April 30, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

On Feminism: From Equal to Angel to Workhorse

Equity Feminism is rooted in classic liberal Enlightenment doctrines and aims for full civil and legal (sociopolitical) equality for women. Equity Feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment with no reference to biology, and most efforts by first wave feminists can be safely included under the equity umbrella, rather than the more contemporary gender feminism umbrella.  (Great quick read on Equity v. Gender Feminism for quick contextualization here.) 

First Wave equity feminists were responsible for most of the reforms to working conditions that affected poor women and children who had no legal protections from abuses by employers. Unfortunately, suffrage had barely been won when a new and radical form of feminism, Gender feminism, would change the nature of feminism (which had evolved to be a flourishing and protective union of women demanding sociopolitical equality) to the forebearer of what we see today.

Gender feminism, the darling of the second wave feminist movement, by contrast, is the “genocentric and misandric branch of feminism,” according to Christine Sommers, a contemporary equity feminist who believes that “most American women subscribe philosophically to the older first wave feminism whose main goal was equity for women, especially in politics and education.” Sommers faults contemporary (gender) feminism for ‘its irrational hostility to men, its recklessness with facts and its inability to accept that the sexes are equal but different.” Sommers, of course, is viciously attacked by the majority of gender feminists who currently monopolize the academic field on this subject.

By the time women had won suffrage, Alice Paul (a radical early gender feminist), leading the Women’s Party engineered the first version of the ERA in 1926 and suffrage leaders were outraged. Carrie Chapman Catt, a key coordinator of the suffrage movement, claimed it would strike down much of the needed protective legislation which protected women and children from working conditions in factories. Obtaining this much-needed legislation had been a life-long struggle for many of these women, who believed women needed special consideration because of their role as mothers. The ideal of women’s rights recognizes and promotes the role of motherhood and family in the lives of women; "equal rights" do not.

Fifty years later, inspired by the rhetoric of civil rights, and encouraged by a market-place that courts them, the great majority of feminists now believe that women should be treated as individuals, not as a sex, and that free and open competition with men in the market place is the goal. Gender feminism is a competitive model which asks for no special favors. Unfortunately for the majority of women and their children, the fact is that women cannot, ever, earn as much as men do in a market place where male wages are the standard unit of currency - ie - it takes $1000 'male' dollars to rent an apartment, but takes $1300 'female' dollars (courtesy of the wage gap and how much more time it takes her to earn an equal amount of spending power). 

Until women take the reins and use the suffrage that their equity feminist fore-mothers fought for, they are doomed to earn 'female' wages. Until and unless that happens, and I do not believe it will, we need to honestly appraise the landscape of biology, personal choice and family necessities and arrive at strategies that will give women and children, and families, a better cultural model which embraces the necessity and rewards of a culture which supports homekeepers.

April 22, 2013 Special Edition - Why you should buy American made products whenever possible

The overall message of Slave Nation is that we had something (freedom to live reasonably comfortable lives with time for family, learning, hobbies and general well-being because most people in society had one wage earner who could earn an amount that would sustain their family) and we lost it in exchange for massive losses of good American jobs and we exchanged it for the right to be permanently enslaved by the debt that comes from working for less than a living wage, the new 'normal' in Americans' earnings, especially for women. That choice by American corporations to sell out their labor force, and by the American people to buy low-priced goods from their own competitors eventually  has been one of the major factors leading to one of the  most obscene income and wealth gaps  known in any of the industrialized nations of the world. 

Therefore, it is more important now than ever for Americans to buy American. At a fair price. Not for a third-world, human-rights ignoring price, but for a living wage, for what it would cost to live here. It is not too much to ask. It is not too much to demand for our children as they grow and replace us in the labor force. 

In order to help promote this goal, and to be 'part of the solution,' I am going to begin listing great American-made products that I have found on a regular basis in this blog. I am not being reimbursed in any way for recommending these products; I am just sharing information. By buying American we can raise the living wage for all, and help toward the ultimate goal of Slave Nation, which is to help families be able to afford to have a homekeeper again. Buying American is an act of self-defense and should be a major priority in our purchasing decisions.

The first product I am recommending is "Up & Up Fresh Citrus Handwash" available at Target stores. 

Pros:   * very reasonably priced at or just under $1  * great product; works well, smells wonderful, attractive packaging, lasts quite a while   * Does not make skin itchy or dry * Made in the U.S.

