Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Pregnancy, Poverty and the State

Michele Goodwin & Erwin Chemerinsky, Pregnancy, Poverty and the State, 127 Yale L. J. (forthcoming)

In Pregnancy, Poverty, and The State, we argue that the core bundle of rights contained in reproductive privacy have been hollowed out through new legislation and court decisions, affecting the actual practice of reproductive privacy. We show how increasingly, even judicial opinions affirming reproductive rights fail to constrain state governments seeking to eviscerate those rights through new legislation. Though court rulings recognize these rights, they ultimately render them meaningless for poor women, particularly poor women of color. These groups are the first victims since they are largely unseen and unheard by those who make the law and policy. As the policies that substantially burden women’s reproductive rights become normalized, these norms will affect broader segments of the population, placing greater numbers of women at risk. 

We view these issues as not simply matters of law, but of human rights, morality, and dignity. The moral hypocrisy of the state is clear in the reproductive health context. That is, when the state coerces women and girls into pregnancies they do not want and to bear children they do not desire to have, it not only creates unconstitutional conditions, but it also acts immorally. Even though legal scholars typically refer to lawmaking that unduly burdens the poor as unjust, we suggest that legislative efforts to eviscerate reproductive rights is far worse than that. 

This project, launches with a review of Professor Khiara Bridges’s daring book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights to problematize the intersections of privacy and morality. We view the state as not only a fallible and problematic arbiter of women’s morality, but argue the state acts immorally when it deprives poor women of privacy, bodily autonomy, and threatens to rob them of life itself. As we document in detail, bounded in the state’s immoral actions toward poor women of color are its historical struggles and campaigns against their personhood and citizenship as well as conscription of their bodies in service to malevolent state agendas such as eugenics and forced sterilization. As we show, this is more than mere indifference, but an historic pattern. We illustrate how the continued effects of more than a century of negative state interventions in the reproductive lives of poor women of color is actually deadly. Finally, we predict that the continued interference in the reproductive lives of poor women creates cultural norms and precedents in medicine, law, and society that will spill over and constrain the rights of all classes of women, regardless of race. That is, historical disregard for the lives and rights of Black women inscribed by judicial doctrine and court opinions as well as state and federal legislation serve as vehicles for contemporary and future disparagement of all women.

March 28, 2018 in Poverty, Pregnancy, Reproductive Rights | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Pilot Study Shows Challenges of Redressing Sexual Harassment of Low-Income Women in Housing

Rigel Christine Oliveri, Sexual Harassment of Low-Income Women in Housing: Pilot Study Results

Abstract:

Sparked by the #metoo movement, we are once again having an important national discussion about the prevalence of sexual harassment in America. The conversation is a necessary starting point, but it’s focus on high-status workplaces overlooks other contexts in which sexual harassment occurs. This Article focuses on one such area: the sexual harassment and exploitation of low-income women by their landlords. Although it is a significant national problem, there have been no reliable empirical studies about its nature and prevalence.

The lack of information causes difficulties. Policymakers and legislators cannot address sexual harassment in housing if they do not know basic facts about it such as how common it is, who is likely to experience and perpetrate it, and what form it takes. The law, much of which is borrowed from the employment context, remains underdeveloped and unresponsive to the unique challenges presented by housing harassment. 

This Article and the Pilot Study upon which it is based seek to remedy this situation. The Study involved detailed interviews of one hundred randomly selected low-income women. These interviews reveal important insights into who is most at risk for housing harassment, the characteristics of the landlords who engage in it, the form it is likely to take, and how women respond to it. 

The Study results both challenge and improve upon assumptions made by more theoretical scholarship, and lead to suggestions for changes to both law and policy. In particular, the results underscore the argument for treating sexual harassment in housing as a phenomenon that is entirely different from employment harassment, with a new framework that recognizes the economic reality of low-income housing. From a policy perspective, the results reveal the need for greater regulation of the landlord-tenant relationship, and the necessity of providing more resources to the most vulnerable renters.

