{"id":454,"date":"2014-10-26T07:20:46","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T07:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2014\/10\/26\/neoliberal-feminists-dont-want-women-to-organize-sarah-jaffe-2014\/"},"modified":"2014-10-26T07:20:46","modified_gmt":"2014-10-26T07:20:46","slug":"neoliberal-feminists-dont-want-women-to-organize-sarah-jaffe-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2014\/10\/26\/neoliberal-feminists-dont-want-women-to-organize-sarah-jaffe-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Neoliberal Feminists Don’t Want Women to Organize – Sarah Jaffe (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nNeoliberal Feminists Don’t Want Women to Organize <\/strong><\/em>
\nBy Sarah Jaffe, Political Research Associates | Op-Ed <\/strong><\/em>
\nMembers of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, an organization including women who clean houses and are part of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, protesting on International Human Rights Day in San Francisco. To say that Sheryl Sandberg ruined my life would be to make the same mistake that Sandberg herself makes\u2014it would be to assume that the successes or failures of an individual woman, feminist or no, equal the successes or failures of feminism.
\nNevertheless, writing about feminism and the workplace in the shadow of Lean In has been a task in itself. One must, it often seems, either define oneself as for or against Sandberg. Critique of her was critique of feminism, at least for the heady months around her book\u2019s publication when well-known feminists felt compelled to take sides.
\nSandberg is not herself the problem, but she exemplifies it in a way that has been instructive. When Jill Abramson was fired from her position as executive editor at the New York Times, reportedly after she confronted the paper\u2019s publisher over her discovery that her pay was less than that of her (male) predecessor, among the many outraged reactions from feminists was the response that leaning in doesn\u2019t work after all. Abramson\u2019s experience, similar to that of so many women, seemed a rebuke to the idea, promoted in Sandberg\u2019s book, that individual women were holding themselves back. It reminded us that no matter how hard we try, sexism\u2014sexism in the workplace\u2014cannot be defeated individual success story by individual success story.
\nThis article appears in the special neoliberal edition of The Public Eye magazine by Political Research Associates.One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is how it has managed to absorb our vibrant, multifaceted liberation struggles into itself and spit them back out to us as monotone (dollar-bill-green) self-actualization narratives. The way this has happened to feminism is particularly instructive. As I wrote in Dissent last winter, the so-called \u201csecond wave\u201d of feminism fought for women to gain access to work outside of the home and outside of the \u201cpink-collar\u201d fields. Yet in doing so, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, some feminists wound up abandoning the fight for better conditions in what had always been considered women\u2019s work\u2014whether that be as teachers and nurses, or the work done in the home for little or no pay.
\nIn fact, the flight of middle-class women into the paid workplace left other women, namely domestic workers, cleaning up the mess left behind, and many of those middle-class women seemed unwilling to deal with the fact that they too, sometimes, could oppress. As Ehrenreich wrote in \u201cMaid to Order,\u201d a piece published in the anthology, Global Woman, which she co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild, \u201cTo make a mess that another person will have to deal with\u2014the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack\u2014is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.\u201d
\nWhile some women have experienced the workplace as a site of liberation and increased power, for many others, the workplace was never a choice. Particularly for women of color, whose domestic work was excluded intentionally from New Deal-era labor laws, the workplace was and remains a site of oppression. And to this day, women remain concentrated in the economy\u2019s lowest-paying jobs\u2014some two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women, and three of the fastest-growing occupations in the country are retail sales, food service, and home health care, which are both low-wage and female-dominated jobs. Home health care workers, in many ways the face of the new service economy, were just ruled only \u201cpartial\u201d public employees by the right-wing Roberts Supreme Court. More than 90 percent of them, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are female.
\nThose are jobs at which, no matter how hard one leans in, the view doesn\u2019t change.
\nAnd these days, the conditions for more and more workers are beginning to resemble those at the bottom; fleeing the female-dominated workplace, rather than improving it, has left middle-class women more, not less, vulnerable. The devaluation of work that involves care, work for which women were assumed to be innately suited, continued apace when feminism turned its back. As other jobs have disappeared, the low wages that were acceptable when women were presumed not to need a \u201cfamily wage,\u201d because they ought to be married to a man who\u2019d do the breadwinning, became the wages that everyone has to take or leave.