Cons:   * There is no refill option making plastic use excessive         * Some of the components are made out of the U.S. * Target is a large multi-national, non-unionized, non-local company

On the whole, I still feel like it is a great product and do recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good American handsoap. 

April 19, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

Because so many women (un-choicers) must leave their children in daycare because of true financial necessity this debate is guaranteed to ignite a firestorm of frustration and emotion whenever it rears its ugly head. Defensive about our choices (and frustrated due to our lack of choices) we commit to defending whichever “team” we belong to, be it working or stay at home mother, with the resulting nasty free for all that can be seen in the comments section of any online commentary on the topic.  

Because of this one-dimensional angst-driven focus on the outcomes for children and inflammatory debates over the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our childcare or work choices we seem to entirely miss the forest for the trees – all of society is harmed by the loss of a traditional homekeeper, not just children. Men are harmed, women are harmed, elders and children are most certainly harmed – the entire family suffers, as do entire communities. Our stubborn, childish refusal to discuss the realities of this truth will only further delay the work we must eventually commit to doing to restore the health and wealth of our families and our country.

We have harmed ourselves from the bottom up for the past fifty-plus years in the wake of deep anti-marriage gender feminism that swept through American society in the late 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. The disdain for marriage, seen by a divorce rate that doubled in ten short years, coupled with the loss of working-class manufacturing jobs set us on an unsustainable social course. The present-day fruits of those anti-family choices and anti-family economics are now painfully clear, from the explosion of new “diagnoses” of children who “need” to be medicated for “attention” disorders, to the childhood obesity epidemic that plagues the children of even our middle income families, to the deepest child and female poverty ever known in America, and lastly to the unchecked greed and materialism which has become the signature of life in our times. 

These are only a few of the many ways that I will prove that we have been harmed by our disintegrated division of labor tradition which draws heavily on shared and separate responsibilities of parents and an inherent frugality and self-reliance which allows for the one income earner model.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 16, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

My heart is in Boston today.

At the heart of our decline is the fundamental truth that we have willfully ignored and stubbornly denied, gripped as we are by a powerful collective cognitive dissonance: We foolishly deny the immutable connection between having a designated person who keeps the home fires burning – a homekeeper - and stable, healthy, and enduring families, economies and communities. 

A corollary of that dissonance is seen in the complete lack of conversation about the damage that is done to labor markets when they are flooded with cheap labor (it bears repeating: wages are determined the same way as other prices are: by supply and demand), which of course ultimately wreaks havoc on families because it impacts both the husband’s and the wife’s income if both are in the wage market; however she will only earn a fraction of those lower wages because the gender gap predictably follows male earnings – when male earnings go down, female earnings correspond to retain the 20 – 30% gap. The loss of the homekeeper, combined with a cheapened labor force is a recipe for disaster, and we can see the results of the disaster everywhere we look.

Things have to change. We must seriously reconsider returning to the sustainable model of traditional labor division that has cradled human civilization since its birth. To that end I have come to the radical conclusion that what the United States needs is not more jobs, but fewer people competing for those jobs in the labor market. I am calling for a movement that culminates in a voluntary reduction in the American labor force, specifically, for women to stay home and operate their homefronts in a more logical and productive management of their assets - like the family business that the homefront is.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 15, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

At the time women entered the workforce it was morphing from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and the demand for workers who were educated (enough), and cheap – a mere sixty cents on the dollar for what a man would have to be paid - cannot be overstated. The marketplace drooled for these production units and courted them ably with vast amounts of carefully orchestrated propaganda. The temporary solution for families became part of the new permanent problem - overall wages in society for all earners began to fall (wages are determined the same way other prices are – by supply and demand) and women who had planned to temporarily shore up the family’s economies now found themselves trapped like lobsters in a one-way trap. Employers no longer needed men to do the heavy, dirty, hard, and sometimes dangerous work of manufacturing, so women who had high literacy rates, and who fit easily into ‘customer service’ positions were the perfect fit for the new mostly part-time jobs in the mushrooming service industry (which would never pay them or their husbands a living wage again).

