Tag Archives: women

That sounds about right…

Posted on November 28, 2011 by | 2 Comments

In preparation for the upcoming state legislative session(s)–they’ll be here before we know it!–I’ve been working with some folks who are reviewing policy trends at the state level, nationwide, to identify sources for these new initiatives, messages and strategies that can combat them, and (because I’m ever the optimist!) positive legislative agendas that can chart a way forward, at least in the states where I spend most of my time.

Looking back, especially over the last couple of years, I was reminded of a quote that I bookmarked in Backlash, a book that I read during my maternity leave.

Will Bunch, the author, referred to some of the legislative developments that took precedence in Congress over job creation priorities, as “impulsive acts of rage with imprimatur of law” (p. 164).

And, you know, that sounds about right.

I have an obvious interest, in particular, in the anti-immigrant attacks that are odious not only for their sheer meanness but also for their foolishness, given that almost all of them are completely unlawful (which, if you think about it, is really kind of ironic: What part of “illegal” do they not understand?). Of course, immigrants aren’t the only ones hurt by these attacks: do you want to be waiting in an emergency room in Arizona while personnel are trying to verify proof of citizenship? (SB 1405–I don’t make this stuff up) Or, what–you don’t carry your original birth certificate on you in case of a life-threatening injury? Wasteful, ill-conceived, hateful, ridiculous…and popular, in states with very different demographics and even political landscapes.

But, of course, immigrants were not the only ones targeted by vengeful acts of childish rage. One of my students wrote a paper this year pointing out how the attacks on women’s reproductive rights threaten our economic viability as a nation, given the link, worldwide, between women’s ability to control their own fertility and their labor market participation. People who work for a living, despite their overwhelming strength in numbers, were demonized, devalued, and, in terms of meaningful access to redress for grievances and some power to right tremendous imbalances in the workplace, nearly destroyed.

States went after children’s health insurance, early childhood education, and safety-net services for those with mental illness, in many cases while simultaneously purporting that businesses need tax “relief” because of their horrible struggles. (In this, of course, they were echoed by the U.S. House of Representatives, whose penchant for oil company incentives over children’s health even my 5-year-old called “wacky.” Indeed.)

We cannot afford to bemoan these policy proposals (some of which made it into law, and some of which were forestalled only by the courageous efforts of advocates and policymakers who deserve our support in November 2012). What we need to do, first, is call them what they are: distractions and assaults, not legitimate plans to address the challenges facing our states.

We need organizing strategies that address their root causes–the maligning of the “other” and the fault-finding borne of desperation and preyed upon by those with a horribly unjust way of seeing the world. We need coalitions that see a threat to one as a threat to all. We need an agenda that offers a promise of real solutions.

We need a new year, and a commitment to make great things happen in it.

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For many women, every day is Labor Day

Posted on September 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Today is Labor Day.

Instead of thinking about how Americans work for a living, though, I’ve been thinking more about women’s work, the unpaid kind.

This isn’t another discussion about gendered divisions of labor within our own household, though.

The reality is that, on a much larger scale, our society and societies around the world are predicated on women’s labor and the way in which it is used to compensate for the impossibilities of our modern lives, especially as governments withdraw from the social contracts that have provided the foundation for family supports necessitated by changes in women’s work and family patterns.

It goes like this: Women provide more care for older relatives when services funded by the Older Americans Act are cut. They have to spend more time in labor-intensive meal preparation and shopping when food prices go up. They have to scramble for decent childcare when subsidies are reduced. They have to worry about health care for themselves and their children when fiscal strains and outright attacks on women’s health become commonplace in the political discourse. They work more hours (at unequal pay) as male wages stagnate in the global economy.

In many ways, then, even budget cuts that look “gender-neutral” on their face fall the hardest on women, and exact the highest price from women whose labor will inevitably fill in the cracks that surface as services are slashed. In Kansas, we’ve cut public schools and expected mothers to make sure that their children are still making “adequate yearly progress” by spending more time on homework in the evenings. We’ve reduced funding for mental health centers, both necessitating more caregiving for those with serious mental illnesses and denying those who need mental health care (including low-income women) an affordable way to access it. We’ve slashed funding for the Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services, whose work includes many programs for children and families, but we’ll make sure to get out to investigate the mothers who aren’t adequately able to hold it all together without these supports.

