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GWENDOLYN MINK is author of Hostile Environment (2000), Welfare's End (1998), The Wages of Motherhood (1995), and Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development (1986). She is also the editor of Whose Welfare? (1999) and co-editor of The Readers' Companion to U.S. Women's History (1998), and has written commentaries for the New York Times, Newsday, and the San Jose Mercury News. A Professor of Politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years, in July 2001 she will join the faculty at Smith College. From 1995 to 1997, she co-chaired the Women's Committee of 100, a feminist mobilization against punitive welfare reform; currently, she is working on the Women's Committee's project to change welfare policy. Since 1999, she has been a member of the board of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a member of the coordinating committee of Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice. In January 2001, Women's Enews named her one of "21 Women Shaping the 21st Century." She was interviewed by Steve Shalom and Joanne Landy for NEW POLITICS.
New Politics: During the Clinton years, many mainstream feminists had access to the White House. In return, these feminists believed they had to temper their criticisms of administration policy. Looking back over these eight years, would you say that women gained or lost from this arrangement?
Gwendolyn Mink: Measured against the early and eager swipes the Bush (II) Administration has taken against women and women's rights, the Clinton Administration could be said to have been downright friendly to women and to the aims of organized feminism. From the closing of the White House Office on Women's Issues; to the ban on funding for international reproductive health services that counsel about, lobby for, or perform abortions; to the appointments of John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson to his cabinet; to his $1.6 trillion tax cut -- George Bush's policies are so over-the-top in their harms to women that it's hard not to romanticize the Clinton years. But life under Bill Clinton actually was a very mixed experience for women, and a very challenging one for organized feminism.
A handful of policies promulgated under Clinton's watch certainly advanced the liberty, safety, health, and economic interests of women. First, Clinton reversed the abortion gag rule on federally-supported domestic reproductive health services; this and collateral pro-choice appointments and prosecutions slowed the erosion of the right to abortion. Second, he signed the Violence Against Women Act into law. Third, he signed the Family and Medical Leave Act into law. Fourth, he supported increases in research spending on women's health issues and diseases. Fifth, although somewhat belatedly, he helped win an increase in the minimum wage (two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women). All of these issues were high on the agendas of feminists in Congress, as well as of organized feminism.
These were positive developments, without a doubt. But they did not benefit all women who came within their purview. For example, although reversal of the abortion gag rule recovered an important element of the abortion right, the right itself remained inaccessible to many women. Without Medicaid funding, for example, low-income women cannot be assured access to abortion -- cannot be assured that they actually can exercise their right. Likewise, the Family and Medical Leave Act established the important principle that labor market workers who take finite leaves from employment to care for family members should not lose their jobs; but because it provides only for unpaid leave, it does not address the situation of millions of women whose families depend both on their income and on their care for survival.
So there were big gaps in women's gains during the Clinton years, gaps that intensified inequalities among women. The clear losers were poor women, particularly women of color. Clinton himself telegraphed this outcome during his 1992 campaign, first when he verbally slapped Sister Souljah for speaking her mind and then when he pledged to end welfare. While Clinton offered policy victories to some women, he drew boundaries within womanhood, prizing some women while disdaining others. The ultimate act of disdain, of course, was welfare reform -- which not only stripped poor mothers of economic security but also impaired their constitutional guarantees.
That Clinton retained the support of most mainstream feminists even as his administration joined with Republicans to create a welfare police state for poor women says more about contradictions within feminism than it does about any price feminist leaders had to pay in exchange for access to the White House. (I actually don't think feminists enjoyed great access; or if we did, we enjoyed access without influence.) Many national leaders of feminist women's groups were audibly opposed to punitive welfare reform. Few groups were actually on the front lines of opposition; but some, like the National Organization for Women and the NOW-Legal Defense and Education Fund, were active and vocal. On the whole, middle class solipsism among both feminist elites and feminist rank and file stalled any broad-based feminist mobilization in defense of poor mothers. Bill Clinton didn't invent boundaries within womanhood when he drew them with public policy. Those boundaries exist, in society and within feminism.
As George Bush has so brutally shown, "gains and losses," as you put it, last only as long as do the political majorities that support them. So rather than dwell on a presidential scorecard, I think we should focus on recovering a political majority that is committed to equality in all its iterations. Key to a democratic political majority is a feminism that advances the equality interests of all women. Such a feminism must put the claims and rights of women whose political and economic security are most at risk at the top of its agenda. In this it must be guided by what diversely situated women say about their lives, rather than insisting on singular goals based on the experiences of the most privileged, or most numerous, or most organized.
