Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Anne Dalke's picture

I, too,

found HH's talk sobering and bracing. I'll be curious to hear what happened in her meeting @ Women's Way, and what your co-workers there learned/took away from/contributed to the encounter.

* my moments from her visit (some from my class, some from the talk...):

--What drew you to economics? "Being poor: I wanted to know why some people were and some weren't."

--"We could work on women's issues, if we knew what a woman was," vs.
"What a woman is, is not problematic. It's earning 77 cents on the dollar."

--"I consider myself a radical...[doing liberal work]...this is not about changing the world."
[cf. David Karen, who *still* teaches her 1976 socialist essay,
"Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex," asking
" how would you articulate that argument, to reflect this [more current] data?"

--"I’ve become a Washington creature, coaching arguments differently":
cf. "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism" (1981) w/ her current focus on capitalism:
"I underestimated then that new economic incentives could challenge the patriarchy;
there are more women working now, and it's easier to get change in the labor market"
(then things will change domestically? hmm....)

--"ask yourself: where do you expect the direction of change to come from?
how do you want to focus your time and energy?"

--"women can have it all...if we arrange social instutitions to get what we want"
[but this does not get us an ecologically sustainable growth rate...]

Perhaps most striking to me was her move from the socialist feminist positions of her early papers to her now much more social Democratic/liberal positioning within capitalist structures, a belief that working for more equity within the labor market will lead, eventually, to changes in patriarchial familial structures...

what do you think of that approach?

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
11 + 7 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.