This isn’t just about current American political currents and an ideological attack on women.

In my class on global poverty, my students learn about how research in economies undergoing structural adjustment programs finds that women’s unpaid labor increases significantly, in many of the same ways experienced by American women. Indeed, while the impacts on children, seniors, and other vulnerable populations are often dire, the evidence is clear that they are not nearly as catastrophic as they would be without women stepping up and, in many cases, sacrificing themselves.

Today, let’s not just celebrate the labor that has built this country, and the proud traditions of labor unions that continue to fight for every working person.

Let us remember the work that isn’t even dignified by being called such, the work that policymakers are subtly depending on when they target working families for budget cuts and service reductions, knowing that women will try to keep the sky from falling down.

And let us avoid the platitudes about “a woman’s work is never done”, and instead call this kind of accounting what it is: unjust, unsustainable, and unacceptable.

Women the world over deserve an “un-labor” day, and a movement that will deliver the public infrastructure and investments that will secure it.

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What lessons for advocates in Roe v. Wade?

Posted on January 20, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Opposing sides from last year's commemorative march

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the Roe v. Wade case almost 38 years ago, on January 22, 1973.

More because I finally got around to it than because I have such a keen sense of timing, I just finished reading Wrath of Angels, a quite compelling story of the battle over abortion in the United States, co-written by an investigative reporter from Kansas City who I know somewhat from her work on extremist groups associated with the anti-immigrant movement.

But, really, this post isn’t about abortion.

Instead, when I looked back at the pages I’d marked as I read, I found that what resonated with me the most were the lessons that this extraordinarily contentious, long-lived, and influential debate holds for advocates in other social justice arenas, as a sort of extreme case study that crosses multiple policy jurisdictions and has left a mark on all of American politics.

  • Public opinion may be more malleable, and more fickle, than we think. Several observers have called Roe v. Wade the ‘fastest social revolution in history’, but, just 7 years after the Supreme Court decision (issued contrary to American public opinion, which was mostly opposed to abortion), opinion polls showed considerable alignment with the expansions of reproductive freedoms the decision codified, as well as the limitations it embraced. To me, this suggests that social justice advocates should not necessarily focus as much energy on bringing “the public” to our side, but rather on working through policy mechanisms to force the changes we know our communities deserve, creating space for the rest of the nation to catch up.
  • We must be ready to fight on multiple fronts at the same time. Advocates on both sides of the abortion issue struggled to cope with a suddenly nationalized debate; where once they had fought state-by-state, building relationships with those policymakers and studying those processes, overnight they were dealing with a national issue that required a national strategy. I see a similar dilemma in the movement for immigrants’ rights; while congressional passage of comprehensive immigration reform is the end goal, advocates are also playing defense against restrictive state legislation and trying to advance something progressive at the state level as federal action remains elusive. It’s hard to play on both of these courts at the same time, particularly on an issue (like both abortion and immigrants’ rights) with important judicial tactics, as well.
  • Winning on language is huge. The anti-abortion (or “pro-life”–language figures into every aspect of this debate!) effort, in particular, has demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the importance of definitions, as evidenced in the push to have fetuses defined as children, even in areas of policy seemingly far removed from questions of reproduction itself. When we forget that how people talk about our issues matters at least as much as what they’re actually saying, we may have already lost.
  • Sometimes, movements may need to strategically exclude. This last piece is controversial for me, especially because social workers and community organizers (and I consider myself both) are rather instinctively inclusive, but I was quite transfixed by the account of the debate within the anti-abortion camp about excluding men from all of their demonstrations, in order to avoid the charge that their cause was about men controlling women’s lives, and to provide a counterbalance to the predominantly feminist reproductive health care providers they were combating. Ultimately, this commitment didn’t last long, and the major anti-abortion organizations did come to be dominated by men. But, still, it made me think: how might I feel differently about that movement, and its role in our politics, if it was authentically led by women? Which leads me to ask, should movements exclude to send a message, given how important messages are? And THAT question raises all kinds of issues about my own work within a community that’s not my own, and the kind of message that might have sent, and whether immigrants would be better off if they excluded non-immigrants from positions of leadership within their own struggle, too.

