I’ve lived in cities for many months broke, without help, too timid to get in the bread line. I’ve known many women to live like this until they simply faint on the street from privation, without saying a word to anyone. A woman [without children or other dependents] will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her.
MERIDEL LE SUEUR1
IF PUBLIC OPINION POLLS are any measure, “economics” is a boring word that clouds our brains and makes us feel we’ve hit a blank wall. Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified “math anxiety,”2 for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above.
At first, I escaped this ailment by the accident of approaching economics through the biographies of great economists. As an extension of reading about the Bloomsbury group, I got hooked on the life and theories of John Maynard Keynes, its most famous non-literary member, who made money each morning before breakfast by calling the international money market from his bed, wrote brilliant and controversial economic treatises that included ideas of human behavior as well as numbers, was the first to predict the disaster to come from imposing crushing reparations on Germany after World War I, and hung out with Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, his own ballerina wife, Lydia Lopokova, and other Bloomsburyites. It was this diversity of interests—this idea that an economist should be “as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician”3—that produced his advice to the Roosevelt administration on ending the downward spiral of the Depression by the simple human means of “priming the pump”—that is, increasing “relief” spending on everything from road building and forestry to producing plays and painting murals, thus creating employment, buying power, and more employment. If Keynes had spent his time with other economists instead, he might have been more influenced by their belief that the free market would create employment on its own and the suffering of joblessness just had to be waited out; such is the human element of economics.
After reading about John Kenneth Galbraith’s spartan farm-boy upbringing in Canada, I could imagine the source of his ability to criticize the hyperconsumption of this affluent society, and even to name its conversion of “housewives” (or homemakers, as many women prefer, since they are not married to houses) into the first educated, full-time consumers in history. (After all, who else could have time to buy all that stuff we don’t need, not to mention waiting for its delivery and repair?) As Galbraith wrote with elegant sarcasm, “The decisive economic contribution of women in the developed industrial society is … overwhelmingly, to make possible a continuing and more or less unlimited increase in the sale and use of consumer goods. … If population is relatively stable, as in our case, this must be increased per-capita consumption. … The higher the standard of living, that is to say, the greater the consumption, the more demanding is this management. … The family of higher income, in turn, sets the consumption patterns to which others aspire. That such families be supplied with intelligent, well-educated women of exceptional managerial competence is thus of further importance … for its demonstration effect for families of lesser income.”4
Galbraith’s insight remains true even now that the presence of two thirds of all mothers in the paid labor force, plus male avoidance of housework and child care, have combined to produce the marketing stereotype of Superwoman, a new “housewife” who is sold everything on the pretext of saving time.5 I notice busy women are now being persuaded through advertising to rebuy their kitchen ranges one function at a time—from egg boilers and potato bakers to the ultimate capitalist chutzpah of a machine to make tea—even though there is no evidence that such gimmickry decreases time demands, and quite a lot that it increases them. To the extent that time spent doing housework has decreased in the last fifty years, for instance, it’s because of a lowered birth rate, not because of any labor-saving device, including husbands.6
But in my academic life, such intriguing insights into economics as human behavior were soon obscured by courses that substituted flow charts for ideas, and phrases like “the marginal propensity to consume” for narrative. Soon I had become convinced that if I studied very hard, I might one day understand what was being done to me—but never how to change it.
