Category Archives: women’s work

Dear Senator Hillary Clinton

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Thank-you.
Thank-you for all of the amazing things you have accomplished in your life.  Thank-you for being a wonderfully strong and confident woman to whom my daughter can look for inspiration.
Thank-you for being a champion for women’s rights.
Thank-you for your fight for health care.
Thank-you for smashing through the glass ceilings that you have and most of all, thank-you for running for the Democratic nomination.
Thank-you for staying in the race this long and giving as many people as possible a choice.
I am awaiting your next move, for I know that it will break ground and pave ways for future generations of women.  I know that whatever you choose to pursue next it will make my life better, and it will make the future better for my daughter, and everyone with whom she will share that future.
I know that you will not let me down, for you haven’t done so yet.  I know you are not perfect and that you have made mistakes, but being that you are human, I know you have learned from those mistakes and will use them to better prepare to forge ahead. 
I hold you to the highest of standards, and wait anxiously for the great things I expect to see from you in the future.  
Our Future.
Thank-you.
Warmest Regards and Endless Admiration,
Chang’e

Most people are rational creatures- even uneducated single moms

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Over at Feminste the classism is alive and in full force.

It’s the same load of crap I’ve heard forever.

I had the Kid a week before my 20th birthday. When I found out I was pregnant, I could have had an abortion. Actually most of my “friends” tried to push me into having an abortion.

But……..

My mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness 3 years earlier (she’s still alive – I think she runs on anger and spite). I was working crappy minimum wage jobs. I didn’t have the money for college.

I wanted my mom to see her first grandchild. (I was still under the impression that at some point I could do enough to make her love me) I also knew that I could get more financial aid for college with a baby and that it wasn’t going to get any cheaper to have a child. At that point, waiting till I had established a career seemed ridiculous. I was printing t-shirts. There is no career path there. Having a baby at my age meant that 1) I still had a parent around to help me and 2) having a baby got me MORE access to an education, not less

So I ad the Kid. I started college when he was 6 months old and actually got more in financial aid and student loans than I had working. I made my schedule such that the Kid stayed home with his dad or my mom while I went to school at night so we didn’t have to pay for childcare. And until Kid’s dad rediscovered his love the crystal meth and tormenting me, I did well. When Kid’s dad left, even though I only had a year of college under my belt, I went from making $5.50 an hour to $9.00 and by the time the Kid was 4 I was making 35k per year. (then Bush became president and the world went to shit).

There are a limited number of good jobs in the world. Period. Not everyone can be a white collar professional. But that doesn’t mean that people in low paying jobs are failures. They do vital work. We could not live in a world where no one performs the shit jobs. And working a full time job should pay a living wage. Period. And having children while young or poor or uneducated is not a crime. It is, in fact, how the majority of people in the world have children.

So reading the comments at Feminste made me heartsick. Women, ostensibly feminists, who think that punishing someone with poverty for having children is acceptable don’t strike me as much different than people who think women should be punished with children for having sex.

As for the minimum wage part of the argument- why should it be okay for ANY job to pay less than what is required to live on for full time work? I’ll say here what I said there- a business that cannot afford to pay it’s employees a living wage is a failing business. If a business could not afford to pay it’s rent, we would not write into law a that businesses can pay less than the required rent. We would let the business fail so it’s place could be taken by a business that can compete fairly.

Businesses that don’t pay a living wage put more of a strain on society, not less. Sure, they provide jobs, but not jobs that pay enough for their employees to pay income taxes. And they increase the strain on social service agencies who then have to make up the difference with childcare subsidies and food stamps and health care.So they cost society more than they benefit it. Propping them up by keeping the minimum wage low and not holding them accountable for the strain they cause creates an unfair playing field for those businesses that can and do provide living wages (look at the difference between Wal-mart and Costco).

But we don’t look at it that way. We look at raising the minimum wage as a charitable thing instead of as the right thing to do for the sake of the economy as a whole and business competition. The working poor doesn’t need more charity, we need to be paid enough to live on as is fitting of working a full time job. There is no shame in being a minimum wage worker. There is shame though in being a business that would fail without being able to exploit your workers.

