Gender, Class, and
Social Policy in the 21st Century
Susan
Thistle
Abstract
We have entered a new moment of negotiation over gender,
class, and women's relationship to work at home and for pay that
will shape policy formation in coming decades. I argue that underlying
such debate is a profound transformation of women's labor. Behind
women's alternate paths into the labor force lies the collapse of
their older means of support, however partial, within marriage,
for reasons far larger than men's loss of income. I outline three
moments in such breakdown among white women and women of color in
the United States from 1950 to 2000, and their consequences for
the current period of prosperity and realization of new social policy.
Women's moves from household to wage work, much like men's shifts
off the land, are opening struggles to replace lost arrangements
for care, while also providing new legitimation and leverage for
such rights. However, uneven breakdown of the gender division of
labor, accentuating differences of race/ethnicity and class, threatens
to derail such efforts. This perspective furthers development of
a dynamic historical or temporal dimension in gender and social
policy formation.
Susan Thistle, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University
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