    While, obviously, I welcome your comments and questions and responses to these reflections on the theme of Roe v. Wade’s legacy for other campaigns and other causes, I’d also love to hear from those social workers who are better scholars of this particular struggle than I, about what this anniversary means for you. This post may be more about what we can learn from this epic battle than about the battle itself, but those lessons wouldn’t exist without the sacrifices of those who have gone before.

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    Whatever happened to the Mink Brigade?

    Posted on December 17, 2010 by | 1 Comment

    I’m closing out this week (and my blogging year) with some reflections on what I hope is to come in 2010, a sort of Christmas list for social justice.

    It can’t hurt to ask, right?

    And while I’m thinking bold and grand, I figured it wouldn’t hurt, either, to at least wonder aloud why we can’t revive something out of the Progressive Era that sounds like a riot, and just the thing to shake up political coalitions in this shifting age.

    As described in The Woman Behind the New Deal, the Mink Brigade was a group of wealthy, liberal young women who used their money and political connections to support progressive political causes–women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, workplace safety, children’s issues. They bailed out striking workers, pulled strings to get access to public officials, and even went to jail to protest unsafe conditions, unfair treatment, and unjust laws.

    As I’ve said before, I still think our best bet is to restructure our society so that there are not such extremes of wealth and poverty.

    But, as long as there are still divisions between rich and poor, organizers for social justice would be well served to figure out how we can elicit support from those who money and position make powerful allies.

    While this might seem like an impossibly tall order, given the unlikeliness of these alliances, there are at least some signs of hope and some pockets of people with wealth committed to using those resources as a tool, and a platform, for good. There’s the “Gang of Four”, for example, which, while certainly not socialites risking arrest for social justice, is a promising example of really rich people investing in progressive politicians and just causes, because they want to make a long-term commitment to social change and see politics as a way to leverage more than mere philanthropy (one of them is even a member of Congress now).

    Still, if what we’re after is real alliances between rich and poor, I see the obstacles to building a sort of “21st Century Mink Brigade” as multiple:

  • The distance between people in poverty and those in wealth (and how such distance makes true solidarity harder)
  • The changed profile of social workers (and the fewer connections that many social workers, especially macro-practice ones, have to rich people)
  • The decline in structures and institutions that have the ability to pull people together around social justice issues (this is connected to the first challenge; our churches and political parties and even many social justice organizations are highly segregated along class lines today)

    I would never assert that organizing such a “grasstops” strategy should be an advocate’s first priority. Our key work has to focus around amplifying the voices and stories and experiences of those most affected by the social problems we’re addressing, not providing wealthy people with opportunities to “make a difference” or “find meaning” in their lives.

    But we also have to get over ourselves, a little bit, and think strategically about how we can build bridges to those whose position in this society and economy can make, if combined with politicization and a consciousness that makes them authentically committed to social good, valuable partners in an egalitarian coalition. Just because someone has money does not make them an enemy of social justice, and writing checks is not the only role for wealthy people in a struggle for social change.

    Will this mean some uncomfortable conversations about privilege and power and ill-gotten gains? Will it mean confronting our own prejudices about people with money, and those without? Will it mean vigilance to protect our messages and avoid shortcuts that can sell out our own power?

    Yes, yes, and, of course, yes.

    But I think that the lessons of history, and some of those of history in the making, suggest that it still might be worth it.

    And, besides, you never know when you might need bail money.

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    Why mentors matter: the woman behind the woman behind

    Posted on September 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    Florence Kelley, photo with permission of History Link

    One of the themes from The Woman Behind the New Deal that has lingered with me since I read it last month relates to the role that other women, in particular other women social workers, played in shaping the social conscience, feminist identity, and, ultimately, career choices of Frances Perkins.

