Tuesday Found Objects: What You Need To Subpoena From My Zenith Computer Today

I was hanging out this morning using my university computer to download BDSM pornography and order Angela Davis posters (paid for out of my research account, of course) when I decided to take a break and check up on what my other radical colleagues were doing.

They've been busy!  So without further ado:

• The Facts, Ma'am.  Jon Wiener, from his perch at The Nation, asks:  "What does it take to become the target of this kind of attack?"  Wiener points out that Cronon is "not Bill Ayers," but a self-avowed political centrist who published "a simple fact" that Republicans in Wisconsin did not want revealed:  their close ties to a group that drafts union-busting legislation and creates public relations strategies for passing that legislation. This fact, Wiener argues, "disrupts the Republicans’ explanation of what they are doing in Wisconsin. They say the new law there ending collective bargaining with public employee unions is an emergency response to this year’s fiscal crisis." However, "the goal is not to protect the little guy in Wisconsin but rather to help the big corporations that fund Republican operations."  Read the whole article here.  

• It's Being A Professor Who Thinks That Is The Problem.  One issue that we need to resurrect is the neo-liberal charge that tenure promotes the prolonged employment of "dead wood" professors.  Clearly, it is Cronon's failure to become dead wood that has made him notorious and, as it turns out, dead wood profs aren't the ch!cks and d00ds that some right-winger wants to light up after all.  No, no: some poor, defeated old sot, shuffling off to class with a tattered little set of notes after a nip too many turns out to be our ideal scholar.  Tony Grafton, that guy you saw flying by your office window in a red cape, and with a big "H" on his scholarly chest, nails it in the New Yorker blog when he reminds us that, unlike politicians, historians are responsible for researching and relating the truth, and the truth sometimes hurts.  As Grafton concludes, "the Republicans seem remarkably fragile. A professor writing a blog post gives them the shivers. It’s a good thing they chose politics, and not the kind of career where the going can really get rough. Professors, for example, teach their hearts out to surly adolescents who call them boring in course evaluations and write their hearts out for colleagues who trash their books in snarky reviews. These Wisconsin Republicans may never have survived ordeals like that. Happily, Cronon has been toughened by decades of academic life. He’ll be blogging—and teaching and writing—long after Wisconsin voters have sent these Republicans back to obscurity."  

(Which reminds me that I have students standing around my office door growling in a menacing way and shaking pitchforks at me as a reminder that I should be using my Zenith computer to get their grading done right now!)  OK, one more:

• Yes, Historians Actually Care About The Rights Of All Working People.  Eileen Boris is in the business section of the HuffPo this week, which you probably missed as you were clicking through to the ads for package tours to Cuba.  Boris asks us to celebrate Women's History Month and commemorate the Triangle Factory Fire by reminding ourselves that the vast majority of working class women, and men, are no longer employed in an industrial workplace.  While guaranteeing the basic employment rights of household workers are becoming the subject of new legislation, Boris points out, "one group of household laborers remains apart -- those paid by governments to care for needy elderly and disabled people. The California proposal explicitly excludes In Home Supportive Service workers, the type of worker whose omission from federal law the Supreme Court upheld in 2007 and the Obama administration has yet to rectify through new labor regulations. Meanwhile, Republican governors, as in Wisconsin, are eliminating collective bargaining for home care workers. An irony of current struggles might be that these public employees end up with fewer rights and poorer conditions than those who labor for individual housewives." 

As Women's History Month draws to a close, we at chez Radical admit that we have done little to celebrate it, so here's my proposal:  I would like to nominate Bill Cronon as an Honorary Woman.  This is one of the few awards available to historians that he has not received, and I think it is time.  Do we have a second?  Thank you, Historiann!  All in favor?

The aye's have it!  Sorry, Wisconsin GOP.  You lose again!

What Will Be The "Obama Effect" for Women?

Over time the American conservative movement has actually agreed about few things. But ultimately, one might argue, it came together largely over a combined hatred of the New Deal and its children, Harry Truman's Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This hatred --which was ultimately expressed in polemic form as the need to defend the traditional nuclear family from the state -- coalesced over the course of three generations and came to embrace a broad social and geographical constituency over time.

