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Falling through the "Safety Net": Women, Economic Crisis, and ReaganomicsAuthor(s): Marilyn PowerSource: Feminist Studies , Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 31-58Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177893Accessed: 21-05-2016 20:32 UTC

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FALLING THROUGH THE SAFETY NET :

WOMEN, ECONOMIC CRISIS, AND

REAGANOMICS

MARILYN POWER

The Reagan administration has acquired a widespread reputa-

tion for being insensitive to women's issues. This reputation is

widely discussed in the press and has even been acknowledged by

the administration itself (although, of course, it hastens to add

that the reputation is unjustified). Women as a group are far less

supportive of Reagan's policies than men, and there is discussion

of a possibly significant gender gap in voting behavior between

women and men.1 Feminists are particularly concerned with

Reagan's explicit support for the antifeminist policies and

rhetoric of the New Right. For many feminists, insensitivity to

women is too mild a phrase for this administration; Reaganomics

constitutes a direct threat to the survival of poor women and to

the rights of all women.

This investigation of the Reagan administration's position on

women discusses two major questions. What have been the ef-

fects of Reaganomics on women, and what are the administra-

tion's intentions in pursuing these policies. In addition, the study

explores possible long-term outcomes, both on the economic

position of women and on the potential for political unity among

women.

In investigating these questions, I will make a number of

analytic arguments. First, women cannot be analyzed as a sexual

class. To understand the impact of the Reagan policies on

women, and the implications for political activity by women, we

must remain aware of class and race differences among women.

Second, we must distinguish the Reagan administration from the

New Right. Reagan has often expressed his sympathy for New

Right policies, and we have little reason to doubt his sincerity on

this point. However, there are clear differences in priorities be-

Feminist Studies 10, no. I (Spring 1984). @ by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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32MrynPowr

tween the administration and the New Right, differences which

have shown themselves in recurrent criticism of Reagan from the

Right as his term has progressed. Third, Reagan's major and over-

riding priority is the restructuring of the economy in the face of

persistent economic crisis. This restructuring is disproportionate-

ly hurting women, but this is primarily because of the particular

positions women fill in the U.S. economy, rather than the result

of a conscious, coherent position on women by the Reagan ad-

ministration.

CLASS AND RACIAL DIVISIONS AMONG WOMEN

There is a long-standing and complex debate among feminists

over how to apply a class analysis to women.2 Key to the analysis

presented here, however, is the fact that women do in fact occupy

different economic positions, and therefore are affected differently

by the policies of the Reagan administration. Some feminists have

argued for an increasing unity of interest among women by race

and by class, and there has in fact been some convergence in black

and white women's economic experiences. Labor force participa-

tion rates are now virtually identical for the two groups, and

black women have moved increasingly out of domestic and other

service work to join white women in clerical occupations. We

should not, however, underestimate the continued differences in

black and white women's economic positions. Black women are

still considerably more likely to be in service occupations than

white women; when they enter clerical occupations, they are

more likely to be at the bottom of the job ladder (such as the typ-

ing pool), and in the public rather than the private sector.3

Unemployment rates for black women are twice those for white

women, and black women are considerably more likely than

white women to live in poverty, especially if they are raising

children alone. In 1981, fully 47.1 percent of black families with

children had women as single parents, compared with only 13.9

percent of white families-despite the recent increases in white

women raising children alone. A black woman raising children

alone is twice as likely to be poor as a white woman in the same

circumstances.4 Lastly, black women are less likely to marry or

remarry than white women, and when they do, as Phyllis Palmer

points out, they tend to marry black men, who earn considerably

less, on average, than white men.5




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In addition to racial differences among women, class dif-

ferences remain as well. Simply put, some women have con-

siderably more income, power, and autonomy than other

women. In order to understand the impact of the Reagan ad-

ministration's economic policies on women, we have to

distinguish at least three separate groups: women in traditionally

female occupations (this is the majority of women workers), an

increasingly marginalized group of women in poverty, and a

small but rapidly growing group of women in traditionally male

professions and management positions. Some income figures may

indicate the range of differences among women in these different

groups. Women lawyers, for example, earned an average of $407

a week in 1981, while secretaries earned $229, and private

domestic workers (a frequent occupation of poor women) earned

$104.6

Reaganomics has differential effects on women by both race

and class. Cuts in social services most directly affect poor women,

who are disproportionately nonwhite. Government employment

cutbacks affect mainly women in the social service sector and

civil service, frequent areas of employment for black women. The

curtailment of affirmative action affects women who are trying to

enter nontraditional occupations, largely but not exclusively in

the professions. And finally, women who have succeeded in

entering traditionally male professional and management posi-

tions may not be hurt, but in fact may actually benefit, from the

economic policies of the Reagan administration. Their incomes

are high enough so that, unlike other women workers, they may

gain more from the tax cuts than they lose in social services.

It is important to distinguish, in this and in the ensuing discus-

sion, between the economic programs of the Reagan administra-

tion and its conscious social policies. Social policies also affect

women differentially, but not to the same extent. If abortions

were made illegal, all women would be affected, even though af-

fluent women would have considerably greater access to safe il-

legal abortions. Of course, social policies also have economic ef-

fects and may actually exacerbate class and racial differences

among women (as with the abortion example). Nonetheless, op-

position to antifeminist social policies may be a potential point of

unity among different groups of women.




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34 MrynPowr

REAGAN AND THE NEW RIGHT

The New Right is not a monolithic organization, but a loose

grouping of political, single-issue, and religious organizations

with somewhat divergent interests. In recent years, and par-

ticularly at the time of the 1980 presidential campaign, these

groups were able to forge a fairly high level of unity, which fo-

cused in particular on reproductive, sexual, and family issues.

This unity is antifeminist at its heart.7

Reagan was closely associated with the New Right long before

his successful presidential campaign. There is little question that

he is in ideological agreement with them on many issues, in-

cluding the defense of the patriarchal nuclear family, the promul-

gation of antiabortion legislation, and other antifeminist policies.

Reagan's identification with the New Right during the 1980 cam-

paign and his incorporation of New Right policies into the

Republican party platform then, was both sincere and politically

expedient. It also, as Zillah Eisenstein suggests, may have been

calculated to mobilize a portion of the electorate that could be

counted on to vote in large numbers because of the intensity of

their beliefs.8

It would be a mistake, however, to equate the Reagan admin-

istration with the New Right. Despite his ideological sympathies

with the New Right social programs, Reagan's major agenda since

he took office has been the restructuring of the economy to

restore profitability to big capital, and the reestablishment of U.S.

political and economic dominance in the world. While the New

Right is fervently procapitalist and anticommunist, its vision of a

restructured America differs in important ways from the cor-

poratist vision Reagan has espoused. As Allen Hunter rightly

argues, members of the New Right are social revolutionaries with

a petit bourgeois populist agenda.9 They appeal to the middle

strata of society with their emphasis on the free market and in-

dividualism (white male individualism), and their opposition to

the state. Social issues such as family life and women's position in

society are not a cover for economic issues, but central to the

New Right vision. For Reagan and the corporate interests he

represents, such an agenda is simply too disruptive to be

desirable. In addition, the New Right vision ignores the increas-

ingly necessary role of the state in maintaining profitability; the

real conflicts of interest between big and small capital; and, as

Eisenstein points out, the contradictions between the needs of

capitalism and those of the patriarchal family.10




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Reagan thus may be at odds with the New Right on two fronts.

