Dear All:
We wanted to share an article that we found extremely incisive and validating.
Tamara and Rebecca
"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."
If you don't have time to read the entire thing, I am posting my two favorite quotes below:
QUOTE 1:
Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Women in the U.S. have long done a disproportionate share of the unpaid service work in institutions and at home. They’re the ones who run the bake sales so the school can have an art teacher or enough books to go around. They’re the ones who run church outreach programs to attract new families and serve community members in need. They’re the ones who check in on sick coworkers, remember birthdays, and help their colleagues feel like part of a team. Women do all of that unpaid service for the institutions in their lives, and then they go home and do even more.
Women serve as the social safety net because norms (norms that serve capitalistic, patriarchal, and white interests) in the U.S. tell them that’s their role. And because breaking those norms leaves them open to judgments (or worse) from others and judgments from themselves.
QUOTE 2:
"In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.
Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan."