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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?

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