February 13, 2018 in Poverty, Violence Against Women | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Appalachian Feminism

Feminism in the Coalfields: What Appalachians of the 1970s Can Teach Today's Feminists

Appalachian feminism, which is to say feminism of working-class white and Black women who lived in a place long dominated by corporate officials, has volumes to teach us about meaningful efforts to reach gender equality, but more importantly, justice. Above all, Appalachian feminism insists upon an understanding of class oppression, which operates within a capitalism that thrives on racist and sexist social structures. It requires listening to women whose feminism is rooted in their daily experiences and charting feminist movements that will transform society for all women, not just those in positions of relative power.

 

Appalachian feminists emerged out of welfare rights and labor movements. By the early 1970s, a few dozen welfare rights groups had organized across West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia. White and Black women led the movement and made militant calls for the rights of poor and working-class women.***

 

In recent years, the most recognized feminists have focused on representation rather than the redistribution of power and wealth. Theirs is not a feminism of deep solidarity. What does standing together truly look like? With fresh assaults on the social safety net happening seemingly daily and renewed attention to working women’s lives, the history of Appalachian feminism is one that today’s feminists would do well to emulate. At the core of Appalachian feminist activism of the 1970s was an understanding that gender justice for all meant accounting for the ways in which capitalist enterprises exploited working people’s paid and unpaid labor and how the state denied them their rights as citizens. The advice that the Appalachian Women’s Rights Organization gave to middle-class white feminists in the 1970s still holds: “take up the genuine problems of the vast majority of women.”

February 6, 2018 in Poverty, Theory | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, February 1, 2018

A Poor Mother's Right to Privacy

Danielle Keats Citron, A Poor Mother's Right to Privacy: A Review, 98 Boston J. L. Rev. (forthcoming)

Collecting personal data is a feature of daily life. Businesses, advertisers, agencies, and law enforcement amass massive reservoirs of our personal data. This state of affairs—what I am calling the “collection imperative”—is justified in the name of efficiency, convenience, and security. The unbridled collection of personal data, meanwhile, leads to abuses. Public and private entities have disproportionate power over individuals and groups whose information they have amassed. Nowhere is that power disparity more evident than for the state’s surveillance of the indigent. Poor mothers, in particular, have vanishingly little privacy. Whether or not poor mothers receive subsidized prenatal care, the existential state of poor mothers is persistent and indiscriminate state surveillance. 

Professor Khiara Bridges’s book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights, advances the project of securing privacy for the most vulnerable among us. It shows how the moral construction of poverty animates the state’s surveillance of poor mothers, rather than legitimate concerns about prenatal care. It argues that poor mothers have a constitutional right not to be known if the state’s data collection efforts demean and humiliate them for no good reason. The Poverty of Privacy Rights provides an important lens for rethinking the data collection imperative more generally. It supplies a theory not only on which a constitutional right to information privacy can be built but also on which positive law and norms can develop. Concepts of reciprocity may provide another analytical tool to understand a potential right to be as unknown to government as it is to us.

February 1, 2018 in Books, Media, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

McDonald's Moms v. Organic Moms: Regulating Motherhood

Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston & Merin Oleschuk, Calibrating Extremes: The Balancing Act of Maternal Foodwork

When it comes to feeding children, mothers today must avoid the appearance of caring too little, or too much. Either extreme garners social stigma, although the penalties are far from equal.

 

As mothers in our study distanced themselves from an unhealthy “Other” who made poor food choices, we were surprised how frequently McDonald’s entered the conversation. McDonald’s seemed to function as a trope symbolizing “easy” meals, “unhealthy” choices, and “bad” mothering more generally. Gail (white, acupuncturist) contrasted her vision of healthy home cooking with a “stereotypical image of someone stopping at McDonald’s to get food for their kids.” Marissa (Black, project manager) confessed that as “busy people we do need to do fast food,” but clarified that “my kids will tell you that does not mean McDonald’s.” Lucia (Latina, social worker) said she and her son “talk about what’s junk and you know, McDonald’s and all that kind of food” in an effort to teach him “what’s healthy, what’s not healthy.”

