Feminism hurting women

Gwendolyn Mink's "The Lady and the Trap" acknowledges the damages the US welfare system places on women who find themselves in need of that service. She does an excellent job of recognizing where the short falls come from.

Welfare in the United States has a very negative connotation. Women who end up needing to be on it are considered lazy and abusive of the system. "In the popular imagination, welfare participants are reckless breeders who bear children to avoid work. Such vintage stereotypes have bipartisan roots... Racially charged images of lazy, promiscuous, and matriarchal women have dominated welfare discourse for quite some time, inflaming demands that mothers who need welfare-although perhaps not their children-must pay for their improvident behavior through work, marriage, or destitution." As mentioned in the quote this stereotype is being used by both political parties, yet Mink recognizes that Feminism has allowed it to continue and has given these policy makers an excuse.

Feminism is predominately a one class one race voice, especially when it comes to policy on welfare. This feminism represents white- middle and upper class women. These woman's issues are quite different than the women who find themselves needing assistance. Feminism believes itself to be helping "women" but it is only helping a certain group of women and while keeping others down. Feminism, has placed a huge emphasis on work outside the home, to say women should be allowed to work outside of the home and this will create equality for women. Yet, this only creates equality for a group of women, if it creates equality at all. Most poor women have always worked outside the home, yet their work is not recognized or praised. Thus only certain types of work is seen as important. "Part of the problem, I think, is that white and middle-class feminists-who are the mainstream of the women's movement view
mothers who need welfare as mothers who need feminism. They see welfare mothers as victims-of patriarchy, maybe of racism, possibly of false consciousness. They don't see welfare mothers as feminist agents of their own lives-as women who are entitled to and capable of making independent and honorable choices about what kind of work they will do and how many children they will have and whether they will marry. As a result, when many white, middle-class feminists weighed into the welfare debate, it was to prescribe reforms to assimilate welfare mothers to white feminists' own goals-principally,independence through paid employment."

There needs to be a shift in how feminism thinks of equality. First, feminism needs to recognize not all women have the same issues and thus one group must not speak for another. Each group need to have her own voice. Second, there needs to be a shift on what type of work is considered respectable and worthy. All women are at a disadvantage if we continue to think that only work outside the home will give us equality. The truth of the matter is even if women work outside the home they are still doing the majority of the work inside the home. Now they have two jobs, one that may or may not be recognized outside the house and one that is for sure not recognized inside the house. We need not only focus on having a dual-earner policy but a dual-earner and dual-carer model. And even that language is discriminatory. Many women are single and will not have a second income or second hand to help in the house, yet with this language at least there could be recognition that both types of work-out of the house and especially in the house- are respectable and deserve attention and payment.