First, even when he approves of New Right social legislation, he

may give it little active support (as has been the case with anti-

abortion legislation) because he doesn't want to sabotage support

for the economic programs that are his priority. Second, Reagan's

economic policies tend to favor large corporations over the small

businesses that are the heart of the New Right vision. Of course

Reagan will support New Right social legislation when it will cost

him relatively little to do so. However, he has little choice but to

put economic restructuring first. Not only his corporate support,

but also his support from the public in general is predicated on his

ability to produce an economic recovery.

The Reagan administration's attack on women must then be

understood not only as a reflection of New Right antifeminism,

but also more immediately as part of the administration's strategy

to confront economic crisis.

ECONOMIC CRISIS AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING

The past fifteen years have been characterized by stagflation in

the U.S. economy: persistent inflation, and a pattern of growth

that has been sluggish at best, interspersed with the worst reces-

sions of the postwar period. Among the many economic in-

dicators, unemployment has remained high, trade balances have

remained negative, and real wages have fallen to about their 1962

level. The persistence of these problems has caused political

economists to label the period an economic crisis, meaning that

fundamental structural changes are needed before the economy

can begin a period of prolonged growth.12 How this restructuring

takes place is a political question; there is not one correct solu-

tion to American economic ills. It is crucial to understand that

each possible restructuring will result in gains for some groups

and losses for others. The outcome will be the result of struggle

among potential winners and losers.

The Reagan administration's program to combat economic

crisis includes massive cuts in social services, tax cuts that favor

the rich and corporations, actions to weaken labor unions, and

policies that have fostered and exacerbated a severe recession.

The outcome of such a policy is a redistribution of income from

poor and working people to wealthy individuals and corpora-

tions which, combined with the weakening of union power and




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the destruction of weaker capitals, may set the stage for profitable

investment and economic recovery.13

This economic program has been exacting a great price from

poor and working people of both sexes. But while all suffered,

women have-experienced the full force of the Reagan policy-

especially poor and nonwhite women. Writings on the effects of

Reagan's policies on women have tended to regard those actions

either as irrational and misguided14 or as part of a concerted New

Right program to push women out of the labor force and into a

traditional, subordinate role in the patriarchal nuclear family.1'

There is some validity to both these positions. The budget cuts are

likely to produce some contradictory effects apparently not an-

ticipated by the administration, and Reagan is clearly wedded

ideologically to the importance of the patriarchal nuclear family

as a basis for economic and social stability. But it is a mistake to

regard the plan as irrational; the administration's policies toward

women are in fact consistent with its plan for restructuring the

economy. And, at the same time, it is a mistake to see these

policies as part of an overall plan to affect women. The ad-

ministration has not developed a coherent position on women's

issues, and it doesn't have a hidden agenda for women. In fact,

it has been seriously weakened politically by precisely its lack of a

coherent position on women-its failure to take women seriously

as political actors, and to understand the need for evaluating the

impact of policies on them.16

To understand fully the effects of Reaganomics on women, it is

necessary to evaluate the combined effects of various budget cuts,

policy pronouncements, and action (or inactions) by a number of

governmental departments and agencies. In what follows, I will

discuss the effects of some of the major Reagan budget cuts and

policy changes on women to date, and their probable effects in

the year to come, within the context of Reagan's overall policy

for restructuring the economy.

EFFECTS OF THE BUDGET CUTS ON WOMEN

As Newsweek pointed out in a surprisingly strong attack on

Reagan's economic policies, 60 percent of the cuts in federal en-

titlement programs in fiscal 1982 came from programs for the

poor. 7 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was cut

by approximately $1 billion, Medicaid (medical aid for the poor)




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MrynPowr37

was cut by an estimated $800 million, and food stamps by $700

million (around 875,000 people were entirely eliminated from

the food stamp program).'8 These programs were dealt another

blow in the fiscal 1983 budget. While Reagan didn't get all the

cuts he asked for, the budget that was passed in June 1982

represented a substantial victory for his policy, including

decreases of $3.6 billion in Medicare, $700 million in Medicaid,

$900 million in food stamps, and $500 million in AFDC. These

cuts are part of a long-term plan to save $30 billion in domestic

spending programs over three years, including a decrease of more

than $17 billion in federal health and welfare programs.'9

Women, especially nonwhite women, bear the brunt of these

cuts in social services because they are disproportionately

represented among the poor. In the 1970s the proportion of peo-

ple who were counted as poor in this country declined very

slightly (it is now rising again), but the proportion of the poor

who are women increased sharply, what Diana Pearce labels the

feminization of poverty.' 20 An ever-increasing number of

women are raising children alone, and one out of three of these

are poor by government standards; many of the rest are near

poverty. In 1978, one-fifth of the families in the United States

were being raised by a single parent alone, compared with one in

nine in 1970. Most of these single parents are women. The

families of women raising children alone are 5.5 times more likely

to be poor than families with a man present, and a family raised

by a black woman alone is 10.5 times as likely to be poor as the

family of a white man.21

Cuts in AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, childcare, and job train-

ing programs are not cuts that affect different groups in society.

They all affect poor women simultaneously, creating terrible

hardship.

Welfare cuts have particularly affected women who work, but

who are paid so little that they receive supplementary welfare.

This focus has the paradoxical result that some women may lit-

erally be forced to quit their jobs and become fully dependent on

welfare. In the 1982 budget, AFDC requirements were changed,

eliminating an estimated 400,000 families with working AFDC

parents and cutting benefits for an additional 260,000 (AFDC

families without working parents did not have AFDC or food

stamp benefits cut, although they experienced other cuts). These

cuts were accomplished largely through changes in the regula-

tions which sharply decreased the amount of earned income




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38 MrynPowr

disregarded in determining welfare payments.

This program of disregarding a proportion of earned income

was instituted in 1967 as an incentive to AFDC parents to seek

work; the incentive has now been virtually eliminated. According

to estimates by the Center for the Study of Social Policy, in eleven

states the 1982 cuts resulted in a situation in which an AFDC

family of three with a working parent (earning the average for

working AFDC parents) actually has less disposable income than a

comparable family without a working parent; in eleven more

states the return to working is $10 or less per month. In contrast,

in 1981, before the cuts, the lowest return to working for such a

family was $79 per month.22 The 1983 cuts exacerbated this

penalty to working AFDC households.