    Florence Kelley, for example, provided Frances with a vision of a working, politically-active woman in an age with a very different dominant view of women’s roles. So did Jane Addams. And, perhaps even more important than these inspirations was the real interest that these women and others took in cultivating Frances, finding places for her within social movements, sharing books and exposing her to alternative thoughts about family, economics, and just society.

    One of the things that struck me was how interconnected these women were. In Chicago, Washington, DC, New York, and points in between, they pop up in each others’ lives, organizations, and campaigns. They shared not just passion for social justice but real affinity for one another, and a solidarity born out of fighting tough struggles as an overlooked and often marginalized gender.

    And they made a difference, not just in the legislative environment that improved the lives of generations of Americans (consumer protection, regulation of child labor, development of mothers’ pensions, worker safety…), but also in the capacity of other women activists to weather their own difficult battles, at home and in the public sphere.

    And reading the excerpts from their letters to each other, and the interweaving of their lives over the course of decades, has made me think more about how much my students today (and, really, me too!) could benefit from such a strong network of social work “justice fighters”–people with whom to share not just tips and web links, but also tears and celebrations, people who share not just our causes but also our stories, our values, and our professional identity.

    I don’t mean to suggest that there’s none of this kind of mentoring among social work advocates today; certainly I try to provide it for some of my students, and I have definitely benefited from the investment made by other women advocates in my own life and work. There are institutions like the Social Welfare Action Alliance that try to formalize some of this convening, and there is the existence of the field instruction experience which, at least theoretically, seeks to provide some mentoring in the foundation of a new social worker’s career.

    But we need more.

    Because, while it may not be as revolutionary to work and mother at the same time as it was in Frances Perkins (or Florence Kelley)’s day, it’s still not easy to be a social worker seeking to integrate clinical skill with radical social change. And I know that there are holes in the networks that support new social work activists, because my students often tell me that they feel alone when they launch their careers. This blog, really, is in part an attempt to fill some of that void.

    Speaking truth to power is always somewhat lonely. Frances Perkins’ story offers many insights for social workers today, but perhaps chief among them is that she probably never would have become what she did, and therefore never won for us what she did, if not for the women social workers who guided her, lifted her up, surrounded her with wisdom and encouragement and, when necessary, chastised her into using her hard-won power for the least among us.

    We’d all do better with friends like that.

    Where do you find support for your social work advocacy? Who are your mentors? What are your recommendations for social workers starting out on a social change path? And what are you willing to do to bring up (and bring out) the next Frances Perkins?

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    The future of our female-dominated profession

    Posted on August 31, 2010 by | 12 Comments

    One of those women I can't imagine our profession without--Bertha Capen Reynolds

    As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t mind controversy.

    In fact, some of my favorite stories are about when I had to do a talk radio show ON MY BIRTHDAY (a Saturday, no less!), and the host had people call in to say whether I was “the stupidest person who’s ever been on the show” for advocating drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants; or the time I was kicked out of a church for trying to mobilize immigrant parishioners; or the time my own grandmother called me to tell me I’d been horribly misquoted in the paper, and I had to admit that I’d actually said those things.

    And this post might rank up there with those.

    So let me just say, first, what’s true, that some of the brightest, most passionate, most talented people I know are social workers. It is obviously my career choice, and I have never doubted for a moment that I made the right one. Period.

    Something that I read about teachers in Super Freakonomics has got me thinking, though, about the nature of our profession, overwhelmingly female, and its future in the face of ever-changing gender dynamics.

    We know that teaching and social work are both dominated by women. And we know that, for generations in this country (and others) they were two of only a handful of career options open to women in any meaningful numbers. Nothing shattering there. But what those freaky-economists have found is that overall teacher aptitude, measured by teachers’ score on intelligence tests and skill measures, have been falling since 1960, paralleling…the rise in occupational alternatives for women. Of course, the authors are quick to point out, this correlation is abetted by the low wages within teaching and the comparative attractiveness, then, of other professional choices–it’s not, in other words, that the brightest women no longer want to teach but, simply, now that they CAN do other things, many of which pay more and offer more rewards and fewer headaches, many do.

    Which is what has me thinking about we social workers. I mean, who’s to say that Jane Addams would have chosen social work if other avenues would have been just as open to her? We can hope, but hope won’t get us the talented social workers, women and men, that we, and, more importantly, our clients, so deserve.

