Long Post 3/31

Long Post 3/31

Mink’s article “The Lady and the Tramp” discusses a theme that frequently arises in our class and that is the way the feminist movement can be harmed by divisions within it. Since this movement affects all women in the world there is a huge spectrum of people to which different issues in the movement are important. Since different factions see different issues as important sometimes members of the same movement end up unintentionally working against each. Mink illustrates this concept by looking at the Personal Responsibility Act and the way it has affect poor working women. This act stripped many poor working mothers of their entitlement to welfare and devalued the work that they are doing within their homes. Their has been a public image created of these women of abusing the system simply because they do not want to work. It is projected that they sit at home breeding children and living of the hard work of other Americans. What is upsetting about this bill is that it devalues the work that these women do in their homes, while raising their children. The Government is willing to consider the work that more well off homemakers do in the home as work, but since these women do not have money their work in the home is ignored.

The way that this issue has divided the women’s movement is that it is difficult for middle class women to see that the option to stay at home can be liberating. Women of the middle class expended so much energy in earning the right to work and escape the home that they cannot see how economically disadvantaged women want the option. While middle class women saw the home as a trap, economically disadvantaged and often non white women never got the option to stay home. They would leave their home and children everyday in order to earn money caring for someone else’s children. Having a right to income support for the job of caring for one’s children is a step towards women being seen as dependents. An issue like this that can affect women in a multitude of different ways shows how important it is that women take the time to see issues through other women’s eyes. The women’s movement will be at its strongest when we all band together rather than allowing ourselves to become divided factions.

Rosanna Eang’s uses her personal story of living in poverty to show how it can be a perpetuating cycle and the strength that it take to overcome that cycle. She was born in the United States to a family of immigrants that had fled from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Her family resided in Philadelphia in a home that housed her immediate and extended family. Even though her family was happy to enjoy the freedom of America it did not come without confrontations of racism and sexual abuse because no one was around to protect the kids. Eang’s is especially grateful to her mother’s hard work because like many women in America, but more extreme she had to take on both domestic and external work. While the men were expected to make money, her mother tended to a family of seventeen people and spent time working in factories. What her mother and her rough childhood taught her was that the way out of poverty is through education. Education became her tool against remaining in poverty as well as fight the oppression of women that often accompanies poverty. I thought that the way in which she used her experience to start an organization that would read to poor children while they wait for their doctor’s appointments was amazing. She knew that it was not just facts and science, but compassion and setting a good example that will help break this cycle.