 

Again and again, mothers distanced themselves from the figure of the “McDonald’s Mom,” a stigmatized “Other” they used to defend their own feeding practices. While this defense may seem judgmental, we suggest mothers’ efforts to establish this distance reflect the intense pressures they experience feeding their children. These pressures are especially penalizing for poor women who struggle to feed kids on a limited budget and racialized women who face enduring racist stereotypes about parenting and food choices. Indeed, the assumption that poor mothers make inferior food choices is evident in recent calls to restrict what can be purchased on SNAP benefits, undermining the essential role of government assistance in mitigating the effects of poverty.

 

When distancing their own feeding practices from “bad” ones, some mothers described feeding their children an organic diet – a resource-intensive practice that has become a gold standard of middle-class motherhood. Mothers today face considerable pressure to purchase ‘pure’ foods that are free of harmful chemical additives; this “intensive feeding ideology” involves the added work of researching products, reading labels, and making baby food from scratch.***

 

Our point is not to equate these uneven penalties, but to draw attention to the multiple ways mothers are harshly judged for their foodwork. Notably, comparable figures of the “McDonald’s” or “Organic Dad” did not emerge in our broader study (which included men), revealing the continued gendered burden of feeding children and the more flexible standards fathers face when doing this work.

 

What became clear throughout our research is that mothers from diverse backgrounds face pressure to continually monitor their children’s eating in ways that are careful and responsible, yet don’t appear obsessive or controlling. We call this process calibration – the constant balancing act of striving for an elusive maternal ideal. Calibration is labor-intensive and emotionally taxing, part of the seemingly impossible task of performing the “good” mother. If you opt for affordability or convenience, you risk being seen as a McDonald’s Mom. If you take your job as health-protector tooseriously, you may be deemed an obsessive Organic Mom who deprives her kids of childhood joys like hotdogs. These gendered pressures not only contribute to mother-blame, but distract us from the larger harms perpetuated by an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust food system.

October 18, 2017 in Family, Gender, Pop Culture, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, April 10, 2017

Cloaking: Public Policy and Pregnancy

Julie Manning Magid, Cloaking: Public Policy and Pregnancy, 53 Amer. Bus.L.J. 439 (2016)
 
Long before J.K. Rowling wrote about an invisibility cloak that allowed Harry Potter and his friends to disguise their presence and move freely without detection, cloaks, both literally and figuratively, were associated with hiding and disguise. Pregnancy is often enshrouded as well, not only by women who want time before announcing publicly that they are expecting a child, but also in the course of public policy discussion and resulting legislative or regulatory enactments.

In the United States, public policy decisions concerning employment tend to avoid the important issue of pregnancy in the workplace, and this avoidance has disproportionately negative implications for women. “Cloaking,” as I use it here, refers to the various ways the United States legislates issues related to women in the workplace without directly discussing the uniqueness of pregnancy and its impact on employment and the wage gap. In particular, the policy discussions do not address transparently that the modern workforce requires job changes for economic advancement, and current policies focusing on accommodation and family leave fail to protect job changes during childbearing years.

Labor-market demands and economic self-sufficiency for women require policy makers in the United States to cast off the cloak that camouflages pregnancy as a subset of other policy concerns—gender, disability, family—and fully embrace pregnancy as a crucial issue in developing economic policy. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) receives thousands of complaints of pregnancy discrimination each year; these numbers peaked in 2008 but remain steadily higher than in the previous decade. In an effort to add transparency to the issue, the EEOC conducted a public meeting in preparation for issuing new guidance to clarify further regulations related to pregnancy and its economic impact. At the public meeting, experts identified a direct connection between pregnancy discrimination and economic self-sufficiency for women and their families. As one expert noted, citing the “motherhood wage penalty” of as much as five percent per child, “[m]otherhood constitutes a significant risk factor for poverty.”

April 10, 2017 in Equal Employment, Family, Poverty, Pregnancy | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Jewish Women Legal Practitioners and the History of Legal Aid

Felice Batlan (Chicago-Kent), Forging Identities: Jewish Women, Legal Aid, and the Secular Liberal State 1890-1930, Indiana J. Law & Social Equity (forthcoming).

Abstract:     

This article discusses an unexamined area of the history of the legal profession — the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish women legal practitioners played in the delivery of free legal aid to the poor as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid — Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. The article interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping their careers, understandings of law, and the delivery of legal aid, as well as the constrained professional possibilities, but at times, opportunities, both women confronted and embraced. By puzzling through these issues, we also see two contrasting understandings of the rule of law and the secular liberal state. 

 

February 9, 2016 in Legal History, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

manhood development camp

Lamont Brown engages the young men at the Camp

 In Chicago: 

As we watch the news and observe our young men we notice many things. We note that they have struggled often to get where they are whether its a position on  some NBA,  NFL or MLB and  of course those entertainers in the music industry all who are making decent money. We are often greeted with late  evening or morning news reporting that ‘Big NBA Playa, was arrested for toting a gun'; ‘NFL charged with cruelty to dogs or domestic violence'; ‘MLB  left fielder violated drug probation'; or ‘Hip Hop Mogul involved in scuffle at the Metropolitan involving a gun’. We see, hear read this sort of news all day everyday.  Too many times we have shaken our heads or thrown up our hands in disgust thinking what’s wrong with these young people?  We ask and we ponder, . . .they have million dollar contracts why do they do these things?

But: 

They are missing an understanding of decorum, etiquette and  manners, knowing what’s appropriate when and what’s not from dress, to conversation as well as table manners. These necessary essentials will prove to be an asset to the young men’s future progress and success.

So  20 to 30 black males ages 12-18 will learn table etiquette as part of the agenda of Manhood Development Camp.  The workshop will be facilitated by Nathan Wright President of Excel Etiquette.  Nathan Wright is perfect for leading the workshop. His company is not only a  full-service Etiquette and Cultural Enhancement Company but it offers a variety of etiquette and social/cultural programs and workshops for adults as well as.

This fabulous opportunity  is offered free to young men  who can benefit from such a workshop Saturday, May 16 – 9 to Noon held at  Leo High School – 7901 S. Sangamon – Chicago, Auditorium. This is an invaluable asset that oftentimes can determine whether or not you get the job. Knowing your way around the table is most important. As a managerial and executive employee you may be called upon to attend, luncheons, dinners, galas, workshops etc., that require you to demonstrate your etiquette skills. 

 Not a bad idea, it seems to me.   

May 20, 2015 in Manliness, Masculinities, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Batlan on the Gendered History of Legal Aid

Excited - my friend Felice Batlan's book is out!  Here's the review from the Legal History Blog.

 

Karen Tani, New Release: Batlan's History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945

I've been really looking forward to this new release, from Cambridge University Press: Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, by former guest blogger Felice Batlan (Illinois Institute of Technology/Chicago-Kent College of Law). Here's the abstract:
This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between “professional” lawyers, “lay” lawyers, and social workers. Putting legal history and women's history in dialogue, it demonstrates that nineteenth-century women's organizations first offered legal aid to the poor and that middle-class women functioning as lay lawyers, provided such assistance. Felice Batlan illustrates that by the early twentieth century, male lawyers founded their own legal aid societies. These new legal aid lawyers created an imagined history of legal aid and a blueprint for its future in which women played no role and their accomplishments were intentionally omitted. In response, women social workers offered harsh criticisms of legal aid leaders and developed a more robust social work model of legal aid. These different models produced conflicting understandings of expertise, professionalism, the rule of law, and ultimately, the meaning of justice for the poor.
Reviewers say:
"Women and Justice for the Poor is an exciting and timely intervention into work on lawyering in the United States. Batlan establishes the deep relevance of ideas about gender and race to the history of law and legal practice through ambitious research, provocative analysis, and engaging narrative."  -- Martha S. Jones, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, University of Michigan
"By tracking legal aid through the winding corridors of urban social institutions, Batlan gives us evocative insights into gender, reform, capitalism, and lawyering in a cogent and fascinating historical account. Her erosion of lay and professional boundaries, demonstrated by women’s contribution to legal aid and the pragmatic relief they provided to underprivileged clients, illuminates the value of using gender to frame the story." -- Norma Basch, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University
"In a remarkably original social/legal history, Batlan is asking readers to rethink what lawyering has meant and could mean. And when you ask ‘outside the box’ questions, you come up with surprising answers. This book can help us understand why law today can be far from justice." -- Linda Gordon, Florence Kelley Professor of History, New York University
More information is available here.