Over the years, I noticed that even activists I otherwise loved to read seemed to behave as if there were a prize for coming up with the most paralyzing news when it came to economics. Here, for instance, is Noam Chomsky, the author and radical social critic:
The U.S. (like other states) will continue to defend U.S.-based corporate and financial interests while seeking to maintain a global environment in which they can flourish. That requires, in particular, that the Third World be kept in its service role. Meanwhile at home, state power will continue to be employed to dissolve popular structures (unions, etc.) that might serve the needs of the general public and enable them to interfere illegitimately in the management of public affairs. It will also be necessary to find ways to control the growing “Third World at home,” no small problem. The Clinton Mandate for Change promises no change.7
Sort of takes the heart right out of you, doesn’t it? Not because he’s wrong—he’s probably right about the economic forces we have to deal with—but because he places all power in the depersonalized state, other-izes the entire “third world” into the role of victim, and does the same with people of color and/or the poor here. Even this might be useful if his purpose were to forge a coalition of “out” groups, but that isn’t stated, and if it’s implied, he neglected to include women, the largest part of any such coalition.* In fact, women might be described as a kind of free-floating “third world” wherever we live: low on capital, low on technology, and labor intensive—not to mention the world’s biggest source of free or cheap labor, plus its means of reproduction.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My first empowering “click” in the still ongoing process of demystifying economics came in the aftermath of the Houston Women’s Conference in 1977. You may remember this event as a sort of belated Constitutional Convention for women. Inspired by the United Nations’ International Women’s Year in 1975, it was funded by congressional legislation written by Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink, and was made up of conferences in each state and territory, some with as many as twenty thousand participants each. Out of those deliberations came proposals for a National Plan of Action, a list of core issues and actions crucial to equality for women, as well as two thousand delegates who were elected to decide on its final form in Houston. That final three-day conference turned out to be the most economically, racially, and geographically representative nationwide gathering this country had ever seen.
It’s worth going back to look at the twenty-six-plank plan of action that resulted.8 In economic rights, homemakers were included as workers; a “minority women’s plank” was hammered out by women of color, from many tribes of Native Americans to new arrivals from South Asia and Mexico, who outlined steps necessary to end double discrimination, from programs to address the high unemployment rate among black teenage women to ending the deportation to Mexico of mothers of U.S.-born children, and the removal of Native American children from their families; a “sexual preference” plank made discrimination against lesbians a women’s issue for the first time at a national level; and a call for a “national health security program,” which was to become a national priority a dozen years later. Those are just a few of the points in a plan that crystallized a majority consensus among U.S. women and helped to create a gender gap in favor of candidates of either party who represented its issues.
Much of the hard work of translating these issues into reality after Houston was taken on by coalitions in each state,9 but a National Advisory Committee for Women was also created by President Carter to advise on implementing the plan from Washington. With forty members, co-chaired by Bella Abzug and Carmen Delgado Votaw of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, the committee’s first task was to analyze the federal budget for its differential impact on the female half of the country.
Unfortunately, the President didn’t seem to realize this meant the whole budget. When the committee took on military spending, not just child care, welfare, and other traditionally female concerns, Carter and his aides were reported to be angry. How dare these women, whose support Carter felt he should have, be so critical, especially of areas that were none of their business? Since aides were urging Carter to toughen his image in response to declining public approval ratings, the idea of firing an outspoken woman like Bella Abzug came up as a way of disciplining the committee and making Carter look stronger at the same time.
Those who remember this “Friday night massacre” will also remember how badly the White House miscalculated. For one thing, Carter’s aides underestimated popular support for Bella Abzug. A Harris poll showed that the public disapproved of her firing by almost two to one.10 For another, they hadn’t fired Carmen Delgado Votaw on the assumption that she couldn’t have been as responsible for the committee’s actions as her co-chair, but she resigned anyway. So did the majority of the committee. As they explained: “The President’s response was not to the issues we brought to him, but rather to use our co-chair, Bella Abzug, as a scapegoat in an effort to suppress our independence. … We believe that all women and men of like mind will refuse to participate in an advisory committee in which disagreement with the President and legitimate criticism are not acceptable.”11
Though some committee members remained and a few others came back on the promise of access to the President, they soon found themselves operating under a new executive order, with a limited mandate that prevented them from advocating the plan in Congress. As Carolyn Reed of the Household Technicians of America said when she resigned, “As a household worker, I’ve learned never to confuse access with influence.”
During this brief but heated controversy, I and others who had worked on the Houston Conference were being called by the press. I heard myself explaining over and over again that a national budget was really the only statement of values a country ever makes—thus, we as citizens have the right and the responsibility to criticize the whole budget for its relative values.
