[lbo-talk] Servant culture

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Aug 14 17:50:15 PDT 2003


At 6:22 PM -0400 8/14/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>Yoshie:
>>Suppose that the woman shoulders 90% of household expenses and the
>>man can contribute only 10% of them (as opposed to the man willing to
>>contribute only 10% even though he can do more if he chooses to) --
>>who is dependent on whom?
>
>He'd contribute the missing 10% and support himself with the remainder of his
>typically larger paycheck.

We can't assume poor men have regular "paychecks," much less typically larger incomes than those of the poor women with whom they hook up, especially in black communities.

"Black women have been a majority of black workers since 1990" (at <http://www.jointcenter.org/DB/factsheet/employ.htm>).

"For African Americans, it [unemployment among teens] reached 42% for men and 37% for women, and was 19% and 16%, respectively, for white men and women" (at <http://www.jointcenter.org/DB/factsheet/employ.htm>).

At 6:22 PM -0400 8/14/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> >. . . The issue that best reflects Berlant's argument . . . is the
>>emphasis on state and federal efforts to encourage, through funding
>>allocated for governmental programs and individual incentives, single
>>welfare mothers to marry the fathers of their children. Consider that
>>in West Virginia, a couple's welfare benefits are augmented if they
>>wed, while the state has reduced the welfare benefits cohabitating
>>non-married adults receive by 25 percent.
>
>But that has to do with wanting to put the financial burden of
>raising children squarely on the underpaid shoulders of the working
>class as a whole, men included, more than it has to do with
>controlling working class women (although it does that, too). This
>is true even for these incentive schemes, as welfare is now
>temporary and much outlasted by child support and marriage property
>issues. As Kelley mentioned earlier, the feminist focus should be
>universal supports funded by corporate taxes, not on more thoroughly
>dunning working class guys.

That's news to me -- the last time the question of child support came up here, she was in favor of strict enforcement of collection of child support payments from men. -- Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list