In order to evaluate the impact of these cuts fully, it is impor-

tant to confront the popular misconception that there are two

groups of poor, the working poor and a welfare class of per-

manently nonworking poor. A number of studies have examined

the work and welfare experience of women on AFDC, and they

clearly illustrate the falsity of this assumption. At a given point in

time, approximately 16 percent of the women receiving AFDC

are working.23 Over the course of a year, however, about one-half

are employed;24 over a five-year period, 92 percent of the AFDC

households in Bennett Harrison's study had a working member at

least part of the time.25 Martin Rein and Lee Rainwater used

longitudinal data to attempt to measure the existence of a

welfare class (which they defined as being on welfare for nine

to ten years out of a ten-year period, with welfare accounting for

more than one-half of family income over that period). They

estimated that only 9 percent of the families receiving some

welfare during the ten years would fit this description; the rest

spent less time (usually considerably less) on welfare and received

an average of only one-third of family income from welfare dur-

ing the years they were on welfare.26 In short, the majority of

women on welfare work for pay. The problem is that they can

only find jobs that are temporary and/or extremely poorly paid.

Many cycle between periods of total self-support, periods

where they require supplementary welfare, and periods of full

dependence on welfare-depending on such factors as the state

of the economy, the seasonable nature of jobs, and their own and

their children's health. This is an important factor, since loss of

AFDC frequently also means loss of the Medicaid card-and one

family illness can mean economic disaster for a marginally




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MrynPowr39

employed single mother.

Thus, cutbacks in welfare for working women don't affect a

small subgroup of women on welfare. Rather they affect the ma-

jority of women on welfare, and at precisely the time when they

have the most opportunity to raise their families above the pover-

ty line through combining work and welfare.27

Even before the 1983 proposal, many critics were arguing that

the nature of the cuts provided AFDC parents with a strong dis-

incentive to work. The administration's response has been that

positive incentives haven't worked; what is needed is negative in-

centives (coercion). They therefore propose to eliminate AFDC

benefits for any parent who has voluntarily reduced earnings or

quit a job. 28 The difficulties of administering such a rule are, of

course, enormous. As one welfare office supervisor commented,

You'd have to be a King Solomon to tell whether someone was

quitting a job just to go on welfare or really had problems. 29

In addition, the administration has proposed a mandatory

workfare program, in which AFDC recipients who didn't hold

paying jobs would be required to work part time without pay for

government or nonprofit agencies. The stated justification of

such a program is that it would provide valuable work ex-

perience.30 The most basic purpose of workfare, however, is to

coerce women to enter the labor force. According to an ad-

ministration spokesperson, the prospect of having to work

without pay would provide incentive to seek paid work.31

These negative incentives would be of questionable effec-

tiveness, but beyond that, they reflect a prevalent and disturbing

hostility towards and suspicion of poor women. This emphasis

on incentives is, in any case, misplaced.32 There is plenty of

evidence that most women on welfare have positive attitudes

toward work,33 a desire to get out of poverty, and, indeed, an at-

tachment to middle-class work values.34 The damage is more

material than psychological. By combining what paid work she

could find with welfare and other sources, a woman had the

possibility of raising her family above the most abject level of

poverty, if not to anything resembling comfort or security. Fur-

ther, she could sometimes parlay the job experience into a path

out of poverty, despite the limited job possibilities and lack of

childcare. The budget cuts destroy both these opportunities for

many women. They sharply reduce the standard of living for

working AFDC women and their families, and they may also

make it impossible for many women to continue working at all.




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4 MrynPowr

Working costs money; welfare rules do exclude some expenses in

determining disposable income-carfare, childcare expenses

(although the childcare write-off has been decreased)-but there

are many costs of working that are not included (substitutes for

women's work in the home such as laundry services and prepared

foods, possibly clothing expenses necessary to retaining a job,

and so forth). Women who have had their supplemental welfare

cut may find these expenses outweigh the return to working.

Women who have lost all their AFDC and their Medicaid may find

themselves quickly on the brink of economic disaster. As a result,

many women who currently work may be forced into full

dependence on welfare-they may literally not be able to afford to

work.

Such an effect is likely to happen only gradually, as women

hold on desperately to their attempts at self-support. The Wall

Street Journal smugly concluded, only twenty-one days after the

budget cuts went into effect, that the prediction that women

would quit their jobs had proven false. The article, nevertheless,

is full of examples of women who must resort to moonlighting at

a second job to make ends meet (an ironic outcome of a policy

change imposed by an administration which purports to value the

role of the mother in the home), and of examples of women who

don't know how they will afford their own or their children's

medical expenses. The Wall Street Journal concedes, What is im-

possible to predict. . .is the percentage of terminated welfare

mothers who still will be supporting themselves and their

children a year from now. '3 The Congressional Budget Office

estimated that one-third of the women who lost all their welfare

benefits in 1982 will eventually end up leaving their jobs and

resorting to full dependence on welfare. A year after the cuts,

federal and state welfare officials reported that 10 to 15 percent

of those who had lost their welfare because they were working

were back on the rolls.36

Many critics have argued that, by limiting the option of com-

bining work and welfare, the Reagan administration is acting irra-

tionally. The Center for the Study of Social Policy, for example,

argues that the current welfare policy actually increases the

dependence of the poor on government programs, thus fostering

continued poverty and an increase, rather than a decrease, in

government costs.37 Looked at in this light, current policy would

certainly seem irrational for a government dedicated to cutting

federal spending and getting the poor off welfare. But the focus




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MrynPowr41

on working AFDC recipients is quite intentional (as is evident by

its repetition in the 1983 budget proposal), and is fully consistent

with Reagan's general political and ideological position as well as

his strategy for dealing with economic crisis.

First, it is a politically viable strategy. Reagan is deeply commit-

ted, politically and ideologically, to budget cuts; much of his sup-

port in the business community is contingent upon his continued

determination to cut. But budget cutting is extremely difficult

when the affected interest groups have effective lobbies (as

Reagan found out in confronting the farm and social security lob-

bies). Poor people are politically weak, especially those on AFDC.

Their weakness is compounded by the political disadvantage that

most are women and children.38 Thus services to the poor are a

politically viable place to cut, but only families who combined

AFDC with working had enough slack (not fat) in their budgets to

allow for significant savings. Hence they constitute a primary

target, particularly as Reagan can claim he did not cut benefits to

the truly needy. 39

Second, it is an ideologically consistent position. The Reagan ad-

ministration is committed to the ideological position that poverty

represents an individual and personal failure on the part of the

poor, and that government programs far from ameliorating

poverty, have actually increased and perpetuated it by their ef-

fects on the attitudes and behavior of the poor. This view is deep-

ly interconnected with the administration's views on the family,

and on women's roles within families. It is perhaps most clearly

articulated by George Gilder, whose apologia for supply-side

economics, Wealth and Poverty, has been lavishly praised by

Reagan and by David Stockman, director of the Office of Manage-

ment and Budget.40 The key to success in a capitalist economy,

according to Gilder, is work, family, and faith. The poor are poor

because they are lacking in all three. By family Gilder means

the patriarchal nuclear family, with male head and nonearning,

economically dependent female homemaker. Work for pay for

women is undesirable because it disrupts this ideal balance and

may lead to a break up of the family; but Gilder saves his most

concerted attack for the damage purportedly caused by AFDC. By

making optional the male provider role, he argues, AFDC

demoralizes low-income men; they become unmanned, cuck-

olded by the compassionate state, 4'1 and are likely to leave their

families. Once the man has left, the family is doomed to poverty

because women are inevitably low-income earners. Thus any op-




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tion that allows women to live independently of men is

undesirable, and in fact causes poverty, urban decay, and crime.