Somewhere in those repetitions, the idea of values began to sink in as the basis of any budget. I realized that if this was true of the federal book-size variety, it was true of my small budget too. If the nation revealed values by allocating big money to nuclear weaponry and superhighways, but peanuts to increasing literacy and lowering infant mortality, then my values as a citizen were revealed not only by my response to that public budget but by the relative spending in my own—and this was true for any of us with even a few dollars left over after subsistence. I began to wonder: Suppose I were hit by a Mack truck tomorrow; how would my checkbook stubs reflect what I cared about?
I liked to think I put my money where my beliefs were, but when I looked at those stubs, I wasn’t pleased. Not only were some of my relative expenditures out of kilter, but I was also treating money as if it were a passive thing to be needed or demanded, not an opportunity to initiate, give, and pursue change.
From that day forward, I found myself balancing my checkbook in a different way and thinking about economics as at least partly a form of expression. Even when I tried to forget this sometimes uncomfortable idea of a statement of values when paying my bills—and even though I knew that buying flowers, dinner for friends, or a new dance record were important values too—that insight began to change my economic behavior. In budgets large and small, I’d begun to see the best-kept secret of economists: Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.
Soon, I was speaking of my committee and checkbook experience on those many occasions when I engaged in what I’d come to think of as the world’s second-oldest occupation: fund-raising. The budget-as-values insight seemed to be a “click” of understanding for other people too: a practical guide to looking at the way our federal and state tax dollars were spent, and also at the way we as individuals calculated and used our dollars. I began to feel more comfortable about asking for contributions for projects designed to redress an imbalance of power, a major occupation in any social justice movement. Instead of begging or relying on guilt, a resentment-producing emotion I wouldn’t wish on anybody, I realized I was offering a way for the donor to invest in what she or he cared about. If the investment paid off, it would create independence, not dependence, which is what women-run projects do so well—nobody knows the price of dependency, or the kind of support it takes to get out of it, better than women. Donors would have a satisfying bottom line, and recipients could see themselves as a good investment, thus avoiding women’s cultural disease of terminal gratitude. Besides, with the idea of balancing one’s checkbook for values every month, even a big goal like equality became a simple part of paying the bills.
I also found this concept of values helpful in sorting out what shouldn’t be supported. If the return on a charitable investment was more social cachet than social change, the cause probably was acceptable enough to have been funded by tax dollars in the first place. Supporting already famous artists in order to rub shoulders with them, funding mainstream medical research, and creating organizations that relieved government agencies of an obligation to provide services—all were common examples. Of course, one could give to, say, cancer research and pressure for its support by future tax dollars, but that kind of activism was (and is) rare in charitable giving. As the only industrialized democracy that doesn’t routinely support free higher education, national health care, a national system of child care, and institutions of the arts, this country still seems to specialize in giving tax deductions for charitable contributions that let the government off the hook and allow tax dollars to go right on paying for corporate welfare, agribusiness subsidies, grandiose Pentagon purchases, big bureaucracies, and other values that the majority doesn’t share—thus creating disillusionment with government, resentment of what is actually a low rate of taxation, and a continuation of this alienating spiral.
As for values within the world of charitable giving, I discovered when I began fund-raising for women’s projects almost twenty-five years ago that of the total charitable dollars given in the United States each year by corporations, foundations, and individuals, less than one percent went to projects that were specifically for women or girls, or had an identified goal of improving their status. Within what were supposed to be general grants—for instance, on health research—females were often specifically excluded on the grounds that menstrual cycles skewed the research (though one might say that men’s lack of menstrual cycles did the same), and in public fund drives, even the Boy Scouts got a bigger share than the Girl Scouts. I could find no foundation that had a category for women of all races. In 1975, Mary Jean Tully, the first active president of the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, released a study documenting the real figure of charitable dollars going to women and girls at less than one half of one percent. In 1977, Women and Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy was founded and began doing regular studies, so we know that years of pressure and initiatives from the women’s movement did increase that proportion to a high of 5.2 percent in 1989. Then it settled down to 4.1 percent in 1990. Now national and local women’s foundations have joined in the battle for a fair half of all philanthropic dollars instead of only pressuring existing foundations and giving programs.12 But it will take all donors insisting that half of their charitable dollars go to women and girls—or more than half, for temporary remedial purposes—to right the balance.