NP: What about sexual harassment? Are women better protected today from sexual harassment than they were, say, in 1992?
GM: The law is stronger today in some important respects as a result of Supreme Court decisions about employer liability in hostile environment cases. Ironically, those decisions were handed down during the summer of 1998, when many defenders of strong sexual harassment law were protesting the application of sexual harassment law to Bill Clinton. The topsy-turvy politics surrounding the Clinton-Jones- Lewinsky situation has weakened sexual harassment protections politically. If the law is weak and riddled with loopholes, women have no recourse against sexualized discrimination. So of course favorable Supreme Court decisions have been a big help. But even improvements in the law have not settled thorny questions, such as when sexual harassment is legally recognizable.
These sorts of questions will be decided in court, but their disposition will depend on the political climate. For one thing, the willingness of women to endure the risks and abuse of bringing hard cases to public light depends on the political climate. The social, economic, and emotional costs of "telling" are incredibly high. For another thing, whether cases even make it to court will depend on the stance of political institutions such as the EEOC. Remember the EEOC under Clarence Thomas.
As the Supreme Court becomes even more conservative and as the EEOC comes under conservative leadership, the time may come when other political institutions -- the Congress -- will be called upon to intervene. That's what happened in 1991, when the Civil Rights Act was amended to correct the rollbacks on civil rights law that had been accomplished under Reagan-Bush. At that time, liberals and feminists sought to strengthen Title VII remedies for women, as well. They were ridiculed by Republicans for creating a feminist pork-barrel for women with supposedly trumped up sexual harassment claims who would bring vengeful and ruinous lawsuits against all- American businesses. Were it not for Anita Hill, the improvements in Title VII remedies for women probably would not have become law. They are the linchpin of the improved protections for sexual harassment targets, because now plaintiffs can hold employers responsible for damages: sexual harassment is now expensive. If this kind of legislative intervention to defend or improve sexual harassment law becomes necessary again in the near future, I'm afraid that its advocates will not have the political currency to win. Defenders of Bill Clinton engaged in far too much distortion of existing sexual harassment law and in far too much dissing of the victim. It's going to be used against us.
NP: Feminists were divided on the Nader campaign, some arguing that it was important to break with the Democrats who gave us welfare reform and the other retrograde policies you outlined, and most others claiming that the protection of women's progress required supporting Gore. How would you judge these various positions?
GM: The first thing I would say is that I don't think that feminists were all that divided between Nader and Gore. The support that Nader did receive from some feminists was residual, in the sense that folks who couldn't bring themselves to affirm the Clinton-Gore Administration's shameful policies toward poor women and people of color had nowhere else to go. Even then, there was a lot of vote-pairing across states, following the principle of "vote for Nader if you can; vote for Gore if you have to." But to get to the gist of your question, which I take to be the relative merits of supporting Nader vs. supporting Gore: I'll take a pass. I don't want to "judge" these positions; I simply don't think it's productive politically. I don't think acrimony on the left arising from this election is productive -- especially when both of the candidates supported by progressives were deeply flawed on social justice issues. Better to spend the three years we have before the next presidential election figuring out how we can work together to democratize the electoral process and to broaden and sustain social movements for economic, social, and environmental justice. We need to do both these things to end the Republican stranglehold on the two parties and on the two-party system.
NP: The issues that animated the women's movement in the 1960's and 70's included the socially-coerced deference of women to men, the unequal division of labor in housework and childrearing, the lack of respect for the domestic work that women do, unfair pay differentials, and, more broadly, the unequal power of women and men. In what ways do you think the women's movement has changed everyday relations between women and men in marriage, dating, raising children, the workplace, etc? In what ways do you think they have remained unchanged? Have the changes differed by race and class?
GM: A lot has changed in daily relations between men and women, thanks to the many ways in which the women's movement has illuminated intimate and personal inequalities and their connections to public inequality. It took a long time and relentless struggle, but feminists have been especially successful in raising consciousness about sexualized and domestic violence and in fighting for remedies that give women a better shot at vindicating their injuries. Intimate abuse persists, to be sure, but women now have a few legal tools and social supports available to us. Other changes, such as winning rights in the workplace, have made a difference in many women's lives by giving women tools to fight discrimination and subordination. But these changes have not equalized power between men and women; nor have they de-gendered the household and caring work historically associated with women and with our inequality.