The only solution is a gradual decrease in the real value of welfare

benefits. It follows from Gilder's argument that welfare cannot

play the role envisioned for it by liberals, of easing and aiding the

transition out of poverty. Rather, it should be minimal, difficult to

attain, for emergencies only. The Reagan administration clearly

adheres to this view of welfare. Hence the safety net metaphor:

AFDC should be a temporary safety net for individuals who

have no other means of support, according to Linda McMahon,

family assistance chief in the Department of Health and Human

Services.42

In fact, according to the free market ideology, poverty is not

necessarily a problem for society at all: individuals compete

freely with each other in the marketplace, and the most capable

succeed while the least capable do not. Poverty is then the out-

come of the successful working of the system. Society may

choose to prevent the poor from outright starvation, but any at-

tempt to lift them out of poverty breaks the rules of the com-

petitive game: there must be both winners and losers.

Third, budget cuts aimed at poor women are a crucial element of

Reagan's plan for restructuring the economy. Beyond the political

and ideological reasons for cutting welfare for working women,

there are economic reasons as well, which are crucially tied to the

Reagan strategy for dealing with the economic crisis. Women on

welfare constitute an important element of the reserve army of

labor and serve the classic roles of the reserve-responding to

cyclical and secular changes in the society's need for labor, and

acting to depress wages for the regularly employed. When in-

comes of this poorest group of workers are decreased, it becomes

more possible to decrease earnings for other groups of workers.

Welfare, or part-time work plus welfare, becomes a less viable

alternative to work at the minimum wage, and women forced off

welfare will be competing with others (mostly other women) for

low-wage, low-skilled work. Historically, skilled and unionized

workers have struggled with some success to insulate their wages

from those of lower-skilled workers.43 But the employers' historic

response of mechanizing, deskilling, and otherwise eliminating

union jobs (which is clearly relevant at present) means that even-

tually the entire wage structure can be affected by depressing

wages at the bottom. The elimination of the Comprehensive

Education and Training Act (CETA) and the limitation of




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unemployment benefits, which affect men as well as women, also

increase the pool of labor at the bottom.

Clearly men as well as women are found in the reserve army of

labor, and nonwhite people of both sexes are disproportionately

represented in this category. Poor women, both white and non-

white, may be a particularly important surplus labor pool,

however, because two of the fastest growing occupational

categories in the past decade, clerical and nondomestic service

work, are heavily female-in fact, women accounted for 65 per-

cent of the increase in total employment from 1972 to 1980.44

Thus cutting welfare for working women can be seen as a con-

sistent part of an overall strategy of weakening labor and re-

distributing income toward capital. We need not assume that

welfare cuts are part of some conscious, coherent plan by the

Reagan administration to get labor in order to make this argu-

ment. Its main justification for cutting welfare benefits is that

welfare payments have become so high that they provide an alter-

native to full-time work, an unacceptable outcome. The govern-

ment shouldn't continue a policy that has created an incentive for

people to go on welfare .... . 45 Orthodox economists have con-

sistly argued that welfare has the effect of lowering the supply of

labor. 46 Decreasing welfare is likely to increase the supply of

labor, and thereby depress wages, as the administration is un-

doubtedly aware.

Whether conscious or not, however, welfare cuts, government

hostility to unions, and the tax policy with its benefits for high-

income groups are all policies cut from the same ideological cloth,

and all have the effect of redistribution of income from working

people to high-income groups and capital.

REAGAN'S ATTACKS ON THE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

COMMISSION AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

To comprehend the effects of Reagan's policies on women,

these considerations of the effects of the budget cuts must be

combined with an examination of the administration's attacks on

programs to fight discrimination. Women are being thrown off

welfare and out of public sector jobs into an economy in a deep

and persistent slump, with the highest unemployment rates since

the Great Depression. The traditional occupational fields for

women, clerical and service work (between them accounting for




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44 MrynPowr

over one-half of all working women), offer predominantly low-

paid, dead-end jobs. In any event, the combination of recession

and automation (such as word processors) may be slowing the

growth in demand for clerical workers. But women's ability to

move into nontraditional fields may be severely hampered. The

Reagan administration has moved to cripple the Equal Employ-

ment Opportunity Commision (EEOC) and paralyze affirmative

action, and in the process has given the private sector the not-so-

subtle message that they needn't worry too much about hiring

women and minorities, and that they can even ignore laws that

are on the books.

The EEOC is responsible for enforcing the laws against dis-

crimination in employment. It has pressed some important cases

that resulted in substantial gains (for example, a massive victory

for women employees of American Telegraph and Telephone in

the early 1970s). However, it has been chronically underfunded

and understaffed; even before the Reagan cutbacks it could be

years after the filing of a charge of discrimination before any ac-

tion was taken. The Reagan administration responded to this

situation by cutting the EEOC's budget by $17 million, a 12 per-

cent CUt.47 The 1983 budget cut an additional forty-eight perma-

nent positions, on top of ninety either cut or unfilled in fiscal year

1981.48 In 1982, according to the Wall Street Journal, the com-

mission was actually unable to conduct regular business for 107

days because the administration delayed appointment of a com-

missioner needed to make a quorum.49

The federal government's affirmative action policy is ad-

ministered by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program

(OFCCP) of the Department of Labor, according to guidelines set

by the department. Companies must conform to these affirmative

action guidelines in order to qualify for federal contracts. Because

federal contracts are so lucrative, and because the OFCCP has

historically reviewed companies' past hiring practices before

awarding federal contracts, the affirmative action guidelines are a

potentially powerful tool for reversing past discrimination both

in firms with federal contracts and in firms hoping for future

federal contracts.50 Particularly in the construction industry, the

entry of women into the skilled trades has been aided by

guidelines that require federal contractors to try to hire women

for 6.9 percent of the jobs. (If this proportion sounds ridiculously

small, remember that, historically, women have been virtually ex-

cluded from the skilled trades. Although the number of women in




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MrynPowr45

construction doubled between 1976 and 1980, they were still

only 1.6 percent of the workforce in 1980.)

In August 1981, however, the Department of Labor announced

a proposed new set of rules for federal contractors that would

sharply diminish the effectiveness of the affirmative action

guidelines. First the new rules would require written affirmative

action plans only from firms with 250 or more employees or $1

million or more in contracts (and the plan required of employers

with 250 to 499 employees would be greatly simplified); without

this change, affirmative action plans are required of all firms with

50 or more employees or $50,000 or more in government con-

tracts. This change, according to Secretary of Labor Donovan,

would free nearly three-fourths of the companies doing business

with the federal government from the burden of affirmative ac-

tion paperwork.51 Those firms still required to file affirmative ac-

tion plans would have their plans reviewed only every five years,

instead of yearly as at present. Second, the proposal would

eliminate the review of a company's prior hiring practices before

awarding federal contracts. And third, new regulations would be

drafted to cut back the definition of appropriate numbers of

women and minorities who must be hired in construction.