Now, in the 21^st century, even the addition of a wife’s income to the family budget is not enough. In most families, it is no longer enough to have two income earners, as families must additionally go into debt in order to maintain a family lifestyle that was previously managed on one income, only five decades ago. As I researched the phenomenon of vanishing income, I came to realize that Americans had been duped. Not just women, but Americans across the board. In the last five decades real wages have fallen dramatically, social protections have decreased, wages are perennially stagnant, debt-drowned young college graduates cannot find work in their fields, and we have lost a staggering amount of wealth in the financial melt-down that few of us participated in constructing. We are in shockingly bad condition, and in many more ways than just economically.

There is virtually no part of American life that has not been dramatically and negatively altered by the flood of women entering the labor market since the original Diaspora from the home to paid employment beginning between the 1960’s and 1970’s. As the result – direct and indirect - of that rush to paid female employment our American culture in the early 21^st century has hit nadir by any number of measurable indicators. From our physical and mental health, to our economy, to even our over-all intelligence, we are worse off than we have been at any point in our country’s history, in large part because we have lost our homekeeper–wage earner partnerships.  http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 14, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

As I researched the composition of the female work force and the dynamics that surrounded the female flight into the workforce, I came to realize that ‘choice’ had little to nothing to do with most female labor force participation, and that ‘need’ was the true driver of most women’s choice to work. Despite Hirshman’s harsh criticism of “choice feminism,” true “choicers” are an avis raris in the female work force, regardless of how relentlessly those few that do exist are propagandized in media as ordinary, everyday female workers (Google "working mom," and every image that will come up depicts a woman in a suit; the majority of the female workforce is employed in the service sector, and is more likely to wear a maid's uniform than a business suit. True choicers have as much in common with ordinary female workers as Bill Gates has in common with ordinary male workers.

As I grappled to refine my premise (still rooted in my belief that this country has flown completely off the rails since women entered the work force), I realized how wrongly I had viewed the landscape of female employment, and how unfair it was to target women for the sin of wishing for “more,” at their families’ expense, when actually they were in an epic struggle just to keep what they had. 

I have come to realize that the shifting labor patterns of the 1970’s which forced most women into the labor market were in fact driven by  greed and outsourcing - the true culprits in the “who dunnit” I was trying to solve. Greed, outsourcing and globalization are the direct cause of the near-death of private sector unions and also for the loss of the manufacturing base that had once supported  hard working Americans (who were not college educated) with a decent living wage to raise a family.

In my research I have found that the real reason women had been sent out to work in the 70’s and 80’s was to recapture the loss of real wages in their husband’s paychecks, not for “liberation.” The working class women who were dragged from their homekeeping by economic necessity must have had a very dim regard for “liberation” based on hours labored away from home for low wages. They knew better than to believe the old chestnut Arbeit macht frei (sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, which proclaims that ‘work will set you free’), and were rightly suspicious of the women’s lib (read gender feminists) propaganda glorifying work. 

Shrinking male wages combined with the brutal inflation that characterized the era, and household purchasing power contracted to the point where wives’ earnings became necessary to cover the necessities. Enter Women’s Liberation with its ‘all women work all the time’ rhetoric, essentially giving men permission to quit supporting their families at exactly the point when they no longer could do so, conveniently drowning out conversation about where the wages went. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

April 13, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

In the beginning, armed with premises which I now understand were faulty, I had originally planned to write In Defense of the Homemaker, a stirring call to women to abandon the insanity of the workforce and to return to their hearths, their children, their gardens – my book was to be a manifesto for modern domesticity and its multiple, detailed, social benefits – and for a fresh start for a culture which clearly is in grave trouble. 

I felt, and do still feel that women returning to homekeeping would be the solution to many of our current social ills, but as I plunged into my research I began to realize that I had the right solution, but for the wrong reason. My plan to rally readers around a unifying concept of the nuclear family, harking back to the days when Dad worked, and Mom baked pies, and we could afford to send our children to college, even if we had not gone ourselves, wasn’t a bad plan, it just blamed the wrong people for the problem we needed to fix.

I planned for my book to be a harsh repudiation of books like Linda R. Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which I consider hopelessly cruel, anti-woman and anti-family for its message that “opting out” of the workplace is a form of deliberate self-betrayal, and that security can only be derived from paid employment, rather than from family bonds. Hirshman argues that Feminism failed in its transformative mission because it hasn’t insisted that women work. 