    The answer, obviously (I trust!), is not to restrict the career options of women so that they’ll have to be social workers. But we do need to acknowledge, albeit perhaps belatedly, that the pipeline of bright women no longer heads straight to our doors, which means that we’ve got work to do.

  • We need to be serious about our professional image as a profession of choice, not of refuge. This means high standards for admission into our professional schools, based not just on academic qualifications (although they can’t be overlooked) but also engagement in the world and commitment to our profession’s values and ethics.
  • We need to work at the system level to raise salaries for qualified social workers–articulating the clear value of what we do, fighting for equitable funding for social services, and rigorously evaluating our impact.
  • We need to recruit, hard, among the target populations we hope will choose social work–not just the women who have been our profession’s backbone and guiding inspiration, but people of color, first-generation college students, rural residents, GLBT individuals, non-traditional students… If we can’t make the case as to why people should choose social work, then we can’t be surprised if they don’t.
  • We must break down barriers that make other professions more attractive routes to helping people than social work. I don’t have an exhaustive list of ideas here, but I know that it needs to include loan forgiveness for work with underserved communities and mentoring for new professionals, because we, like teachers, tend to lose some of our best folks early in their careers.

    I don’t think we have a crisis of unqualified social workers. Every semester, I’m a little bit amazed by some of the very smart, intellectually curious, naturally empathic, all-around wonderful people who have chosen to cast their lots with us. Amazed, delighted, and reassured.

    But I do think that a profession with a value base that compels us to advocate for the advancement of the less powerful, including women, must be planning for how we’ll fare in the very future we’re seeking to create–one where women have the same set of career options and incentives that men do, and where we’ll have to compete with all sectors of the economy for the best and brightest of both genders, in order to staff our profession with the hearts and minds we’ll need to tackle that next set of injustices, just beyond the horizon.

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    Is a Feminist Uprising the Traditional Ninth Anniversary Gift, or the Modern?

    Posted on August 18, 2010 by | 8 Comments

    Today is my wedding anniversary.

    Which, in retrospect, is perhaps not the best time to finally get around to reading Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

    Anyway, the combination of the anniversary and the book, and my continued thinking about motherhood and women’s struggles for equality and justice and health and peace…have me thinking about what a truly pro-women policy agenda would look like, and what such a movement would mean for families, the nation, and our social work profession.

    Women’s experiences in our society are distinct, and we need political power that recognizes that, demands policies that support us, and changes the expectations that we have internalized, which, after all, is what the backlash is really about: making women police ourselves, so that no one else even needs to consciously repress us.

    And I think that all of that is tremendously important, which I why I read blogs like MomsRising and Feministing, why I include content in my policy classes about “gendered budgets” and how social welfare policy has oppressed women, and why I think that we need policy reforms that give women real options and real equity and real authority. Absolutely.

    But, on this day, my thoughts are really more on my own journey as a woman, how the personal is always political and, for me, the political is personal now, too. I’m thinking about how I couldn’t see how sexism and proscribed gender roles impacted my life until I was a married woman, largely because I had bought into the conceit of exceptionalism. I’m thinking about how many people have nodded sympathetically (approvingly?) when I said that I quit my full-time job because I missed my kids too much when I was traveling, and how their reactions affirm the backlash at work: “see, another woman who tried to have it all and thought better of it.” I’m thinking about how my wonderful husband, who had to actually show me where we get things dry cleaned when I first went to part-time work (because I never, ever got off work in time to go to a dry cleaners before!) has only made dinner a few times in the past three years. I’m thinking about how nice it would be, at least sometimes, to be the one to rush off to work in the morning, and about how much I miss the recognition and respect that came with a more prominent job. I’m thinking about how many mothers at the park say “lucky” when I tell them that I work part-time, and how many of my full-time employed friends say the same. I’m thinking about how our own social service organizations fail in creating the kinds of jobs that work for working mothers, and about how many times I asked for more help so that I could cut my hours back, before I quit. I’m thinking about how glad I am that my son told me, “when I’m older, sometimes I’ll have to get off work early to pick up my kids because my wife will be at work,” and how to make sure that he sees all of me, not just the Mommy side. I’m thinking about how many people told me to “work less” when I couldn’t get pregnant, and how no one told my husband that. I’m thinking that many of the same groups that attack women’s right to an abortion attack the technologies that helped us build our family, too, and about how my grief cemented my commitment to women’s full spectrum of reproductive freedoms. I’m thinking about the kind of example that I may have inadvertently set for the young immigrant women with whom I organized when I stepped back from that work…and about how missing my kids can be construed as a statement about something entirely different.