Note that these changes are all described as proposed, not

final. The history of these proposals in the period since they were

introduced is perhaps as indicative of the Reagan administration's

attitude toward affirmative action as are the proposals

themselves. Such proposals represent guidelines for the enforcing

of existing laws; they require no legislative approval, but general-

ly are drafted in a final form after a sixty-day hearing period, and

go into effect one month later. Thus the proposals, if retained,

should have become official by the end of November 1981. In

fact, they were never officially mandated, nor were an additional

set of amendments (proposed on 23 April 1983) which would,

among other provisions, limit the amount of back pay a

discriminating company could be forced to give in restitution.52

On 19 July 1982, all affirmative action proposals were put on

hold by White House order. At the time of this writing (August

1983), the final version of the changes in the affirmative action

rules still has not been made. An OFCCP spokesperson refused to

comment on the likely content of the guidelines. The Washington

Post reported in July 1982, however, that the White House was

considering issuing a new proposal significantly different from

the first attempt. 53




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46 MrynPowr

We can only speculate about the causes of this delay. It may be

that opposition to the changes was stronger than the administra-

tion anticipated, or that the delay simply reflects their indif-

ference to affirmative action. What is evident is that the lengthy

limbo on affirmative action guidelines, coupled with the sharp

reductions in the OFCCP's budget, has given employers the clear

message that affirmative action is a low priority for the Reagan ad-

ministration, and can effectively be ignored. Wider Opportunities

for Women, an organization that trains women for nontradi-

tional jobs, interviewed twenty-five contractors, and found that a

common position on affirmative action was, There's no way

we're going to comply with the (affirmative action) regulations;

we know they're going to be weakened or eliminated. 54 In May

1982, the Wall Street Journal reiterated the theme that the ad-

ministration's stated hostility to affirmative action, coupled with

the uncertainty over the changes in regulations, has caused many

employers to become lax in their enforcement of equal employ-

ment and affirmative action laws.55

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which files suit

for the federal government in cases of discrimination, has perhaps

been leading the retreat from enforcement of antidiscrimination

laws. Minorities have particularly felt the impact of the depart-

ment's repudiation of busing as a means of integrating schools,

and its cutback in filing school, housing, and voting rights suits,56

but women are likely to be negatively affected by the Justice

Department's changes in policy on job discrimination cases.

William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Civil Rights Division, has

announced that the division will no longer file class action suits in

job bias cases, but will rather pursue them on a case-by-case basis.

Such a policy will clog the courts and create an unmanageable

backlog of work for the Civil Rights Division, effectively

eliminating litigation as a viable means of combating job

discrimination. Reynolds has also come out strongly in opposi-

tion to goals and timetables as a means of determining employers'

progress in eliminating discrimination; he wants to substitute

broad performance standards for concrete, specific goals,

which he considers offensive to the law and the Constitution.'57

He has also said that he would like to overturn the Supreme Court

ruling which allows employers to set voluntary quotas.

This policy is in step with the general philosophy of the Reagan

administration that the government should rely less on enforce-

ment and more on voluntary compliance by employers with an-




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MrynPowr47

tidiscrimination laws, a strategy with a historically unimpressive

track record. In fact, the Justice Department actions seem to have

created an atmosphere of confusion among some employers in

which, according to the Wall Street Journal, some fear they will

be subject to charges of reverse discrimination if they press for-

ward with their affirmative action programs.58

These policy changes in the EEOC, OFCCP, and the Justice

Department fit together with the budget cuts into a coherent

whole. As with the budget cuts, they are politically, ideologically,

and economically consistent with Reagan's strategy for restruc-

turing the economy.

First, the policies are politically consistent with Reagan's commit-

ment to minimize government regulation of business, to return to

the free market. Corporations have consistently opposed and

resented affirmative action rules, and Reagan's delivery on his

promise to loosen up on enforcement of the rules may be impor-

tant for their continued support.

Second, the policies are ideologically consistent with the ad-

ministration's beliefs about the functioning of job markets, and

about women's roles as workers. The goal for labor, they believe,

is for everyone to be free to compete ; this is best achieved

through unregulated labor markets. Any attempts to regulate

labor markets, through such policies as antidiscrimination regula-

tions, minimum wage laws, and even health and safety codes

disrupt the natural workings of these markets, creating inefficien-

cies and unemployment.s9 Discrimination, in any case, is no

longer prevalent in their view (nor do employers benefit from it).

Women in particular face little discrimination; they earn less

money because they are less serious workers than men. Affir-

mative action for women, therefore, is particularly undesirable,

because it replaces productive males with less productive females.

Third, the policies are economically consistent with the strategy

of redistributing resources from working people to capital. A

free, unregulated labor force has little power to improve its

conditions, particularly in the context of weakened and diminish-

ed labor unions. Removal of antidiscrimination and affirmative

action enforcement constitutes one more step in removing the

protection of poor women and minorities and allowing them to

be used as a reserve pool to divide and weaken labor. Paying

women and minorities less than white males for roughly com-

parable work, for example, has been a historically important way

of dividing workers and undermining labor organizations.




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48 MrynPowr

CAN REAGAN S RESTRUCTURING OF THE ECONOMY

WORK?

I have argued that Reagan's policies center around a strategy to

restructure the U.S. economy in response to continuing economic

crisis. But can this restructuring work? And what effect would the

resulting recovery have on women?

First, we must define what is meant by economic recovery.

To Reagan and his advisors, recovery means first and foremost an

improved, more profitable investment climate. This should ideal-

ly result in more investment in productive capability, increases in

productivity, higher growth rates for the gross national product,

and an improved international balance of trade-and, of course,

reduced interest and inflation rates, which they hope to achieve

by reducing the government deficit.

The conservative restructuring of the economy can quite con-

ceivably bring about some form of economic recovery, as it ap-

parently has in the second quarter of 1983, now that a con-

siderable period of recession has softened the economy (that is,

lowered wages, wiped out competitors, decreased the interest

rate). A more long-term recovery, however, is likely to be based

more on a corporate planned economy than on Reagan's vision of

laissez-faire, free market capitalism. Bill Resnick suggests that a

successful conservative restructuring would involve wage austeri-

ty, aggressive use of military and economic clout overseas,

superexploitation of domestic resources, service and benefit cuts,

price discipline, and investment channeling and control.60 Ob-

viously, none of these elements will occur automatically; they are

the focus of political struggle, and there is dissent even among the

Right over the final two, which would violate the principles of

free market capitalism. However, if the Right can put this pro-

gram in place over the next few years, it can possibly provide the

basis of an economic recovery.

Assuming, then, that such a recovery is possible, how would

women be affected by it? The Reagan administration has main-

tained that the most economically disadvantaged groups in socie-

ty have the most to gain by his recovery program. I will argue,

however, that women, especially poor and nonwhite women, are

likely to be helped least by a conservative restructuring of the

economy, and in fact in many cases would lose, both relatively

and absolutely, by such a recovery.