To cite just one result of this gender bias that runs through most government and private funding, many drug programs were designed for male addicts. Our stereotype of an addict is male; we fear men who become destructive to pay for drugs more than women who become self-destructive as prostitutes to pay for them; and in a male-dominant culture even male suffering dominates. Yet according to some urban surveys, at least half of addicts are women, and many are not only destroying themselves but giving birth to drug-addicted, perhaps AIDS-infected babies besides. Moreover, if a female addict does recover, she probably has a tougher time being accepted into society than her male counterpart, especially if she bears a double stigma as an ex-prostitute. I point out this example as one way that biased values underlying our social welfare budgets, both public and private, punish not only those directly involved but the rest of society too.
That’s an example of the problem seen up close, but there is also the larger problem that we see only from standing back and looking at the whole. Because we don’t demystify economics by understanding it as a system of human values, we leave it in the hands of the experts. That leaves us among those who are economics-impaired—in more ways than one.
Let’s take math anxiety as a model. The first part of its cure is realizing that there is no more a math mind than there is a history or an English mind; there are only people who learn math or history or English at different paces and in different ways. In the same way, it’s helpful to realize there is no such thing as an economics mind. Some people might love numbers and abstract theory, but that doesn’t mean they’re better suited to this messy, emotional, and idea-driven field than those who love sociology or politics. To pursue the parallel with math anxiety, U.S. girls have been so much more afflicted with it than boys that some experts hypothesized a male “math gene” or a link with testosterone—which only increased girls’ paralyzing conviction of having the “wrong” kind of mind. Yet in Japan, where women are usually responsible for household budgets, major purchases, savings, and even family investments in the stock market, males are often the ones with math anxiety. As students, they are at least as likely as girls to go to the special juku courses for coaching in math, are often tutored by their sisters, and sometimes are judged by lower math standards in universities. (“If there weren’t lower math standards for boys than girls,” teacher Cathy Davidson was told, and recorded in 36 Views of Mount Fuji, her memoir of teaching in Japan, “our best universities would be filled with women.”) The Japanese belief that managing money is “women’s work” dates back to an ancient samurai tradition, when no self-respecting, supermasculine samurai warrior would deign to carry money, and wore clothes with no pockets as a point of pride. So much for testosterone.13
What we need to do as a society is to develop an array of teaching methods that make no assumptions about the right way, or the right group, for learning math, economics, or anything else. What we need to do as individuals is to keep looking until we find the path into a subject that works for us—which was exactly what a values-driven approach was for me.
Once into this demystification, I actually found myself contemplating numbers with interest and even playfulness for the first time: a big step for someone so afflicted with economics anxiety that budget figures were the most feared part of any political argument, I had a hard time remembering to look at the amount before I paid a bill, and I also feared ending up as a bag lady. If the ability to have fun with a subject is a good indication of making it one’s own, then amusing myself by devising “money reviews”—alternative ways of assessing books, movies, music, museums, or anything else with a price—was a good sign that my years of economics aversion were passing. After all, even a few dollars offer more units of value than do all but the most resourceful use of adjectives. For instance: Why not take the national average movie ticket price of $5.00 and distribute it accordingly? An economic review of a classic like The Godfather might list the script at $4.00, tot up all the good acting performances as another $4.50, credit the film’s realistic look at $3.00 and its historically accurate linkage of pre-Castro Cuba and organized crime at $2.50—and then recommend the movie as worth $9.00 more than its admission price. On the other hand, a typical Woody Allen film might have a script worth 50 cents, a portrayal of women so neurotic that a viewer should be paid $5.00 to sit through it, another $2.50 debit for the inevitable Allenesque character who wants to win and still get the sympathy due a victim, and several fine performances by good actors adding up to a positive $3.50. Thus, an economics review would recommend it—but only if a ticket buyer got a rebate of $3.50. Similarly, a novel could have one scene that was worth the hardcover price, a pleasure of learning that balanced the clunky writing but only at paperback cost, or a poetry of language that made up for the poverty of plot at both prices. A museum’s entry fee might be cut in half to make up for the exclusion of women artists of all races; a music tape might have a balance sheet for each “cut”; and a television show could help to amortize the price of a TV set—or not. It’s easy to get carried away.