Naturally Hirshman’s message was aimed at upper middle class, college-educated women who could earn far more than the vast majority of their less-educated sisters, who would automatically reject this manufactured debate as entirely ridiculous (the lowly-paid sisters who make up the majority of the female work force would instantly recognize the eerily Marxist ‘glorification of labor’ propaganda and dismiss it with the contempt it deserved).

Hirshman presents ‘rules’ to women, to revive Feminism’s transformative mission; one is to have one child – if you must – but not two, and second, to force your husband to do his ‘share’ of the household chores (cruelly ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the lowest-paid women in the work force are single mothers). Many of these women who earn pitifully low wages will likely need their children’s support in their elderly years, and Hirshman’s advice to diminish their families below what well could be their own future subsistence levels indicates the dismissal of these women which shines through clearly in her exhortations. Her total ignorance about the fact that our birthrate has been below replacement levels since the mid-1970’s shines yet more light on her ‘choicer’ class tunnel vision which does not require her to wonder from where the women will come who will be so happy to live for work in the future.

Hirshman also wastes little ink on how children actually fare in daycare, or how the majority of women workers actually fare in their perpetually under-rewarded efforts in the market, as they continue to earn substantially less pay across all fields, decade after decade, in an infinitely predictable arc across the decades. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

March 13, 2013

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

The fifty-year abandonment of the traditional single-earner plus homekeeper partnership model of family economics and division of labor, has negatively and dramatically affected family security, health, and wealth, and is at the root of most of the challenges we currently face as a society.  Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, I ask this question: Are we better off now than we were fifty years ago? Sixty years ago? Seventy? Is life now better by measurable indicators than it was then? Have the changes in the way we live conferred a better quality of life, stronger families, or greater family wealth upon us since our homekeepers entered the wage market?

Has our shift from an economic and family management model that depended on one partner working outside, and one inside of the home, to a family model that depends on two income earners outside of the home, led to more prosperous or secure lives for families? Are we happier? Healthier? Are our children ok? The answer, based on statistics that outline a grim picture of child and female poverty, and overall declines in Americans’ health (made orders of magnitude worse by the current economic situation), is a resounding no. We are not better for these changes; we are actually much worse for them. Our national health and wealth have suffered dramatic losses over the last fifty-plus years, due to the negative effects of the most dramatic shift in family social structure to ever occur in our culture, or to our economy: the flight of our homekeepers into the labor market.

Slave Nation is an analysis of what has happened to those women, and their families, in the wake of the great diaspora from the home into the labor force, and into what we, the authors, term modern day serfdom. This serfdom is due to many factors, including an overcrowded labor market, unequal pay, work and government policies that unfairly affect women, loss of security nets and the additional taxes that families pay in order to have their mothers in the workforce. We believe that the facts we will present here clearly demonstrate that the flood into the marketplace of ‘paid’ (wage) labor was the end of freedom for these women, and the beginning of an era of unimaginable loss of wealth and security for their families.

In Slave Nation, we will address the loss to the family structure, the social fabric, our health, our wealth, our social justice apparatus, our critical thinking skills, our ability to self-govern, and our knowledge base that has occurred in the wake of homekeepers being alternately pushed and lured into the marketplace - by economic necessity in the case of the former and by employers who were salivating for the cheap, reasonably educated workforce the women represented, in the latter. We will then expose the falsehood of the economic ‘necessity’ of having two income earners in a family by detailing how little of the second paycheck (if any) is left over once a family adjusts for the wage gap, taxes, lost social security survivor’s benefits after a spouse dies, transportation expenses, wardrobe costs, and additional services that have to be purchased due to the absent homekeeper, in a game that is guaranteed to be lose-lose for families.

We will examine how these losses have weakened the family unit and we will look at who is gaining what we are losing, and what measures they employ to orchestrate that reverse of fortune. We will explore reasons why we as a society passively allow this theft, and we will outline specific values and truths that we need to promote to strengthen our families and communities so that we cease to be vulnerable to those who intend to exploit us if they can.

We will then propose methods that we can employ to reconstruct the society (and the protections for women and children which used to be an inherent part of that society) which fell apart in the wake of the homekeeper diaspora. The methods, are multi-pronged, using withdrawal from the labor force by as many workers as possible combined with voter-driven policy change to make homekeeping a more accessible choice for families than it has been these last many decades.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/