Note that the recovery does not necessarily mean low rates of

unemployment; in fact, orthodox economists and conservative




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MrynPowr49

politicians have revised their estimates of acceptable levels of

unemployment ever higher over the past decade, so that

unemployment rates of 5 to 7 percent (more than 6 to 7 million

people) are considered reasonable (in the 1960s an unemploy-

ment rate of 3 to 4 percent was the usual goal, and rates below 4

percent were achieved in 1966-69-but never since). One major

argument offered for acceptance of a higher unemployment rate

is that women are a higher proportion of the labor force now;

women are considered to have a naturally higher unemploy-

ment rate than men because of their weaker attachment to the

labor force.

Thus recovery may be consistent with continuing high rates of

unemployment. Further, as I have argued, one key basis for

Reagan's recovery plan is the cheapening of labor power-the

lowering of real wages and weakening of labor's ability to control

working conditions. This has already happened to a considerable

extent, with a consequent lowering of the standard of living of

the working class,61 and conditions are likely to worsen further

before the economy recovers. Recovery could bring increases in

real wages for some, but an enormous amount of ground has

already been lost (average wages in 1981 were almost $ 30 a week

less in real terms than they were in 1973), and rebuilding union

power in the face of a hostile government could be slow and pain-

ful.

Perhaps more important, many workers, including a large pro-

portion of women workers, would be left out of the recovery

almost completely. This is because a successful economic

recovery would involve a substantial increase in computer-based

automation, particularly industrial robots in factories and word

processors in offices; these changes are already beginning to take

place. Automation is likely to have two effects on women

workers. First, it tends to deskill work, making it boring and

repetitious to perform, and making the worker herself easier to

replace and hence more vulnerable. Second, automation results in

more output per worker, which can mean that the pool of jobs

will not expand as rapidly, or may even decline.62 In industry,

robots are likely to cause an absolute decline in employment, par-

ticularly among skilled, unionized blue collar workers. According

to Business Week, robots currently developed or in the process of

development are capable of performing the jobs of seven million

current factory workers, of whom 45 percent are union

workers.63 Women are not highly represented among skilled blue




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5 MrynPowr

collar workers, but in recent years affirmative action pressure on

apprenticeship programs and on employers has helped increase

their participation in these relatively high-paying jobs. Clearly,

this option is being closed off.

It is less clear whether automation will result in an absolute

decrease in the number of office workers. However, with in-

creases in office productivity estimated at 200 percent,64 the job

pool may not expand very rapidly. This factor is of particular

significance for women, because over one-third of all employed

women are in clerical occupations. Clerical work has expanded

greatly throughout the twentieth century, providing jobs, albeit at

low pay, for the growing number of women seeking paid employ-

ment.65

Although the pool of clerical jobs is not likely to be expanding

greatly, and the pool of skilled industrial jobs will probably

decline, the number of women needing jobs is likely to increase.

The number of women raising children alone continues to grow,

and the strategy of wage austerity would mean that families

with two adults would continue to need two incomes to

survive.66 Where, then, will the jobs come from for these women

(and the men displaced from industry)? Business Week concludes

that there will be no employment problem, because employment

in service-oriented industries is expected to grow by an estimated

7.5 million jobs over the 1980s, taking up the slack.67 It is difficult

to tell how plausible this figure is; however, the United States has

become an increasingly service-oriented economy since World

War II, and this tendency has continued in the past decade.68 Ser-

vice occupations have grown accordingly in the last ten years,

especially in restaurant and custodial work.69 Service workers are

disproportionately female: 62.4 percent of all service workers

were women in 1979, accounting for 18.3 percent of all white

women workers and 34.8 percent of all black women workers.70

Even if service work can expand rapidly enough to employ all the

displaced workers (which is questionable), it does not provide a

satisfactory alternative to the jobs lost to automation. Service oc-

cupations tend to have short hours (one-third of all service

workers, and 45 percent of waiters, work part-time71), few

changes for promotion, and very low pay, especially for women.

In short, while the Reagan administration's economic restruc-

turing might result in some sort of recovery, that recovery would

involve weakened labor unions, wage austerity for industrial

workers, and the banishment of a large number of workers, par-




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MrynPowr51

ticularly women and nonwhite people of both sexes, to a life of

poverty because of greatly reduced welfare payments, unemploy-

ment, and low-paying, dead-end service jobs. Corporations, cor-

porate managers, certain professionals (such as engineers and

lawyers), and a subset of the working class involved in high-

skilled high-tech industries might prosper, but a large pool of

women would find themselves pushed out the bottom of such a

recovery, at best cleaning the offices and cooking the ham-

burgers for those to whom prosperity had returned.

The Reagan administration's policies pose an urgent and com-

plex set of problems for the feminist movement. Reagan's en-

couragement of the New Right has facilitated the introduction of

a wide range of highly represssive social legislation which behind

self-congratulatory names such as the Human Life Amendment

and the Family Protection Act, poses a severe threat to the rights

and freedom of all women. The New Right represents a minority

of Americans, but their single-minded zeal, aggressive tactics, and

tolerance (if not support) from the White House mean they must

be taken seriously by feminists. And, in fact, the feminist move-

ment has taken an active stance in opposition to the New Right,

with some success.72

As I have argued, class differences among women mean that

they are affected in differing ways and to varying degrees by the

Reagan administration's economic policies. Poor women are the

most immediately and most severely affected by the budget cuts.

Women at the absolute bottom of the job ladder are losing some

of the pathetically few opportunities available to pull themselves

and their families out of poverty.

Reagan's plan for economic recovery would be likely to mean

an increase in the proletarianization of clerical workers, as word

processors allow the conditions of work more and more to re-

semble blue collar factory work, and low-paid, menial service

work may become the dumping ground for growing numbers of

surplus women workers. Such economic pressures may be a

catalyst for political unity among women workers. However, par-

ticularly in the absence of a visible and articulate progressive

political movement, economic uncertainty instead may move

some women toward the New Right. As Deirdre English points

out, the insistence of New Right women on the primacy of the

nuclear family, and on the necessity of women's dependence on

men, is a response (albeit a reactionary response) to a worsening

economic and social environment.73




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52MrynPowr

Finally, a small but significant number of highly educated

women in professional and managerial occupations may find that

the Reagan economic plan is, in fact, in their interest.74 This is not

to say that women who get a toehold in traditionally male profes-

sions or corporate hierarchies are as likely to succeed as men.

There is ample evidence of discrimination still in existence at

every step along the way. However, this small but articulate

minority of women is sufficiently affluent and sufficiently

established that Reagan's planned recovery would directly benefit

them, in terms of tax benefits, expanding job opportunities, and

even a growing pool of female service workers to care for their

children and perform household chores.

Thus we may see a growing rift between the increasingly pro-

letarianized majority of women workers, and an increasingly

established minority of highly educated, affluent women with

markedly different economic interests. Certain social issues could

unite these two groups of women-for example, reproductive

rights-but on issues like budget cuts for social programs they

might well come down on different sides. Eisenstein has argued

that women are increasingly recognizing their unity as a sexual

class. ''75 I am suggesting, on the contrary, the continuation of

real, material class differences among women on the basis of

diverging labor market positions. If true, this rift will create a real

challenge to the feminist movement in its attempts to achieve

social and economic justice for all women.