But the more I pursued serious and not-so-serious ways of exploring economics as values, and the more I read about federal and other budgetary dilemmas, the more I began to notice the great lacunae in the accounting systems that government, business, and we ourselves used. Thanks to my values insight, plus the good luck of being asked to write an introduction for a book by New Zealand’s Marilyn Waring, one of a new international wave of feminist thinkers about economics, I began to see that big chunks of life were simply missing or underplayed.
First, labor costs didn’t always reflect the country’s values—as imperfect as they might be. Child care attendants were paid less than parking lot attendants, and nurses’ aides often got less than the men who picked up garbage at their hospitals—not because we were consciously valuing our children less than our cars, or patients less than garbage. The truth was (and still is) that in the United States as in almost every country, categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race, and class of most of their workers. This becomes clear when similar work by different groups of workers is compared within countries. Women in the United States might be poorly paid “office-cleaning women” who do the same job that men do as better-paid “janitors” or even “maintenance engineers,” and men who wouldn’t dream of being typists might now be “keyboard literate” information processors of the computer age, who are paid more than secretaries doing the same task. It is also evident when the same categories of work are compared among countries. Road building might be well paid here and in Canada, where it’s done by men, but poorly paid in other countries, from vast Russia to tiny Nepal, where women do it. In Japan, electronics assembly is done primarily by men and is decently paid, while in Hungary and Mexico, it’s the province of women who get poor pay and working conditions. In Turkey, tobacco processing is low-status “women’s work,” but in the United States, it’s romanticized by cigarette ads and tradition as “men’s work”—and is better paid.14 A cheap labor force cheapens whatever it does—until it rebels.
This wage fixing by cultural caste system is at least as effective as any conspiratorial price fixing for which businesses are legally prosecuted, and sometimes as conscious—as when 9to5, the clerical workers’ union, discovered that insurance companies in Boston were fixing the range of clerical salaries in the guise of information sharing. The free market has little to do with it. There is no shortage of nurses in this country, for instance, only a shortage of wages and respect that drives nurses into other professions. Instead of raised salaries, this dilemma has often been met with attempts to change training requirements and import nurse from other countries. When nurses’ unions fight lowered salaries on everyone’s behalf, they are said to be opposing immigrant women. Imagine the response if car makers lowered salaries and standards for the much less skilled but mostly white male workers on assembly lines, and tried to import workers from other countries.
Though the first few women in a male field may benefit from its higher pay and status, it’s as temporary as the values in a white neighborhood where the first “minority” families buy houses at prices at least as high as white families, but may lose investment value as white families leave. Indeed, even for female tokens in prestigious male fields, the salaries aren’t yet equal. According to the January 1994 salary survey of Working Woman magazine, male engineers get $11,000 a year more than female engineers, and women corporate vice presidents get only about 57 percent of the salary level of their male counterparts. Once any field includes “too many” women (usually when females become about a third of the whole), it is devalued, just as is the neighborhood into which “too many” families of the “wrong” race have moved, and for the same reasons—exclusivity and bias. Thus, bookkeeping in this country was fairly well paid while it was a male occupation but became devalued once women gained entry in large numbers. Men invented “certified public accountant,” and moved on due to a certification process that first excluded women of all races (the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants had a “no women” policy into the 1950s), and then required experience at public accounting firms that rarely hired other than white males. That remained true until recent social justice movements forced the issue. In managerial and professional jobs in general, an Urban League study from the late 1980s predicted that the percentage of blacks and whites is unlikely to narrow significantly before the year 2039, and even if that happened, salary parity for black and white men wouldn’t arrive before 2058; such is the depth of workplace racial segregation.15
Whether in the United States or in the international economy, it’s a rule with few exceptions: Work is valued by the social value of the worker. A category of work is paid least when women do it, somewhat more when almost any variety of men do it, and much more when men of the “right” race or class do it.