So the feminist transformation remains ongoing. The wage gap persists, for example, pushing women into economic dependency on men. Quality, affordable childcare is still not guaranteed to labor market workers, confronting family caregivers usually women -- with untenable conflicts between caring and earning. I could go on and on.
Equally important, though, are inequalities of power and resources among women. The feminist transformation can't just be about fighting inequality between the sexes. To focus only on subordination and hierarchy between women and men risks generalizing so much that we miss the deepest and most suffocating practices of gender inequality. For example, when we focus only on the wage gap between women and men, we miss the stunning effects of race in the allocation and distribution of women's income. In 1999, the median weekly earnings for white women who worked in the labor market fulltime were $483. For African American women, it was $409. For Latinas, it was $348. That means African American women earned 15 cents less on the white woman's dollar, while Latinas earned 28 cents less. The wage gap between white women and Latinas is greater than the overall gender wage gap! Also, if you compare white women's income to Black men's ($488) and Latinos' ($406), you'll see that race effectively erases the gender wage gap. This doesn't mean that the gender wage gap, driven largely by white men's earnings, isn't important. But it does mean that a feminist politics of wage equity needs to attend to the fact that the wage gap for women of color has as much to do with their racial status as it does with the fact that they are women.
Making recognition of these sorts of inequalities among women foundational to feminist analysis will force us to always ask "which women?" when we advance claims "for women." It will force us to interrogate the impact of claims "for women" on differently situated women -- such as women of color who are parenting alone whose prospects in the labor market often do not entail earning living wages, let alone wages that support the purchase of surrogate care for children.
NP: What issues do you believe that the women's movement needs to address and emphasize if it is to reclaim its vigor and its vision? And are there any issues that you think are dead-ends or mistakes for it to be taking up?
GM: For years, a big segment of the women's movement has universalized women's inequality -- presumably to accentuate commonalities that can bring women together in a mass movement. While I think that emphasizing what we have in common is important, it is simply not the case that all women are affected by the gender system in the same way. When forces that dominate a movement -- either in numbers or in privilege -- universalize rather than contextualize, they not only marginalize women who experience gender differently, but they also prescribe routes to equality that can be just as demeaning and subordinating as the inequality under which they currently live.
Reproductive rights politics, for example, has tended to define unwanted childbearing as the key reproductive aspect of women's inequality. Hence the singular focus on abortion and abortion rights. But what about women whose childbearing and children are disdained and devalued by the race and class systems? Such women might well appreciate the right to control their fertility; yet just as important is the right to enjoy it. A reproductive rights politics that fights equally for policies that ensure healthy, safe, and secure conception, bearing, and raising of children, on the one hand, as well as for abortion rights and access, on the other hand, would take us far toward putting feminism to work for all women. A reproductive rights politics that begins by recognizing that would activate the dynamic conversations and solidarities that make feminism vigorous.
A new feminist politics of work may be beginning to emerge, one that insists that all work women do is socially and economically valuable. Widespread support, at least within organized feminism, for a refundable child credit is one indication that at long last, we may be disrupting the dominant feminist assumption that the only solution to women's inequality in the family is participation in the labor market. There's a lot of work to be done, though, to translate respect for all work women do to respect for work all women do. It's going to require lots of conversation with the base of the women's movement -- all those feminist voters who supported welfare reform in 1996 -- and lots of trust-building with welfare rights groups and other poor people's advocates.
I guess my main point is that as a women's movement and as individual feminists, we need to pay much more attention to each others' inequalities, rather than constituting a politics that revolves solely around our own. "The personal is political" isn't supposed to be a license for solipsism. It's supposed to change politics by bringing intimate and interpersonal power and subordination into public debate and by making challenges to existing intimate and interpersonal relations part of political work. If we insist on a politics that responds to the multiple, simultaneous, and different inequalities that structure women's personal and public lives depending on their social location, cultural standing, and economic resources, we can forge a politics of solidarity that will not only serve the justice interests of all women but also will make the women's movement feel like it belongs to more of us.