May 14, 2015 in Books, Poverty, Women lawyers | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Conference: Reframing the Welfare Queen

At USC School of Law, Reframing the Welfare Queen: Feminist and CRT Alternatives to Existing Poverty Discourse

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Moynihan Report, a Senate report issued in 1965 that pathologized the creation of black, female single-parent households with long- term dependence on state assistance programs, and in this way laid the political foundation for the political construct known as the "welfare queen." The "welfare queen construct" has played a key role in political debates and facilitated the transformation of public assistance programs. For the past fifty years it has played a prominent role in presidential politics, shaping discussions of poverty during the Reagan, Clinton and even Obama presidencies. Moreover, the construct led to a spate of concrete policy changes in 1996, ones that transformed older open-ended welfare programs into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). Many TANF features are direct responses to the threat of the welfare queen, including: family caps limiting benefit levels for families above a certain size; workfare programs requiring welfare recipients to work; and strict time limits that sunset welfare benefits after a set number of years.

 

Numerous scholars, activists and commentators have explored how the welfare queen construct is used to demonize poor women of color in need of state assistance programs. And while the critiques launched by these early conversations about the welfare queen have been important in opening a much-needed dialogue about the needs of the poor, this conference attempts to move us beyond discussions that isolate poor minority female welfare recipients as a special class. Instead the conference explores how the construct of the welfare queen imposes costs on us all, by revealing the hidden institutional norms naturalized by the construct and the cultural anxieties it creates that prevent people from seeking state assistance. Our project is to "reframe" the welfare queen - to challenge the ways in which claims of need are represented as pathological by the state; feminized and racialized in ways that marginalize and render invisible certain needy communities; and foreclose recognition of certain kinds of "need" and certain relationships of support between the individual and the State. By "reframing" the welfare queen have an opportunity to image new forms of governmental assistance that might better match up with the working poor's needs and lived experiences and with feminist values and anti-poverty advocates' goals and understandings.

April 7, 2015 in Conferences, Poverty, Race | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The Failures of the LSAT and SAT Testocracy

Lani Guiner (Harvard), Ivy League's Meritocracy Lie: How Harvard and Yale Cook the Books for the 1 Percent.  In this excerpt from Guiner's new book, she traces the elitest and anti-Jewish origins of standardize testing in law schools and discredits the alleged merit evalution of SAT and LSAT tests. Taking the "testocracy" to its ultimate result, she concludes we are admiting students based on a false sense of merit and failing to prepare students as future leaders and professionals. 

The top career choices of many male Harvard students—whether it is 2007 or 2013—are severely lacking in any element of service. This is the damage that we are doing through our testocracy. We are credentializing a new elite by legitimizing people with an inflated sense of their own merit and little unwillingness to open up to new ways of problem solving. They exude an arrogance that says there’s only one way to answer a question—because the SAT only gives credit for the one right answer.

January 13, 2015 in Education, Poverty, Race | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, November 28, 2014

The Second Shift on Thanksgiving

Slate, Thanksgiving is Becoming Impossible for Low-wage Working Women

This is a deeply gendered issue, and not just because low-wage retail workers are disproportionately female. Holidays are a time when the domestic demands put on women escalate. While some families are more progressive, the fact remains that, in most families, women are expected to do almost all the cooking, cleaning, present-wrapping, decorating, and planning. ***

 

State Rep. Mike Foley is trying to attack this problem by pushing a bill in Ohio that would triple the minimum wage on Thanksgiving Day. It's a brilliant idea, and not just because it increases the compensation for people who are dragged into work that day. Since there's no increased profitability for being open on Thanksgiving, if employers have to pay more to make no more money, they might reconsider this ridiculous trend of forcing retail workers to work on what is supposed to be a national holiday.

November 28, 2014 in Equal Employment, Poverty, Work/life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, November 20, 2014

From Working Class to Academia

From one our past guest bloggers, Susan Apel, Professor of Law, Vermont Law School, a personal memoir about moving from the working class to academia.