We who are on the left, while we do not believe that the state is unequivocally our friend, also believe in the capacity of the government to legislate our protection and support as a people: national health insurance, civil rights protection, pensions and employment equity are important categories where we think government intervention has been, and will be, successful. But progressives would also do well to pause and think before they ask Barack Obama for the 21st century equivalent of the New Deal. It was the Roosevelt Administration, as Alice Kessler-Harris has noted in her book, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2003) that, as it sought to empower working men in a capitalist economy, wrote social discrimination against women into economic legislation. Indeed, they saw this as recognizing the different role men and women already had in families and communities. Feminists who had worked for years in cross-class movements, many of whom lived with other women and believed marriage and family to be incompatible with a career, transported these ideas to Washington in 1933 (see Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism and New Deal Politics, a book which appears to be flying off the shelves at Amazon right now.)

One member of this network (all friends of Eleanor Roosevelt who had unique access to the administration as a result) was Frances Perkins. The official website of the Social Security Administration, where I found the above framed image of Secretary of Labor Perkins, the first woman to fill a cabinet level post, quotes her thus: "I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen." Eager to reinforce male bread winning as the foundation for "normal" families, fair labor standards, social security, the federal tax code and unemployment benefits all undermined an equitable workplace for women. And this was not just a question of gender discrimination, since although white working-class women did not have access to equal pay they did sometimes have access to unions. But women of color did not. By deliberately excluding domestic service from labor legislation, the Roosevelt administration specifically, and knowingly, undermined the economic citizenship of women of color, most of whom worked in what would now be called pink collar occupations.

And in her study of Social Security and AFDC, the two New Deal programs that, between them, "created the contemporary meaning of welfare," Linda Gordon argued over a decade ago that the state articulated poor women as widows and/or mothers, but not workers. As Ruth Crocker of Auburn University noted in a review of Gordon's book in 1995, the view that men were supported through wages and women through charity prevailed, "even though most poor women were also wage workers" (Gordon, 145) Gordon also cautioned us to remember that female policy makers, who had come out of a long middle-class feminist political tradition that saw working-class women's labor as ideally contributing to the economy in shoring up the nuclear family and raising children. As Crocker writes:

A central purpose of this history of policy-making is to explore why "welfare" or ADC programs took the shape they did -- how they emerged as one alternative among many. Black welfare thought provided one such alternative source of solutions, ignored rather than rejected by policy makers, and by historians of New Deal policy-making. Black welfare leaders were not consulted nor were their interests protected in the 1935 Social Security Act; their "alternative vision" was ignored by policy makers who also omitted domestic workers and agricultural workers from the Act's coverage. More disadvantaged than white women and disenfranchised even after 1920, black women nevertheless articulated a powerful "welfare vision" that was distinct from that of whites. Gordon provides a valuable summary of black women's welfare activism between 1890 and 1935. For African- Americans, the issue was not programs for the needy, but access for blacks of ALL classes to public services. These women organized, built, and sustained private institutions of health and welfare, defied stereotypes, asserted leadership, and struggled not as women, but as race leaders. Gordon makes the important point that for these women, welfare meant civil rights -- indeed, the assumption by policy historians of a dichotomy between welfare and civil rights stems from "a white notion of welfare" (Gordon, 119).

So in other words, it isn't an accident that we have not yet achieved equal pay for equal work, that women are more likely to be poor than men, and that the fastest ways for a woman to exit the welfare system before the state gives her the boot is to marry a man who has a job.

So let's not make the same mistake twice, shall we? In the wake of a petition circulating in the feminist blogosphere reminding President Obama that "shovel ready" projects in construction, transportation and public works may not employ women on the scale that they employ men, this great article by feminist labor historian and committed public intellectual Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California -Santa Barbara appeared in Salon on January 16. Infrastructure is important, says Boris, who is writing a history of home care workers (many of whom are organized by SEIU) with Yale's Jennifer Klein. "But we also need to enhance the social infrastructure, bolstering not only a green economy but also the carework economy, by generating and improving pink jobs in home care, health and education." As Boris argues, this will not only employ women, who represent 46% of the work force in the United States, but it will deliver services to the people whose need for services is often enhanced in times like these: the elderly, the sick and children.