Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 17:38:08 -0500 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu> Subject: Re: M-TH: Assistants to your self-emancipation Hi Charles, I am planning to reply to your previous posts as well, but I have yet to get around to them. Sorry for my tardiness. << - An Equal Rights for Women Amendment to the Constitution, revive that campaign, in the form of a Bill of Rights for Women, as well as a general statement that women shall have equal rights with men. The Bill of Rights would include freedom and liberation to pursue and material enabling to provide for self-happiness,, education and joy; pay equity or comparable worth pay; reproductive, sexual and caring labor power and freedom for women, including fulfillment of all material needs for reproductive and caring and schooling labor; protection and safety from bodily brutalization and abuse for women and children>> I am afraid that legal struggles of this kind have probably exhausted their usefulness. << - Improve mens' caring and nurturing labor skills, particularly child care skills. Programmatically and systematically men can learn more home economics and housework, how to feed, cloth, wash , etc. children. I know there are many men who are an exception to this generalization, who do a lot of housework, but in general it is an accurate generalization. This is especially important because women do so much wage earning too, doublework. It is patently unfair and exploitative.>> <<- It does not follow that because women biologically get pregnant that they must do most of the childcare after birth., from infancy through schoolteaching.>> About the above two, I think that it is not simply the ideology of sexism that creates the unequal and gendered division of labor in social reproduction. Without equal participation and equal treatment in terms of wages and also special paid leaves for pregnancy + childbirth, women will keep earning lower wages, which will in turn perpetuate an economic 'rationale' for the aforesaid division of labor in care-giving. (And of course, the double burden in turn will reinforce women's marginality in the labor market.) I think this is an issue that labor movements + marxists ought to foreground. <<- Total equality for women in political and leadership postitions, in government , religion, academe, business and all institutions of power.>> We had better begin with ourselves--within labor movements and marxist politics. Right now, government, academe, business, etc. are doing a much better job making use of women's labor and knowledge, including some women in leadership positions too. <<-all-arouind anti-male chauvinism and anti-male supremacy , equality without identity. We want a unity and non-antagoniatic struggle of opposites. Something like what happens in dancing.>> I like your metaphor. But can you be more specific? <<- Affirmative action with quotas. (quotas are reasonable and not arbitrary, by the way. Their quantification can also be made reasonable , not arbitrary)>> Can't agree more. Quotas are reasonable from the marxist point of view. Quotas are also great challenges to the myth of meritocracy. <<- Men who conceive of this as "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" feminism. This program is in men's self-interest as well as women.>> For working-class men, yes. What do you think we can do to make this a generally shared premise in marxist politics? <<- Men declare their surrender in the Battle of the Sexes.>> Men can declare it if they want to, but power isn't something you can surrender except in certain artificial contexts. Yoshie --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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