    And, because I’m an organizer and a policy geek, I’m also thinking that I bet most of those moms at the park would agree that they do more than their fair share at home, want better options in the labor market, and reject being labeled as “just stay-at-home moms”, and I’m wondering how many would self-identify as feminists. I’m thinking about how to build a movement that can change the frames that constrain women’s lives, because “pro-family” shouldn’t mean “turn the clock back”, “gender-neutral” almost never is, and no one ever nods knowingly at working fathers who “try to have it all”. And I’m thinking personally, too, about how my wedding vows included the phrase “work with you for justice and peace in our home and in our world”, and about what building a truly equitable partnership looks like, every day. I’m thinking about that agenda: equal pay and equal education and some things that must be distinctly unequal–reproductive choice and affirmative action and economic support for single mothers. And I’m thinking about how to make sure that my kids, especially my daughter, grow up in a society that supports women in a multitude of roles, having broken through the backlash for good.

    And I’m thinking, too, happy anniversary, honey. I swear.

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    Move over, Eleanor? No, there’s plenty of room.

    Posted on August 5, 2010 by | 4 Comments

    Sarah and Angelina Grimké

    I named my daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt.

    She has a framed picture of the former First Lady, at work in the United Nations, in her room.

    So you can imagine my chagrin, when, after reading The Woman Behind the New Deal, about Frances Perkins and her role within the Roosevelt Administration and the architecture of the New Deal, I realized that (while I still think Eleanor is an amazing woman whose role in history is well-deserved) I’ve been a bit duped.

    Our history seems to only have enough room, often times, for one really monumental woman at a time. And, with Eleanor’s proximity to the President, she’s often been the one given that historical spotlight.

    So, while it was Frances Perkins whose ideas became much of the social legislation of the New Deal, and whose ability to see “the elements of disintegration in the social fabric” (p. 294) foretold the fall of France to the Nazis, and whose commitment to preventing injustice saved more refugees during World War II than any other individual in the U.S. government, and whose vision secured the role of the International Labor Organization as a voice for workers worldwide, and whose government service created much of the infrastructure that opened careers for generations of social workers, and whose belief that statistics tell human stories brought to the White House a dedication to alleviating suffering during our nation’s greatest economic tragedy…there hasn’t been much room for her in our understanding of the forces shaping the modern welfare state, or even in our social work education.

    My first instinct was to feel chagrined–I’ve been guilty of overlooking one woman’s accomplishments because of too much focus on another’s. And then I got angry–where did this instinct come from, to jump from one heroine to the next, instead of arming myself with a whole phalanx of awesome women to serve as role models for my life (and that of my daughter)?

    This isn’t just about what I name my daughter (although Frances is looking kind of appealing). In an age where textbooks are being rewritten to exclude even more of the stories of courageous campaigners for social justice, and even more of the voices of marginalized populations, what we understand about the past is increasingly important as statements about who we are, and who we want to become.

    So here’s to not just Eleanor, and Frances, but Grace Abbott and Jane Addams and Florence Kelley and Caroline Love O’Day and Mary Dreier and Bertha Reynolds and Lugenia Burns Hope and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sarah and Angelina Grimké and the countless others I can’t wait to learn about.

    I’m not going to have enough daughters to honor them all, but my young woman still has a lot of room on her wall.

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    Posted in Background Reading, Inspiration and Examples

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    Make it work with women, and you’ll win

    Posted on May 27, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    Social work is an overwhelmingly female profession. And, in many fields of social work practice, social workers also make up a majority of clients, as well.

    We know this.

    Yet, for such a female-centric profession, we often forget that women are, also, a big part of the puzzle in terms of addressing the social problems that plague our society, too. We fall into the myth of ‘gender neutral’ communication and outreach and advocacy, even though we really know better.

    And then we wonder why we don’t have more supporters, or more advocates, or more donors.

    One of the most uplifting books I read this spring was The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World–And How to Reach Them. It’s an easy read, by two awesome and talented women who know how to communicate and, most importantly to me, are super committed to social justice, writ large. So you should really read it. It has a lot of good examples, too, and they’ll get you on the very first page when they describe their disgust and disdain for a get-out-the-vote website, aimed at women, wreathed in pink flowers. Seriously.

    So, we know that we don’t want to go that route. But we social work advocates also don’t, usually, have the big budgets to hire a firm like theirs to help us craft advocacy messages. Hey, we often don’t even have the money to hire an intern to help us craft advocacy messages.

    So what can we take away from these lessons to adapt our current campaigns and make them resonate with the very folks who will help us get to victory: women?

    One of my favorite pieces from the book is their emphasis on how women share information, a reality very much a part of my life (where I get and give advice and resources with women in my social networks all the time). It’s not only true; it’s guerrilla marketing that, for advocacy, has the advantage of not only being lower cost (because your leaders are carrying the message for you) but also more likely to lead to success (because people who are asked by those they know to take action are much more likely to than those more passively solicited). This means empowering your leaders to shape and disseminate messages themselves, reflecting a reality that, in this digital age, there’s no such thing as total ‘control’ anyway. This means taking advantage of social media and other emerging technologies to help people connect, not only to your cause, but to each other. It’s a core principle of community organizing, really: for men and for women, it’s all about relationships.

    The authors’ discussion of ‘cultivation’ focused primarily on the fact that women tend to be tougher customers, in terms of supporting causes, but fiercer and more loyal supporters once they’re on board. To me, though, this principle demands power-sharing, too; what better way to truly bring women into your fold than endowing them with power to make decisions and help to chart strategy, and being transparent so that women can learn to really trust what you’re doing and where you’re headed? And, of course, they make the key point that these kinds of commitments on the part of organizations will also, often, attract support from men, as well; while reaching out in a stereotyped way can turn off either gender, paying attention to the need to cultivate deep relationships with your potential supporters will bring men along, too.

    The authors talk a bit about women’s lower rates of political giving than men, with some insights that are very important for advocacy work and, even, for direct services. They make a compelling case that getting women to participate more in the political process as donors requires helping to draw connections between those contributions and the results they can generate in the policy sphere; women already care about the issues, what they need to believe in is the process. And that means we need to be rigorous about evaluating our advocacy, work, too, so that women have reason to trust that process and to see connections between their contributions and activism and progress in the social concerns about which they’re passionate. AND we’ve got to make participating in social action feel just as good as direct service; too often we bemoan people’s greater willingness to get involved on the micro level while we ignore the need to feed people’s spirits in our macro work, too.

    Finally, it occurred to me as I was writing this post and pulling dozens of sticky notes off the pages of The She Spot, doing advocacy in a way that appeals to women (as targets) will appeal to women as organizers, lobbyists, fundraisers, and coordinators, too. I have little notes saying, “how fun!” in the margins of so many of their examples (like the house parties to show a movie about sex trafficking and have hosts lead discussions and coordinate petition drives among their friends and colleagues). That’s not surprising because, after all, I’m a woman. And since women have been at the heart of every movement for social justice in the history of this country, playing critical, if not always heralded roles, and since we make up the majority of staff and supporters and volunteers of nonprofit organizations today, and since many of the social problems we’re collectively trying to address disproportionately affect us, well, then, we should get to run these campaigns our way.

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    Policy Reform to Make Every Day a Happy Mothers’ Day

    Posted on May 10, 2010 by | Leave a comment


    Who makes me a mom–my big kid at age 3 and the twins at 3 months

    Yesterday was Mothers’** Day (okay, so I’m really writing this the week before, since I usually spend Mothers’ Day sleeping late and then just playing with my kids, but give me a break–it’s Mothers’ Day!).