In a way, the ultimate proof of this rule is its reversibility. When men enter a mostly female, “pink-collar” field, rare though that might be, they tend to raise the status of the occupation and to be treated better than their counterpart females (including by those very counterparts), even though they may be looked at as odd for being there. Thus, males were nurses until the Civil War created a shortage and the influx of women lowered the status of the profession, but military medics and a few other men who re-entered after Vietnam were often called “physicians’ assistants” and paid better than their female counterparts. Males integrated into the overwhelmingly female job of telephone operator fared far better with their coworkers than did females who entered the overwhelmingly male field of telephone installation and repair. The first male flight attendants were more likely to be given special perks and status, and addressed by their last names, than were females who had been “stewardesses” all along. Areas go up or down as the favored group enters or leaves.
Sometimes an increase of salary precedes an influx of the favored group. Males went from 10 percent to 50 percent of coaches of women’s teams within a decade after Title IX of the Civil Rights Act required schools to increase their spending on female athletic programs, for example, thus increasing coaches’ salaries.16 Sometimes, integration of the favored group pushes the less favored one out. The percentage of black teachers and especially black principals plummeted after public school integration in the South, not only because of job competition but because blacks would have been in positions of authority over whites. When sex-segregated private schools or colleges merged, the same thing happened to many female staff and faculty, especially in positions that would have given women authority over men.
Even male and female prostitutes seem to abide by the rule of valuing work by the value of the worker. Based on ads for “escort services” in the yellow pages of various cities, plus interviews with street prostitutes in San Francisco, male prostitutes are paid more than female prostitutes for their sexual services, regardless of whether their customers are male or female.
It was this problem of the way work is valued—if not all its applications—that inspired U.S. and Canadian feminists to supplement the first “equal pay for equal work” concept with the standard of “comparable worth,” also known as “equal pay for work of equal value” or “pay equity.” It had been around since World War II when the National War Labor Board used it to compare dissimilar jobs within a plant to see if pay inequities existed (but then it was discarded along with child care centers and other inducements to work in the war effort). The idea was to compare the salary range in a mostly female profession (say, registered nurse) to that in a mostly male profession requiring similar training and skill (say, pharmacist), and set women’s long-term salary and benefit goals accordingly.
It will take many years of organized pressure to adjust all the mostly female jobs upward to the level of mostly white male areas—almost as many as to reach the ultimate goal of an integrated workplace. Though there have been some victories for “comparable worth,” especially among government employees from Minnesota to California, secretaries are still 99 percent female nationwide (in spite of all the men who came out of the military trained as clerk-typists and could have used such jobs). They are usually paid much less than the construction trades, which are still 98 percent male (in spite of all the women who have trained in nontraditional jobs in the last twenty years).17 Any attempt to revalue work according to the job itself, not the social identity of the worker, amounts to not only a redistribution of wealth, but a reconfiguration of professional egos. Even some mostly male unions have sided with management in resisting comparable-worth standards.18 Though some unions are supportive and see pink-collar organizing as the future of unions (for instance, the Service Employees’ International Union, SEIU, which backs the clerical organizing of 9to5), the protection of workplace territory is also signaled by responses like that of the International Typographers’ Union to a new Linotype machine. Because it was easily operated by anyone who could type, the union pressured employers to hire only those with other printing skills, kept closed off the apprenticeships that taught them, and so preserved a workplace as white male turf.19
We have to be clear about the values here. Education isn’t one of them. Degrees don’t compensate for sex or race; at least, not without a powerful social justice movement to accompany them. In fact, the female unemployed and underemployed are acquiring more degrees every year, and the female cheap labor force is getting better educated. For example, about 28 percent of all clerical workers had some college in 1976, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but by 1987, 40 percent did—at the same time that many clerical jobs were being de-skilled (for instance, by replacing shorthand with dictating machines, or spelling skills with computer spell-checks). Surveys show women in clerical jobs often feel depressed because they know they could do much more.20 Meanwhile, the average male manager continues to be less well educated than the average female clerical worker. Though craft skills should be valued along with academic ones, you can bet that truckdrivers would no longer be paid more than social workers—as is now the case—if truckdrivers were mostly women and social workers were mostly men with MSW degrees. Though women are encouraged to see degrees as a path to higher incomes—especially now that lowered birth rates have made many campuses recruit older students for economic reasons—they might learn more about the life ahead from the realities of faculty employment than from their textbooks. According to 1992–93 surveys, academic women at every level, from lecturer to full professor, were still making less than their male counterparts.21
Whether it’s the sticky floor of the pink-collar ghetto or the glass ceiling of the executive suite, degrees won’t help—not without an attack on the sexual caste system.