For this reason -- to answer your question about dead ends -- I think it would be a real mistake to rev up a new Equal Rights Amendment campaign, as some in the women's movement would like to do. Women's inequality is far too complicated for a blanket constitutional promise to serve us all equally at this time. While I wish we had won the ERA in 1972 and hope that someday the Constitution will make women's equality official, I think we have come too far and have too far to go to revert to the politics of universals. We have come too far in the sense that 14th Amendment jurisprudence since 1972 has opened a place for sex equality in the Constitution -- if within limits. We have too far to go in that the Court has made it quite clear that it will only recognize intentional discrimination as constitutionally problematic. That leaves out most contemporary inequality practices which are measurably discriminatory in their effects, even if the policies and policymakers have not announced an intention to discriminate. Moreover, we have too far to go in that the hardest legal sex equality issues are the ones involving inequality visited upon some women but not all women -- where subordination occurs not because of a woman's sex but because her sex is raced, or classed, or governed by heterosexual normativity.
NP: What dangers lie in the fight for, or the winning of, an Equal Rights Amendment today?
GM: A constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination, which is what the ERA intends, will not reach intersecting inequalities -- not automatically and not without major changes in the outlook of the courts. So an ERA that is singular in its focus on generic sex discrimination runs the risk of widening and deepening inequalities among women -- between those whose inequality more readily fits prevailing notions of sex discrimination and those whose experience of sex is complicated and defined by their experiences of race, class, and sexuality.
NP: To go back for a minute to reproductive issues, are you saying that abortion rights are most important for middle class women, while the right to "healthy, safe and secure conception, bearing and raising of children" is more important for poor women in a society that disdains poor women and their children?
GM: The Court has said that a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy is a fundamental right before fetal viability and cannot be restricted by "undue burdens." (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, modifying but upholding Roe v. Wade). But just as Clarence Earl Gideon was deprived of his fundamental right when he was tried without counsel because he could not afford to pay for one, a woman is deprived of her fundamental right if she must complete a pregnancy because she cannot afford to pay for an abortion. When rights are not equally available in practice, rights are reduced to privileges for people with resources. So, securing the abortion right and securing poor women's equality both require that abortion services be provided to all who seek them.
My complaint is not that the right to abortion is a middle class right, but rather that the mainstream women's movement's focus on abortion as the sum total of reproductive rights -- and as the synecdoche for feminism -- excludes equally critical reproductive rights, such as the right to choose children. Middle class white women's revolt against compulsory reproduction, like their revolt against compulsory domesticity, is a crucial struggle along the way to gender equality. It's not the only reproductive struggle, though. Poor women, especially women of color, who often bear children under clouds of suspicion and disdain and whose bodies often have been sites of compulsory fertility control also have struggled for the right to bear and raise their own children.
NP: Everyone to the left of Attila the Hun pays lip service to the idea that we have to be concerned about issues of race, class, and gender. To what extent do you think the left has ignored gender in fact and to what extent do you think the women's movement has short-changed issues of race and class?
GM: Who is "the left" here? And does the women's movement not overlap with it? If you mean the male/marxist left, well, yeah, gender hasn't fared too well in its politics. Nor have race/class fared well in the politics of the dominant women's movement. It's less a problem of not noticing race, or class, or gender, than of not doing the hard work of figuring out how each interacts with the others. I think that most people who care about democracy and equality recognize that race, class, and gender are crucial modes of subordination. But some on "the left," including feminists, view some modes of subordination as residual or secondary to the one they most care about or are analytically committed to. Or they see race, class, and gender as additive but not mutually constitutive. This can marginalize allies and constituents whose lived experiences testify to the simultaneity of all three. It also can marginalize issues or problems that arise at the conjuncture of all three, such as the welfare police state. Or it can produce prescriptions from the vantage point of only one inequality, which invariably suffocate people who live in the belly of all three.
NP: In your previous writings you have argued that one of the causes for the failure of the mainstream women's movement to protest Clinton's welfare reform was the ambivalence of many feminists about poor women staying home to raise children. This argument prompts us to ask two questions.
First, was it the broader tendency to soft-pedal criticisms of the Clinton Administration that at least partly explains the failure of women's organizations to mobilize protest against "welfare reform"?
