

The government was inhibiting that choice. In this case, it was her choice for childbirth. Said Bader Ginsburg: “The argument was it’s her right to decide either way, her right to decide whether or not to bear a child. The case involved the right to continue in one’s vocation (in Struck it was an Air Force career) through labor and raising kids. Secretary of Defense, not Roe, to secure true reproductive freedom for women. As Alana Casanova-Burgess noted in her 2019 article for WNYC Studios, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have preferred to use Susan Struck v. The history of reproductive rights in the U.S. A 2018 study found that women who were represented by a labor union were at least 17% more likely to use their paid maternity leave than women who were not represented by a labor union. Unions can foster an environment where women feel safe to use existing benefits. Labor unions already help women secure better pay and care-related benefits. Being part of a labor union is one way to secure time for our other vocations as aunts, mothers, grandmothers, nieces and daughters. The real antagonist identified by “Lean In” then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands.Īn obvious, all-American alternative, Faludi notes, is solidarity - fighting together for our rights at work. Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. It’s a dysfunctional twist on “Work Bitch.” Faludi draws from the portrait of Katherine Losse’s account in her 2012 book “The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network,” of her own time working at Facebook. Sandberg’s version of labor success highlighted faux feminist gurus promising women triumph through personal, strategic striving. In her 2013 article “Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not,” Susan Faludi explains that the “Lean In” brand of labor politics - extolled in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book (with Nell Scovell) of the same name - is akin to the fakery of corporate Christianity. Today, we dance water Zumba to Britney Spears’ 2013 “ Work Bitch” and avoid the sharks in our work tanks.

#Does not equal sign in notepad how to
Newsweek and Time ran articles on the phenomenon, while women’s magazines offered advice on how to appear at our best alongside articles about surviving labor in the “sandwich generation.” Teenage girls and their grandmothers found time in between labors for sisterly sabbath, playing makeup.

The phrase became part of popular culture. A few years before the Dales’ cartoon was published, Dorothy Miller, then a University of Kentucky professor of social work, and Elaine Brody, a gerontologist, had published seminal essays describing what they called “the sandwich generation” - women of middle age who were working three shifts: tending children, parents and their regular jobs at their places of employment.
#Does not equal sign in notepad full
I was 16 years old, watching my mother care for both her children and her elders, all while laboring full time in the Texas public school system. That image on my mother’s notepad was created by Barbara and Jim Dale for Recycled Paper Products in 1984. RELATED: Now more than ever: Let’s get the Equal Rights Amendment finalized We take heart from prophets in the Hebrew Bible who were creatively maladjusted, refusing to adapt to political absurdity. Meanwhile, the unkempt woman in my mother’s cartoon is the image Christian feminists hold in their minds as they continue laboring for a world in which we have universal child care, parental leave, a truly living wage and well-funded public schools for the kids we raise. The spectacle of comportment that is Justice Amy Coney Barrett haunts our laptop screens as we rage against the machinery that has cast her as an icon of proper Christian womanhood - a very well-behaved woman making history. This Labor Day, I am thinking about women, labor and how much those who raise kids need labor unions, and my memory of that cartoon is helping put Labor Day 2022 in political perspective.Ĭhristian feminists have been back on our heels since the U.S. The caption read, “If it was going to be easy to raise kids, it never would’ve started with something called labor.” (RNS) - My mom saved a notepad from the 1980s that included a drawing of a straggly, red-eyed woman holding a baby, another child pulling her hair, and one wailing next to her.