We are more than just the sum of our vaginas

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I heard form a friend who heard from a friend who heard from an Obamabot campaign employee that Obama is in negotiations with Hillary to give her the VP spot.

Apparently someone in the Democratic leadership figured out that you can’t win an election if a quarter of your party refuses to support the nominee.

What they fail to realize is that we are not so blinded by our need for a vagina in the White House that we will see past Obama’s serious failings just because he’s decided to give our candidate the do nothing job of VP.

Hillary being Obama’s number 2 mitigates as much of Obama’s lack of experience, sexism, and messianic cultishness as Gore’s being number 2 mitigated Bill’s affairs or Cheeney’s being number 2 mitigates Bush’s entitled stupidity- in other words, not at all.

So should the Democratic party do something so obviously condescending – I am still voting for either McKinney or writing Hillary in.

On the other hand- if Mr Postage Stamp resume wanted to take the VP spot, spend a couple of years seeing how running a government is different than running a campaign for head cult leader president, I would have no problems. He is younger and less experienced. I would hate to see our highest office turned into the corporate cliche of the woman who has worked for decades becoming the number two to the bosses favorite nephew.

Trolling and Male Privilge

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Why are trolls almost always boys? Why, like rapists, can they not take no for an answer? Why don’t they leave when you ask, demand, ban, block, and delete them?

Rotten Feminist knows why. And she is dead on right (resident troll take note- she describes you perfectly with these words)

He relies on assumptions and stalker-like tactics. He is indignant that we refuse to “hear his voice” either by ignoring him or out-right deleting his comments. And he operates with the attitude that he is right, and all other ideas are WRONG.

And now I have someone new to add to my google reader.

Speaking of the work mothers do

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So the Kid and I have had a lot of time to talk since he was deprived of internet and television for a few days. It turns out he really does love his dear old mom, but not if there is manga to be read.

He’s studying American history this year and they are learning all about the constitution and the civil war, etc. He said “the Civil war wasn’t really fought over slavery, it was over state’s rights”.

And then I gave him the condensed for a 13 year old version of this post

You may have some romantic notion that the Civil War was fought for philosophical reasons over the enslavement of fellow humans. The truth is actually based in the functions of a capitalist society. As the north industrialized and started selling more finished goods that were more capital intensive than agricultural raw goods from the south, slavery became an impediment to the wage system.

Keeping a slave is a fixed cost. The only fluctuation is in the original buying price, after that there is no competition to keep costs down. You could keep your slaves near starvation but when they dropped dead you would have to buy another slave. Replacement was not cheap. So the price of raw goods stays relatively high because labor costs can’t be dropped. Paid workers, on the other hand, had no initial cost and since you were not responsible for their well being you could pay starvation wages without a replacement cost. As long as there was a surplus of labor, you could keep dropping the wages lower and lower making the cost of producing your goods cheaper and cheaper. Capitalism at it’s finest (oh sense the irony there or you people don’t know me well).

And so the very next day (oh providence!) the kid had a group exercise on the Civil war, slavery and economics.

And my darling child just went and rocked the brains of a group of 7th graders.

When I asked him if he understood what I explained to him – he did the typical teenage eyeroll “Of course, Moooooooom.” And he thinks the other kids understood it too.

So RQ is not only corrupting her own child with radical ideas, but the precious children of the creative class elites as well. Their parents may have drank the koolaid, but not all hope is lost.

The Obligatory Mother’s Day Post

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You all know by know that I hate Mother’s Day. I hate the schlock. I hate that instead of valuing the real work that women do (for free) we give flowers and cards one day of the year.

So I decided to figure out how much we really value mothers’ work. We’ve all seen the calculators that say if moms were paid for all they do they’d make the same salary as doctors. But we don’t actually pay moms like that. In fact, there is only one instance in this country where women are paid to stay home with their children. Welfare.

But welfare is temporary. Women with newborns have to start 40 hours a week of job searching when their child is just 12 weeks old. And Welfare doesn’t exactly pay minimum wage.

In WA state the monthly TANF (new term for welfare since welfare to work program started) grant is $440 in cash for two people. And from personal experience that amount has been the same for at least 13 years. If you include food stamps, it’s $607.