GM: I really don't have a definitive answer to this question. My impression, as I indicated earlier, is that while many feminist women's organizations merely whispered their opposition to the welfare reform bill, some actually did take a loud and visible stand. Where all organizations failed, including the outspoken opponents, was in mobilizing their constituencies to oppose punitive welfare reform. We had an elite-base chasm, where many women at the base -- members of NOW or contributors to NOW-LDEF, for example -- supported the idea of pushing welfare mothers into the labor market and agreed with Clinton and the Republicans that something should be done to stop "illegitimacy." These views were not inconsistent with their white, middle class version of feminism -- a version that calibrated independence in terms of labor market attachment and that equated equality with fertility control, not with the right to have and care for children. To some degree, the national women's organizations that did oppose the punitive welfare bill were out of step with their constituencies. This is a bit of a problem for democratic politics within a movement. The only way around it is for the leadership to sustain dialogue with its base to try to disrupt the racism and solipsism that lured some feminists into the war against poor women. The welfare law comes up for re-authorization next year. I'm hoping that this dialogue has taken place, and that feminism in the broadest sense will mobilize at least to reform TANF, if not to win welfare justice.
It's essential that feminists beyond the beltway rise to this challenge. The leaders of organized feminism can do a lot. But they cannot counter the voices of millions of feminist voters who signal their congressmembers what will or won't sell from Westchester to Santa Monica. So long as most white congressmembers -- including feminist congresswomen -- think that abortion rights are the be-all and end-all of the women's movement, welfare justice will remain out of reach.
NP: Our second related question is this. You have powerfully criticized mainstream women's organizations for devaluing poor women's at-home care-giving. Some argue that women, including poor women, as well as society, derive substantial benefit from women having work experiences outside the home. Taking into account the need to make "participation in the labor market equitable and rewarding for women, especially mothers," ["Feminists, Welfare Reform, and Welfare Justice," Social Justice, vol. 25, no. 1, Spring 1998] do you think the argument for work outside the home has merit?
GM: The issue isn't whether women benefit from work outside the home. Some women do benefit -- when they are paid a fair and living wage, receive medical and other benefits, can find reliable childcare, don't have to put up with sexual harassment or other forms of discrimination, and enjoy their co-workers and/or the work they do. Nor is the issue whether work outside the home is "good for" women. For those women who benefit from it, it must be. The issue, to my mind, is whether feminism is just another opportunity for some women to tell other women how to lead their lives. If we believe in women's equality, then we should promote policies to ensure that all women have the rights and resources not only to be fairly rewarded in the labor market but also to decide how to balance market work and family needs. Poor women who are compelled into the labor market because middle class women (and men) think it's good for them are not equal; they are pawns in the white, middle class feminist struggle against domesticity. In addition, policies based on the idea that any job is better than caring for dependent family members not only vitiates vocational choice (usually, but not only, of women) but also negates the value of the family work women have performed for centuries. Until we value the very work for which women historically have been declared unequal, no woman will have achieved equality. And until we value the work that poor women, especially women of color, do for their own families, racialized inequalities among women will continue to sandbag gender justice.
NP: Some would argue that one of the crucial aspects of racial and economic oppression is that it denies women the opportunity for rewarding work outside the domestic sphere. It's not clear from what you've said so far whether you think that practically all women would benefit from work outside the home, if that work were decent, harassment-free, and provided benefits, childcare, etc. At times you seem to suggest that you don't believe this. Today, of course, the labor market doesn't offer poor women productive and fairly remunerated work, but that problem could be addressed by focusing on changing, through regulation and social policy, the nature of the jobs that are offered. It's clear that you support such changes in regulation and social policy. The question is, do you think that such work is essential for full personal development, or that women who never work outside the home can be just as liberated as those who do?
GM: Because they are women, because they are of color, and because they are women of color, African American, Asian American, Indian, and Latina women certainly have been denied choices, opportunities, just rewards, and respect in their work outside the home. A key goal of any equality movement therefore must be to transform the labor market to root out its gender, racial, and racialized gender structures, ideologies and environments. It is just as important, however, to recognize that women of color historically have been assigned to work outside their own homes -- to work in other women's homes as well as in the labor market. A crucial aspect of women of color oppression has been the denial of respect and legitimacy as family workers. The ideology of domesticity did not tether women of color to their own homes as it did middle class white women. A feminist politics that focuses solely on liberation from domesticity will always be skewed against those women of color who also want to win the right to meet their responsibilities to their families.
I don't think that many women who receive meager under-the-table wages cleaning other families' homes or who work in sweatshops or who are enrolled in workfare would say that such work is the touchstone of their liberation or essential for their full personal development. Moreover, no woman is liberated who is not permitted to make her own decisions about family work and wage work. No woman is liberated who is judged by everyone else as less-than-fully-developed because of the kind and place of work she does.