Pollittics

In Slate, Katha Pollitt discusses Gail Collins' book on the gains women have made in the past 50 years. There's no question America has changed considerably, and women are much freer to decide their own destiny. But, like any activist, Pollitt feels we're not doing enough, and that progress has slowed, or even stopped. Maybe reversed.

When did this happen? After the gains of the 60s and 70s, there's been trouble:

...as the book goes into the 1980s, the arc of the narrative takes a downward turn. The movement culture dissipates [...] the sour economy pushes into the workforce women who don't want to be there. Soon feminism is popularly understood as professional women trying to "have it all"—and, before you know it, it's the l990s and women are, maybe, resigned to "settling for less." And that is where many still are today.

Is this lack of progress, or reality? The "sour economy" stuff is nonsense. More women are working, whether there's a good or bad economy. When women can work outside the home more easily, and there's an expectation they should take care of themselves (and men aren't as likely to believe it's their duty to support them), of course there'll be plenty of women "pushed" into the workforce. There are plenty of men who would love not to have to work, too. This isn't settling for less. This is life.

Pollitt has a predictable solution--more government.

By appealing to American principles of fair play and individual merit at a historical moment of unusual openness to liberationist ideals, feminists were able to knock down formal, legal barriers in a very short period of time. But what they couldn't do—and it wasn't for lack of trying—was to enlarge the social-welfare state.

American women, alone among those in Western industrialized nations, have no paid maternity leave (let alone parental leave) or (as of yet) national health care. Care of dependent family members—children, the elderly, the sick—is women's unpaid labor. Workers have few rights. Aid to poor families—including mothers and children temporarily poor due to divorce—is humiliating and stingy. Feminists hav not even been able to eliminate the sexism embedded in the minimal welfare state we have: Unemployment insurance, the income tax, and social security are all structured around dated ideas about gender and work that disadvantage women.

You know, I could swear the social-welfare state has been enlarged quite a bit in the past 50 years. Exactly how many trillions of dollars have to be spent before we no longer have a "minimal welfare state"?

The original problem was women were held back by a whole culture, fully backed by the laws of the land. The legal blocks were removed, and the culture changed, but the ensuing freedom didn't fully lead to Pollitt's desired results. So what's her solution? Rather than letting citizens find their own way as independent agents, let's bring back more laws telling people what they can and can't do. Thankfully, with the culture changed, this time around they'll have to dance to our tune. Also, time to stop treating men and women equally--laws must once against reflect a separate status for women.

Look how well this strategy has succeeded in other countries:

Americans, including many women, might recoil from "government spending" and "bureaucracy" and scorn as anti-meritocratic proposals to use quotas to increase the number of women political candidates or corporate board members. Such measures, though, go far to explain why Scandinavia always comes out on top of those international surveys of women's equality and why the United States is stuck in the middle of the pack. The struggle over health care reform, with or without the Stupak amendment banning federally funded abortion coverage, shows how difficult it will be to move up on the list.

So if internationl survey measures the quality of women's lives by A, and Sweden adopts A, Sweden is better for women. QED. Or maybe there are other, better ways to measure how well women are doing. Ways that Pollitt, stuck in the past, can't get her head around.

Pollitt clearly needs a little consciousness raising.