November 20, 2014 in Law schools, Poverty, Work/life, Workplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Gender, Race and Poverty: International Conference Watch Live Today

Gender, Race and Poverty: Addressing Multiple Identities Through Law

Objectives

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers from different parts of the world to share their findings about the role of law in addressing some of the most challenging aspects of discrimination: those involving the intersection between gender, race and poverty. There were few opportunities of getting together researchers in Latin America, Africa, Europe and North America to work together on these issues. Despite the problems, the legal challenges and possibilities for reform are similar and closely related. The workshop will address the international and comparative law, and theory and practice.

Context

The World Development Report 2012 identified substantive victories for women: there was an increase in their schooling, in their life expectancy and  in their participation in the labor market. However, these gains were not reachable to poor women. Women in countries with low and middle income are more likely than men to die, they face unequal access to economic opportunities and are being marginalized in their homes and in society. This results in a cycle of discrimination and disempowerment. Women are responsible for a disproportionate share of care tasks in their homes, an activity that is not valued or remunerated, leading to lower levels of education and lack of preparation to seek financial independence in the formal labor market or to break with prejudices and stereotypes the role of women.

 

Whereas the World Development Report highlights that these gaps are more pronounced when gender and poverty are combined with other exclusion factors – ethnicity, caste, remoteness, age, race, disability and sexual orientation – there should have a critical study of forms of interaction between gender, race and poverty. While the feminization of poverty is a phenomenon long recognized, gender inequality, racial inequality and poverty are conceptualized as separate problems. Poverty is often approached from a neutral point of view with regard to gender, rather than adopting a comprehensive, integrated and holistic gender perspective. Likewise, racial discrimination is accessed by a neutral perspective regarding both gender and poverty. These approaches are not adequate to portray the various and intricate human rights violations experienced by poor women with multiple identities

November 13, 2014 in Conferences, International, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, August 31, 2014

LAT CRIT and SALT Conference

I received a request from Prof. Charlotte Garden at Seattle to post about the upcoming Lat Crit-SALT conference, which I am happy to do.  

Twelfth Annual LatCrit-SALT
Call for ParticipationJunior Faculty Development WorkshopOctober 9, 2014University of Nevada-Las VegasLas Vegas, NV 

LatCrit, Inc. and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) are pleased to invite interested participants to the Twelfth Annual Junior Faculty Development Workshop (FDW), immediately preceding the SALT Teaching Conference.  This annual workshop is designed for critical, progressive, and social justice oriented pre-tenure professors, including clinicians and legal writing professors, as well as those who may be contemplating a teaching career.  However, we also encourage more senior members of the profession to attend, share their experience, and serve as resources and mentors.

The FDW is designed to familiarize critical, progressive, and social justice oriented junior faculty with LatCrit and SALT principles and values and support them in the scholarship, teaching, and service aspects of professional success.  In addition, the FDW seeks to foster scholarship in progressive, social justice, and critical outsider jurisprudence, including LatCrit theory, among new and junior faculty, students, and practitioners.  Finally, the FDW aims to cultivate a community of scholars interested in the continuation of this and similar projects over the years.

To facilitate community building through shared experiences and the exchange of ideas, we strongly encourage all participants to attend the entire workshop.

If you have questions about the workshop or would like to attend, please email [email protected].  Although we will make efforts to accommodate all interested participants, RSVPs are strongly suggested by September 30, 2014. 

Registration for the SALT Biennial Teaching Conference is available at http://www.saltlaw.org/conference_registration/

 

August 31, 2014 in Call for Papers, Conferences, Poverty, Race, Theory | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Women Disproportionately Deal with the Realities of Hunger

Slate, Hunger's Disproportionate Effect on Women

[T]he task of feeding children on an inadequate budget falls primarily to women. That women still do the majority of household labor is well known, but usually it’s discussed in the context of middle-class obsessions like leaning in and the mommy wars, not in the context of growing poverty.

 

McMillan shows just how heavily domestic duties weigh on food-insecure women—both the practical and menial labor of getting dinner on the table, and also the emotional labor required to negotiate with hungry kids. 

July 26, 2014 in Family, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Return of the Welfare Queen

Michele Gillman (Baltimore) has posted The Return of the Welfare Queen, 22 American J. Gender, Social Policy & Law (forthcoming).

