggling price.
And of course we will bear the burden of the sin for these wanton ways. There is nothing more exciting to a religious delusional than holding a whip hand over a fallen woman.
A society stuck in a deep depression becomes more reactionary not more liberal. It falls back into tropes that revere old fashioned fairy tale pasts.
And in those pasts, women knew their place.
Now is a dangerous time for feminism and we could lose all the gains we have made in the past. I'm frightened that the feminist movement seems to be blind to these dangers.
But by all means, let us have more discussions about the "feminism" of shows like Sex in the City.Labels: commentary, economy, feminism, sexism