CONCLUSION

This article discusses some of the most important effects of

Reaganomics on women. It is only by looking at these policies in

their entirety, examining actions by the various agencies and

departments as well as budget cuts, that we can understand the

full, disastrous impact on women.

I have argued that this attack on women does not represent a

coherent, conscious strategy to suppress women and reassert the

predominance of the patriarchal nuclear family. Consequently, in

the present case, I disagree with Eisenstein, who argues that the

politics of society is as self-consciously directed to maintaining

the hierarchical male-dominated sexual system as to upholding

the economic class structure, and that the Reagan-Stockman

budget tries to stabilize patriarchy as much as it tries to fight infla-




24/29


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54 MrynPowr

NOTES

My thanks to Yassaman Jalili for her assistance with the research, and to the editors

of Feminist Studies for helpful criticisms and suggestions.

1. Compare Gloria Steinem, Joanne Edgar, and Mary Thom, Post-ERA Politics: Losing

a Battle But Winning the War? Ms, January 1983: 35-36, 65-66.

2. For a summary of some of the debate, see Jackie West, Women, Sex, and Class, in

Feminism and Materialism, ed. Annette Kuhn and Ann-Marie Wolpe (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); and Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (Lon-

don: Verso Press, 1980), chap. 4.

3. Phyllis Wallace, Black Women in the Labor Force (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), 25.

4. United States Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports series P-20, table 12;

Suzanne Bianchi, Household Composition and Racial Inequality (New Brunswick, N.J.:

Rutgers University Press, 1980), 32-33, 122-23.

5. Phyllis Marynick Palmer, White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female

Identity and Experience in the United States, Feminist Studies 9 (Spring 1983): 151-70.

6. Nancy F. Rytina, Earnings of Men and Women: A Look at Specific Occupations,

Monthly Labor Review 105 (April 1982): 25-31.

7. For an excellent discussion of this point, see Zillah Eisenstein, Antifeminism in the

Politics and Election of 1980 (pp. 187-205); and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Anti-

abortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right (pp. 206-46), both in Feminist

Studies 7 (Summer 1981).

8. Eisenstein, 195. I would not agree with Eisenstein, however, that Reagan's emphasis

on antiabortion and profamily politics was purely instrumental.

9. Allen Hunter, In the Wings: New Right Organization and Ideology, Radical

America 15 (Spring 1981): 113-40.

10. Eisenstein, Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980, 202.

11. In this sense, Reagan faces the same project that Carter did-Carter was defeated

largely on his economic record. And while Reagan's economic policies differ in degree

of extremity from Carter's, it is important to remember that cuts in social spending (as

well as the buildup in military spending and cold war rhetoric) began under Carter. In

general, the focus on Reagan in this paper is not meant to imply an uncritical attitude

toward the Carter administration, either on economic or social issues. As one of the

reviewers of this article commented, Patriarchal attitudes did not suddenly arrive at

the White House in 1981.

12. For discussion of the issue of economic crisis and economic restructuring, see, for

example, Arthur MacEwan, International Economic Crisis and the Limits of

Macropolicy, Socialist Review 11 (September-October 1981): 113-38; Douglas Dowd,

Accumulation and Crisis in U.S. Capitalism, Socialist Revolution 5 (June 1975): 7-44.

13. While there is not room in this article for a thorough discussion of whether such a

strategy can work, a question about which there is considerable debate, see Bill

Resnick, The Right's Prospects: Can It Reconstruct America? Socialist Review 11

(March-April 1982): 9-36; and Manuel Castells, The Economic Crisis andAmerican Socie-

ty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). This question will be considered brief-

ly at the end of this article. It does seem that a sufficiently deep recession/depression

would set the stage for some form of restructuring and growth, but recession is a

politically difficult strategy. In any event, such a restructuring clearly works against the

interest of working and poor women (and men), since recovery would require a




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MrynPowr55

substantial decline in their standard of living and control over their work lives-not to

mention health and safety on the job, environmental controls, and so forth. Waiting in

the wings if the Reagan plan proves politically unacceptable may be the superficially

more progressive program Resnick characterizes as modernizing conservative,

which would involve government planning in close cooperation with big capital. Such

a program would also undoubtedly involve decreases in wages and social services, but

would combine them with more tolerance for life-style variation and a superficial sup-

port for programs to combat discrimination, such as affirmative action. The extreme

Right has so redefined the terrain of struggle over issues such as abortion, gay rights,

and the family that the modernizing conservatives need give very little ground to ap-

pear progressive; in Resnick's words (p. 25) the reactionary right will make the

moderate right position look reasonable.

14. Tom Joe, Profiles of Families in Poverty: Effects of the FY 1983 Budget Proposal

on the Poor, Working Paper for the Center for the Study of Social Policy

(Washington, D.C.: February 1982).

15. Zillah Eisenstein, The Sexual Politics of the New Right: Understanding the 'Crisis

of Liberalism' for the 1980s, Signs 7 (Spring 1982): 567-88.

16. Responding to the accusation that the budget cuts would cause severe jeopardy

to women, an administration spokesperson replied that the concerns of women or

any other interest group could not be given special attention (New York Times, 10

May 1981). The administration has been equally unconcerned about the effect of its

programs on blacks; according to two spokespeople from the Office of Management

and Budget, no attempt was made to measure the impact of budget cuts on blacks or

any other subset of the population (New York Times, 2 June 1981).

17. Newsweek, 5 Apr. 1982, p. 17.

18. New York Times, 21 Sept. 1981.

19. New York Times, 24 June 1982; Washington Post, 25 June and 14 Aug. 1982.

20. Diana Pearce, The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work and Welfare, Urban

and Social Change Review 11 (Winter 1978): 28-36.

21. National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, Critical Choices for the 80's

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1980), 17-19.

22. Disposable income was calculated by subtracting average work-related expenses

and childcare costs from gross earnings, then adding income from AFDC, the Earned

Income Tax Credit, Energy Assistance Program, and Food Stamps (Joe, 15).

23. Ibid., 13.

24. Philip A. AuClaire, The Mix of Work and Welfare among Long-term AFDC Reci-

pients, Social Service Review 3 (December 1979): 586-605; Bennett Harrison,

Welfare Payments and the Reproduction of Low-Wage Workers and Secondary

Jobs, Review of Radical Political Economics 11 (Summer 1979): 1-16.

25. Harrison, 3.

26. Martin Rein and Lee Rainwater, Patterns of Welfare Use, Social Service Review 52

(December 1978): 524-25.

27. Before the 1982 budget cuts, women in twenty-nine states could achieve incomes

at or above the federally defined-and brutally low-poverty level through a combina-

tion of work and welfare. After the 1982 cuts, work and welfare no longer generate

above-poverty incomes in any state. See Joe, 16.

28. Ibid., 23. Children would still receive their benefits.

29. Wall Street Journal, 21 Oct. 1981. This quote also highlights the dangerously sub-

jective nature of such judgments.

30. However, workfare jobs aren't supposed to compete with regular labor market




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employment, so they are very unlikely to provide competitive skills. See Joe, 23.