\nThough the movement for paid sick leave has gained some important wins in recent months and years, alongside a growing movement to raise the minimum wage, a more expansive family policy that would actually allow more than a few days\u2019 paid leave or allow workers more control over their own schedules remains a pipe dream.
\nEqual pay for equal work means little when the wages for all are on the way down. You would be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed feminist, even of the most neoliberal variety, who doesn\u2019t argue in favor of equal pay, but this focus has often served, as I have argued, to stifle discussion of other concerns in the workplace. As Marilyn Sneiderman, lifelong labor organizer and director of the New Labor Center at Rutgers University, told me for Dissent, the fight for fair pay might seem an individual struggle for high-end workers like Abramson, but for a hotel housekeeper, a nurse, a janitor, the best way to improve your job isn\u2019t to get promoted through the ranks, but to organize with your fellow workers.
\nNeoliberal feminism is a feminism that ignores class as a determining issue in women\u2019s lives. It presumes, as Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out in an article on her personal website, that giving power to some women will automatically wind up trickling if not power, than at least some lifestyle improvements down to women with less power.
\nThis applies internationally as well as domestically. Nancy Fraser, in her book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, cites Hester Eisenstein\u2019s argument that feminism has entered into a \u201cdangerous liaison\u201d with neoliberalism, embracing critiques of the state and men\u2019s economic power that allowed for deregulation. Fraser sees neoliberal feminism embracing a pro-globalization mentality that regards women in the developing world as in need of \u201csaving\u201d by enlightened Western feminists.
\nTake Somaly Mam, the Cambodian NGO entrepreneur who built her career on her own fraudulent tale of being sex trafficked as a child. Westerners flocked to her story and her cause, joining her on trips to \u201csave\u201d women from brothels. Sheryl Sandberg was on the board of her foundation, alongside Susan Sarandon. Hillary Clinton was a fan. Mam\u2019s rise to fame dovetailed with the rise, across the U.S., of an obsession with \u201csaving\u201d sex workers and increasing criminal penalties for sex trafficking.
\nHer fame attracted prominent feminists to a cause that continues, as Melissa Gira Grant writes in her book Playing the Whore, to be supported by the Religious Right and to criminalize women who are trying to make ends meet any way they can. Yet the solutions offered to the women saved by Mam\u2019s organization (currently undergoing a name change after Newsweek published its expose of Mam\u2019s fabrications) were mostly low-wage sweatshop jobs producing clothing for Western consumption. As Anne Elizabeth Moore, who has spent years working in and reporting on Cambodia, writes in Salon of Mam\u2019s organization and others like hers, \u201cWhat they do is normalize existent labor opportunities for women, however low the pay, dangerous the conditions, or abusive an environment they may be. And they shame women who reject such jobs.\u201d
\nThis is neoliberal feminism at its finest. As Gira Grant writes, the idea that women in Cambodia\u2014or in the United States\u2014can organize themselves and change their working conditions is almost always absent from the conversation.
\nSelma James, one of the founders of the 1970s Wages for Housework movement and a leader in the Global Women\u2019s Strike, criticized how some feminists turned grassroots organizing projects into \u201cjobs for the girls\u201d as a way for some women to have power by creating mechanisms to save others. In today\u2019s political climate, we must be wary of claims that feminism is best served by increasing the power of individual (white, middle-class) women, and question over whom they exercise that power. We must understand the difference between power for a few and a real change in how power affects us all.
\nSarah Jaffe is an independent journalist covering labor, social and economic justice, and politics for The Atlantic, The Guardian, In These Times, Truthout and many other publications. She is the cohost of Belabored, a labor podcast hosted by Dissent magazine, and a frequent guest on other TV and radio programs. She lives in Brooklyn with a rescue dog and too many books.<\/em>
\nThis article first appeared in Truthout <\/a>(October 17, 2014)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}