  • The “welfare queen” was shorthand for a lazy woman of color, with numerous children she cannot support, who is cheating taxpayers by abusing the system to collect government assistance.
  • The good news is that dependency rhetoric did not work and may have backfired.
  • The bad news is that the welfare queen still lurks behind repeated calls to cut government benefits and to criminalize poverty.
  • This article explores the legacy of the welfare queen, her return in the 2012 presidential campaign, and the current inadequacies of TANF. The article concludes with suggestions to reform TANF in the hopes of burying the welfare queen once and for all

May 13, 2014 in Gender, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Legal Reform for Women in Poverty

Jill Engle (Penn State), Promoting the General Welfare: Legal Reform to Lift Women and Children in the US Out of Poverty, 16 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice (2013).

American women and children have been poor in exponentially greater numbers than men for decades. The problem has historic, institutional roots which provide a backdrop for this article’s introduction. English and early U.S. legal systems mandated a lesser economic status for women. Despite numerous legal changes aimed at combating the financial disadvantage of American women and children, the problem is worsening. American female workers, many in low-paying job sectors, earn roughly twenty percent less than their male counterparts. Nearly forty percent of single mothers and their children subsist below the poverty level. The recession exacerbated this problem, mostly because unemployment rates skyrocketed and then stagnated for years. Sadly, though, many women with jobs still find themselves living in poverty in modern America. Social trends loom large in the constellation of factors impacting poverty as well, and this article examines the twin phenomena of women and children 1) ending up poorer after divorce than men, and 2) living in poverty as single-headed-households much more often than men. I also stress the deleterious effects of domestic violence and its link to the perpetuation of women and children in poverty.

 

I argue our legal system is equipped to build the scaffolding to facilitate our collective climb up and out. I advocate changes to government policies, and family law reform. Recent changes to federal benefits programs have exacerbated the problem of women and children living in poverty. Welfare reform and “domestic violence” provide a natural segue between the article’s two main sections. Modern family law developments such as no-fault divorce and the attendant decline of alimony are also analyzed.

 

May 1, 2014 in Family, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Obama Urges Raise in Minimum Wage for Tipped Workers to help Low-Income Women

From Reuters, White House Urges Higher Pay for Tipped Workers

The White House said on Wednesday raising the minimum wage for workers who receive tips would disproportionately benefit low-income women and help close the gender pay gap in which men earn higher pay than women.

The federal minimum wage for workers who receive tips is $2.13 an hour - well below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Even though employers are required to make up any shortfall between the tipped minimum and the standard minimum if gratuities fall short, one in 10 workers earn less than the minimum wage, the White House said.

"This provision is difficult to enforce," the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report. The president has asked Congress for an 18 percent, $41 million increase in funding for Department of Labor Wage and Hour division investigators to hold employers to the law.

March 29, 2014 in Equal Employment, Poverty | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

more leisure time for men?

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, men apparently have more leisure time than do women.  

“In virtually every country, men are able to fit in valuable extra minutes of leisure each day while women spend more time doing unpaid housework,” according to the OECD. But the sharper point was that gender inequality is most stark in India, where the average man spends just 19 minutes a day on “routine housework” and the average woman spends almost five hours on such duties.

Of course, stats must be taken with some qualification and skepticism.  Somehow the claim that there is more leisure time for men seems apt for those who can afford not to work.  There is this to consider as well: 

Millions of Indian men do huge amounts of housework — but in single-man or all-male households. Three years ago, I spent a few weeks in Mumbai interviewing dozens of auto rickshaw drivers for a long essay about their lives. An overwhelming majority of them lived in all-male households, often sharing a single room and cooking for one another. It’s not just them. Millions of poor and lower-middle-class Indian men leave behind their villages and families every year to work in cities as daily wage laborers, construction workers, auto rickshaw or taxi drivers, security guards, fruit or vegetable sellers, waiters or domestics, transferring the small surplus incomes of their city lives into economic security for all of their dependents back in the village.

Such a man runs his own household expertly and sometimes with evident pleasure, shopping, chopping, cooking and cleaning at high speed, being ribbed by his mates all the while. On his annual visit back to the village, though, he puts his feet up and doesn’t do even the 20 minutes of routine housework that would make him above average.

March 26, 2014 in Manliness, Masculinities, Poverty, Race | Permalink | Comments (0)