31. New York Times, 29 March 1981.

32. The Reagan administration argues that the system of income disregards which

allowed working AFDC mothers to receive a higher income than AFDC mothers who

did not work for pay had failed to provide an incentive to work, since 14.9 percent of

all women on AFDC held jobs in 1967, compared with 14.1 percent in 1979; and 30

percent of all welfare case closings in 1967 were because the mother found work, com-

pared with 13.3 percent in 1979 (New York Times, 30 June 1981). This proof' is

fallacious even on its own grounds, for a number of reasons. First, employment ratios

can't be used to measure the incentive to work without balancing them against the

availability of work. The overall unemployment rate in 1967 was 3.8 percent; in 1979,

it was 5.8 percent. Unemployment for adult white women (age twenty and over) was

32 percent higher in 1979 than 1967 (5.0 percent compared with 3.8 percent);

unemployment for adult nonwhite women was 42 percent higher (10.1 percent com-

pared with 7.1 percent in 1967). Since unskilled and marginal workers seem to be par-

ticularly vulnerable to increases in unemployment, we might well have expected

employment among AFDC mothers to decline sharply, possibly by one third or more,

rather than remaining roughly the same. Second, as we have seen, measuring work

behavior at a moment in time sharply underestimates the number of women on AFDC

who work for pay over the course of the year. Third, the use of the case-closing

statistics is highly misleading: the number of cases closed because the mother found

work might have been higher before the income disregards precisely because all income

was counted, so that it was much easier to lose eligibility for AFDC. What possibly has

failed is the theory that women could work their way off supplemental AFDC; the low

wages paid to women workers have made supplemental AFDC an ongoing necessity

for many-but this is not a problem of incentive.

33. Marlene Sonju Chrissinger, Factors Affecting Employment of Welfare Mothers,

Social Work 25 (January 1980): 52-6.

34. Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

35. Wall Street Journal, 21 Oct. 1981.

36. Joe, 22; New York Times, 25 Oct. 1982.

37. Joe, 21-22.

38. Over 70 percent of the AFDC case load are children (ibid., 25).

39. Robert B. Carleson and Kevin R. Hopkins, Whose Responsibility is Social Respon-

sibility? The Reagan Rationale, Public Welfare 39 (Fall 1981): 8-17.

40. We must be careful once again not to imply complete unanimity between Reagan

and New Right spokespeople such as Gilder.

41. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 148, 140.

42. McMahon, cited in Wall Street Journal, 21 Oct. 1981. Here is a case where the New

Right's social views are exactly consistent with the Reagan administration's free market

orientation. Gilder provides an ideal justification for actions Reagan would have taken

regardless.

43. Often the skilled workers were white males, and this struggle took the form of ex-

cluding nonwhite men and all women from the union and the trade. See, for example,

Ruth Milkman, Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor: Historical Perspectives on

'Women's Work' and the American Labor Movement, Socialist Review 10 (anuary-

February 1980): 95-150.

44. Carol Boyd Leon, Occupational Winners and Losers: Who They Were during

1972-80, Monthly Labor Review 105 oune 1982): 19.

45. See McMahon.




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46. See Sheldon Danziger, Robert Haveman, and Robert Plotnick, How Income

Transfer Programs Affect Work, Savings, and the Income Distribution: A Critical

Review, Journal of Economic Literature 19 (September 1981): 975-1027; for a review

of this literature. There is a striking lack of unanimity about the quantitative impact of

welfare on the supply of labor--even studies using the same data base arrive at quite

different numerical results-but all the studies agree that AFDC, specifically, lowers

women's supply of labor to some extent.

47. Jane Stone, Reagan's Affirmative Inaction, Working Papers 9 (January/February

1982), 33.

48. Sara E. Rix and Anne J. Stone, Impact on Women of the Administration's Proposed

Budget (Washington, D.C.: Women's Research and Education Institute, April 1982);

Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the

United States Government: Fiscal Year 1984; pp. I-V, 16-17.

49. Wall Street Journal, 17 May 1982.

50. I say only potentially because the guidelines have not always been rigorously en-

forced.

51. New York Times, 25 Aug. 1981.

52. For the exact wording of these proposals, see the Federal Register, 25 Aug. 1981, p.

42968, and 23 Apr. 1982, p. 17770.

53. Washington Post, 30 July 1982; and telephone conversations with OFCCP

spokesperson, 3 June and 11 Aug. 1983.

54. Laurie Westley, study director, cited in the Wall Street Journal, 15 Apr. 1982.



57. Ibid.

58. Wall Street Journal, 28 July 1982.

59. The most extreme form of this argument, put forward by Milton Friedman, would

abolish even licensing (for example, of doctors, taxi drivers), as it interferes with the

consumer's freedom to choose. Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1962), 35-36.

60. Resnick, 13.

61. This decline in the standard of living is somewhat masked in the statistics. Thus,

family income has basically held its own over the decade. However, it has only done so

because more family members are working now.

62. Automation also creates jobs, as workers are needed to produce and service the

new machinery. However, employment forecasts indicate that automation in the

1980s is likely to destroy more industrial jobs than it creates. Business Week, 3 Aug.

1981 p. 63.

63. Ibid., 67. The unions most likely to be affected are the United Auto Workers; Inter-

national Union of Electronic, Electrical, Technical, Salaried Machine Workers;

Machinists; and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

64. Ibid., 62.

65. Clerical work is overwhelmingly female. In 1979, 98.6 percent of secretaries and

typists were women. See U.S. Department of Labor, Perspectives on Working Women: A

Databook (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1980), 10.

66. Indeed, the family wage --paying the male enough money entirely to support

himself, his wife, and their children-may have been little more than a brief historical

aberration, as it was prevalent among the working class in the United States for only

perhaps forty years, beginning in the twentieth century.

67. Business Week, 3 Aug. 1981, p. 63.




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58 MrynPowr

68. Emma Rothschild, Reagan and the Real America, New York Review of Books,

5 Feb. 1981, pp. 12-17.

69. Leon, 20.

70. Perspectives on Working Women, 11, 74.

71. Leon, 24.

72. Steinem, Edgar, and Thom.

73. Deirdre English, The War against Choice, Mother Jones, February/March 1981,

p. 28.

74. Of course, most women professionals are still located in traditionally female pro-

fessions (nursing, elementary school teaching, and so forth). And the movement of

women into nontraditional professions and management positions has coincided with

a devaluation of the professions in terms of pay, status, and autonomy. See Michael J.

Carter and Susan Boslego Carter, Women's Recent Progress in the Professions, or

Women Get a Ticket to Ride after the Train Has Left the Station, Feminist Studies 7

(Fall 1981): 477-504. However, both the number and the proportion of women

lawyers, physicians, engineers, accountants, and computer specialists (all male-

dominated, relatively lucrative professions) has grown sharply over the last decade.

Women were one-fourth of new physicians and lawyers, one-third of new computer

specialists, and two-thirds of new accountants. See U.S. Department of Labor, Employ-

ment and Earnings, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, January 1973 and January 1982).

75. Eisenstein, Sexual Politics of the New Right, 581.

76. Ibid., 578, 585-86.

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