FEMINISM SEDUCED

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The body of this article is drawn from Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2009). Reprinted by permission of Paradigm Publishers; all rights reserved. 2. From an announcement for ‘Womenomics Part I—Women and the Global Economy’, Thursday 31 January 2008, Demos Forum, New York City. Series sponsored by the Women's Leadership Initiative. 3. I use the terms Global South or Third World to designate those countries still struggling with the after-effects of colonialism. The mainstream press uses the term ‘emerging markets’ to refer to countries that are seen as promising targets of international investment. 4. By ‘hegemonic’ feminism I mean a commonsense, everyday understanding of feminism that permeates the media and that is widely accepted as what feminism connotes in the mind of the public. I am modelling this expression on ‘hegemonic masculinity’, the locution coined by R.W. Connell (1995 Connell, R. W. 1995. Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]). 5. My argument here echoes the analysis set forth by Judith Stacey in her work on post-industrial society. As she writes: In the late 1980s, I suggested that second-wave feminism had served as an unwitting midwife to postindustrial society … Legitimate feminist critiques of women's economic dependency and mandatory domesticity in the 1950s modern family, I argued, had provided unintended ideological support for the massive entry of women into the labor force and its complex interaction with rising divorce rates and family instability that were already under way. In that sense feminism unwittingly had abetted the shift from industrial to postindustrial labor practices that ultimately eroded real wages, weakened labor unions, undermined public support for welfare entitlements, and increased class inequality. Paradoxically, therefore, women's efforts to achieve gender equality with men contributed to forces that yielded the feminization of poverty and increased inequality among women (and men). (Stacey 2006 Stacey, Judith. 2006. Not acquiescence, but multilingual resistance. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 34(1/2): 63–68. [Google Scholar], 63) 6. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a federal assistance program operating from 1935 to 1996 (under several different names) which provided financial assistance to parents, primarily mothers, and their children in low-income families. 7. See Boris (1998 Boris, Eileen. 1998. Introduction: Scholarship and activism: The case of welfare justice. Feminist Studies, 24(1): 27–31. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) on the coalition of activists and academics known as the Women's Committee of 100, which brought together feminist scholars and grassroots activists, and the rest of the special issue of Feminist Studies—24 (1) (1998)—devoted to this topic. 8. Section 8 of the US Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 authorised the Housing Choice Voucher Program which sponsored subsidised housing for low-income families and individuals. 9. Over the past three decades, increasing numbers of women have become sex workers, maids, workers in export production, or microfinance recipients to earn incomes in the restructured global economy. Many must migrate domestically or internationally to obtain this work … These ‘industries’ now span the globe, occurring in most areas of the developing world as well as throughout industrialized countries. (Pyle and Ward 2003 Pyle, Jean L and ward, Kathryn B. 2003. Recasting our understanding of gender and work during global restructuring. International Sociology, 18(3): 461–89. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 470) 10. For a comprehensive account of the widespread policy assault on women's interests and rights under the Bush administration, see Finlay (2006 Finlay, Barbara. 2006. George W. Bush and the war on women: Turning back the clock on progress, New York: Zed Books. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 11. Moghadam is drawing here on the framework developed in the anthology edited by Deniz Kandiyoti on Women, Islam and the State (see Kandiyoti 1991 Kandiyoti , Deniz 1991 . Women, Islam and the state . Philadelphia : Temple University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). These essays show the variety of conditions for women in different Islamic nations, revealing that the major variables are not the presence of Islam but the history of state formation and economic development for each country.