Pinand in Leading The Way discusses the struggles of being a woman while trying to have success with family life and work life. Pinand tells us her story starting from college to working life after marriage contemplating children. She is very relatable given her desires and education, seem to match up with experiences a person in our class may have had. She tries to explain the ways in which she was optimistic and cautious of being a working mother given the experiences she has seen of her coworkers and the culture of a professional atmosphere. She seems to have a supportive husband but I thought it was interesting when she describes the ways in which she always felt there wasn’t enough time to be available to both her husband and her work and how she struggles to reconcile each especially when hearing this echoed by some coworkers who felt they had experience the same thing. She concludes by saying how she is planning to have children while furthering her career and is going to make it work despite the struggles.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa in A General Strike speaks about the way the women’s work inside the house is undervalued and why the women in Italy deserve more. She talks about a previous “general strike” (303), and says that this cannot be the case because no women were involved. She hopes for a better future in which women are able to be monetarily compensated for their work in the house and where they have time for themselves. In order to have this future, she wants the women of Italy to come together for this goal.
In Maid to Order by Barbara Ehrenreich, the lives of people working in other’s houses as cleaning ladies are studied. Ehrenreich even has worked for a company that supplies these maids so that she could get the full experience of their work. She begins by discussing housework throughout history and references The Feminist Mystique in saying that in that piece, housework was being rebelled against by women but not so that they could have more help from men but so that it could be delegated to another woman. She also talks about how men do not equally share the work of the house with women. She talks about how women have mostly been the holders of these jobs, first low class white immigrants and then African Americans and how companies have formed to have employees rather than individuals working in houses on their own. She discusses how badly workers are treated and how hard their job is for a small amount of pay. She discusses the low social status given to these workers and how hard it was for her to spend 3 weeks doing their jobs. She also talks about the ineffectiveness of their cleaning and how there is a rising prevalence of families who have housekeepers, many of whom do not report it.
In The Mommy Tax by Crittenden, the differing amounts of money earned by men and women are discussed. Crittenden speaks on the ways that the perception of women’s earnings is much higher than it is and depending on the parameters of statistical results, people can be tricked into thinking that there has been a change in the discrimination women face. Crittenden references two specific cases of women who were hard workers with satisfying jobs and then when children were added to their lives, they were given no special treatment and were eventually fired or felt the need to leave their jobs. She says that for women this increases especially when there are more children because the strains on the mother increase. She also compares America to other countries and references France as a country in which many allowances are made for mother’s so that it is possible fot them to have successful families and careers. She talks about the amount of money many women lose by having children and the fact that the government does not help these women at all in our country. She contrasts this with the benefits received by veterans in our country, and questions the fairness of this situation. She does say though that men who have children and a working wife also face similar reductions in their money flow based solely on the fact that they have outside commitments from work.
These readings all speak about women’s rights in working and the respect that women deserve for the amount of women they do. These readings make it clear that equality has not been achieved in regards to the way that women and men are treated in the work place and that feminists and all people have much work to do on this issue.
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