Let’s just assume a mom on welfare works just 40 hours a week caring for her child. 607/ 4.3 (weeks in a month)/40 (hours in a week) and she gets about $3.53 per hour.

(And if you happen to be one of the 30% of custodial parents who receives child support in a timely fashion and you also happen to be on TANF- your child support will go to the state first to pay back your grant money. You *may* receive an extra $50 on top of TANF from your child support but you will not get the whole amount of both child support and TANF)

And WA is in the high middle as far as grant amounts go. Tennessee, at the bottom of the heap gives a family of two $142 in cash and a total of $398 if you include food stamps or about $2.31 per hour.

That is what motherhood is worth in this country, less than minimum wage.

Let’s contrast that with the average monthly cost for infant daycare. In WA it’s about $754. That’s 20% more than the monthly TANF and food stamp grants combined. In TN it’s about $412 per month, close but still more than TANF and food stamps.

Why, if mothering is such an important job, do we pay poor mothers so very little to do it?

Because the ideal has been set of the two parent family with a mom who stays home and sacrifices herself for the good of the kids. And sacrifice isn’t really looked at as work. Sacrifice is religious term meaning to give up yourself for the good of others. But not just give up, but totally subvert any of your own desires.

And because the sacrificial mom is our ideal, we do not give poor mothers with no other resources as much money as someone who does their same job for fewer hours a day and fewer days per week. We don’t expect strangers to sacrifice themselves. Actually, the only people we expect to sacrifice themselves completely are mothers.

But children are work. And the work that a mother puts into her children is not for her benefit. It is partially for her child’s benefit, but it is mostly for societies benefit. We need children to grow up and be productive members of society. We need them to grow up to pay the taxes that will pay for social security. And now we need children to grow up and pay the taxes for our massive war debt. If we remove all the sentimentalism that has been attached to motherhood to make the sacrifice more palatable, then mothers are performing a vital function for society to continue. And they aren’t paid for it. They are financially punished for it with lower wages ($11,000 less on average than non-mothers), higher expenses and less job security.

Because we don’t value women, but we really don’t value mothers.

My Uterus Will Not Be Held Hostage

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So the cry from the Blogger Boyz and their cronies to those of us who refuse to drink the koolaid and bow to the Precious is “What about Roe! What about the Supreme Court!”

Fuck you. Seriously. I don’t like it when Rethuglikan boyz try to control my behavior with threats to my bodily autonomy, why on earth would you think it’s okay coming from you.

Really it is two halves of the same coin. Don’t be a slutty whore or you’ll get punished with an unwanted pregnancy on one side and don’t be a slutty Hillary voter or you’ll get punished with an unwanted Supreme Court on the other.

How’s this? It’s my mother fucking uterus and I am a grown up woman. I think I know how to best protect it, and you boyz do not. I am sick of and tired of having to vote for shit ass people because of a threat to limit my control of my own body. And quite honestly- so far my voting for the candidate least likely to pack the court with Forced Pregnancy wignutz hasn’t done shit. Did the Dems shut down Roberts- no. Did they stop the partial birth abortion ban- no.

So my letting the immediate safety of my uterus dictate my votes hasn’t really worked out. And you boyz seem to think that is the ONLY thing feminists care about. Yes- reproductive rights are incredibly important. But they wouldn’t even be an issue if we women were considered to be full human beings with all the rights that entails.

So I choose to focus my time and attention on a candidate who understands that women are more than the sum of their genitalia.

In the mean time I’m stocking up on birth control and emergency contraception.

My uterus, not a hostage, not for sale to the lowest bidder.

Get another tactic boyz.

We’ve Got The Power!

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Well not exactly. But we will, either tomorrow or Saturday. And in just a very few minutes I will have to shut down my compy at work to install new compys in the whole lab. (New to us anyways, we are th bastard stepchild of the main campus and get their hand me downs).

So I will be computer-less for at least 24 hours. Think of this as an open thread and leave me something nice to read when SCL finally brings me back to the 21st century. I’ll take thoughts, musings, haiku, rants, jokes, you name it.

And enjoy this picture. Behind every great woman there isn’t necessarily a great man, but this is too cute not to post.