Most poor people aren't black, contrary to stereotypes. Women in low-paid occupations are paid less, still, than men in low-paid occupations (car park attendants, for example, are paid more than childcare teachers). I haven't looked at figures in the last 3 years but I'd be surprised if this has unaccountably reversed for the population as a whole, especially since there is some evidence that the welfare reform drove low-waged women's wages down, increasing the wage gap. Women's wages are closer to men's than they were 30 years ago (partly from men's dropping) but the lines on the graph have not yet kissed.
But the issue is not--or wasn't originally--only low-wage workers. You asserted that women's dependency on men was passe in rich societies, women can now go it alone (and should if they can't find a satisfactory guy) and that rich women are more dependent. I said that was ignoring a good part of dependency, which needn't be total dependency. Issues of dependence break down, sure, when neither person has a paycheck, but that's not typical. The relevant thing about men in the examples you give seems not to be that they're poor or that they're black but that they're unemployed.
You seem to be arguing that on the rich end of the scale women are economically very dependent, on the poor end not at all, and in the middle mostly not and then only by choice. I know single women who are making it and single women who aren't making it, but it looks to me like the potential or the reality of combining with a man's typically higher paycheck is a factor in their lives. And that means losing independence---exacerbated when there are small children, when she cuts back or takes time off paid work to do care work, when the health insurance is through his job, etc.
I also think it's helpful to show how the system doesn't work in cases when it's supposed to be working (in this case, working to provide women economic independence from men) than to show it doesn't work in cases where everyone agrees it's not working.
>>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.
Since I can't find this now I may have misread or misremembered and apologize to Kelley if so.
But is that supposed to be a contradiction? That men should pay their child support and that feminists should fight--not alone, certainly--for more equitable distribution of the whole pie? I don't think men should be let off the hook either. It's what the Italian Women's Liberation movement calls 'double militancy.'
Jenny Brown