    This post isn’t about any inspirational lessons my kids have taught me, though, or the history of the holiday, or anything heartwarming like those email forwards about sick kids that people always send around this time of year (that I curse under my breath but still cry at?).

    It’s about public policy reforms that would make every mother’s life better, and make our country a better place in the process, and about building the kind of political movement that would make that happen.

    It’s about really believing that it could, that it can, that it will, because moms manage to make some pretty amazing things happen every day, there are a lot of us, and, well, even the most jaded politicians are afraid to be “anti-Mom”.

    This spring, I read The Motherhood Manifesto. It’s terrific–stories about ordinary moms and how public policy changes would make a difference in their lives, and in ours. For several months, I’ve been an active member of MomsRising, a truly fantastic blog/advocacy group/support for progressive parents that takes on the policy priorities (maternity leave, open/flexible work, after-school programs, health care for all, excellent childcare, realistic & fair wages, and paid sick days) that stem from The Motherhood Manifesto, but, in today’s digital age, it’s a site that uses video and social networking and the highlighted voices of real parents to inspire action. If you are a mom, or you want to honor one, check it out.

    Reading the book and communicating with other moms on the site, I think that there’s a real missed opportunity not to just press for these policy priorities, but also to activate families more and include a ‘motherhood (and apple pie is always good)’ appeal in other policy advocacy, too. For example, there’s a real claim to make that providing greater access to health care outside of the employer-employee relationship would open up job options for mothers and fathers who want flexibility but often sacrifice it for full-time positions that come with benefits (which can mean, then, that one parent settles for less employment than he/she (usually she) would like, because the other is in an overwhelming job that comes with health insurance). I don’t hear the pro-mother, pro-family, pro-labor market flexibility argument much in the health care debate these days, and it seems to be a missing element.

    Similarly, the discussion around universal preschool and greater supports for early childhood education highlights the high cost, scarce availability, and spotty quality of childcare options, but gives short shrift to the struggles of childcare providers, many of whom are themselves mothers, who, despite the unaffordability of childcare for many parents, often earn poverty wages for their families. Uniting mothers who are childcare providers and those who are childcare consumers seems key to building a coalition that will shift the public understanding of childcare to something that more parallels higher education, where considerable public subsidy is considered an essential component of a thriving economy and society.

    I am very, very aware of the many privileges that make motherhood a (usually) pleasant journey for me: a partner who shares a lot of the family work load; life insurance that would keep our family from being devastated if something happened to either one of us; a part-time job that allows me a lot of flexibility; a higher education that makes that job a possibility; extended family nearby; a safe neighborhood full of people who view our children as partly their responsibility; access to health care for my kids…I can’t imagine being a mom without these supports, and yet the reality is that most mothers are denied many of them.

    Still, my reality is that I won’t make what I did once I go back to work full-time (the motherhood wage hit is about 30%, and it lasts for years, ON TOP OF the $700,000 lifetime hit women take in earnings due to the wage gap); I’m not saving anything for my retirement; I do more than half of the housework and the vast majority of the hands-on childcare; I panic whenever our childcare falls through; I work and parent even when I’m sick; including caring for my kids, I ‘work’ about 80 hours/week, but I’ll only get Social Security credits for a fraction of that. I see around me mothers who wish they were working but couldn’t make enough to pay for childcare, mothers who wish they could see their kids more but don’t want to sacrifice their careers, mothers who only have 2-3 weeks at home after having a baby, mothers who rationalize sending their kids to poor-quality childcare because they can’t afford anything else, mothers who themselves aren’t earning what they’re really worth.

    It’s wrong, our nation can’t afford it, and our families deserve better. Nearly every other developed nation does a better job of surrounding mothers with investments for success than ours–we know what would help, and we know that the we will reap the rewards for decades to come. Please, go make it a Happy Mothers’ Day, today and tomorrow and the next day…

    **I’m intentional about the placement of the possessive here; “mother’s day” would be about honoring one’s own mother, which, you know, is fine, but certainly not revolutionary. I consider it “mothers’ day”, which, if we took it seriously enough, could change our world.

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