To change these surrealistic values embedded in labor costs—often the biggest item in government and business budgets, certainly the first to affect our lives, and, as Keynes knew, the fastest way to affect the economy—we need to innovate through everything from union contracts and lawsuits to comparable-worth standards and a civilian job corps to combat a Depression that, for many, is still going on. But we must also remember to change what we control.
Since I’d learned so much from my own checkbook stubs, I decided to look at the occasional sums I’d been paying for by-the-hour help with research, cleaning, or fund-raising events. Sure enough, I discovered that I’d sometimes paid less for the mostly female job of fact checking than for the comparable but mostly male one of computer tutoring; more for an all-male window-cleaning service than for a woman or man who did the “women’s work” of cleaning the same room; and more to a man who delivered rented chairs to a benefit than to a woman who served food. I also realized I’d been comparing my lecture fees to those of other feminists and feeling guilty if I was paid more, instead of looking at counterpart male speakers in social justice movements and objecting when I was paid less. Moreover, I hadn’t been taking into account the huge fees paid to Henry Kissinger for a view of foreign policy long past, or to Oliver North for talking about illegal Iran-contra arms deals, or to General Schwarzkopf for rehashing the Gulf war. I hope it’s not true everywhere, but it seems that lecturers on war get higher fees than those on peace, consumption experts are paid more than those on the environmental cost of overconsuming, and women do better when they say what men want to hear (as on the campus of Ohio’s Miami University in 1991, when Christie Hefner of Playboy got almost twice as big a fee for defending pornography as author Andrea Dworkin did for opposing it).22 Lecture fees could give us a multilevel insight into our values.
Once we stop accepting the idea that any economic system is objective and value-free, however, at least we have an Ariadne’s thread of values to follow through the economic maze. My own lack of a comparable-worth standard had been penalizing more than myself. Because I was helping to establish speaking fees for other feminists and was giving away some of what I earned, I had become part of the problem. It was an intimate lesson in how we internalize economic values, even when we know better. From that moment forward, I tried to use a kind of do-it-yourself comparability standard, whether I was the worker, the employer, or asking for a fee on someone else’s behalf.
I’m not suggesting that such personal acts are a substitute for organized pressure, or for systemic remedies like legislation and a 1930s-size wave of unionizing to give pink-collar ghettos a powerful voice—with unions like 9to5 as a model.23 Even individual efforts may need organizing; for instance, the Household Employment Pledge asking each employer not to give less than spelled-out basics of pay and working conditions—and each employee not to accept less.24 But neither do such larger efforts substitute for individual acts. Each of us is an indispensable piece of an economic quilt that only lasts and warms everyone if it’s assembled from the bottom, not woven from above, no matter what the economists say. Moreover, we do what we see, not what we’re told. As Gandhi said: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” As the civil rights movement put it: “Walk like you talk.”
* I hope the myth that “women control the U.S. economy” has disappeared. Perhaps it came from women’s longer life expectancy and the myth of rich widows, though the few who exist rarely control the wealth that is passed through them. The facts are these: female-headed households and women over sixty are the single poorest demographic groups in the nation, women and children are 78 percent of the poor and 92 percent of those on welfare, and one in five mothers in the paid labor force is the sole support of her family. Worldwide, women and children are not only a disproportionate number of the poor but also more than 90 percent of all refugee populations. In the U.S., adult women are 62 percent of illiterates, and worldwide, at least two thirds.