allowances. Furthermore, childsupport po lic ies need to be strictly enforced in order to attribute financial support of children to divorced and absent fathers. In the area of welfare, Sidel recommends simplifying the process of determination of eligibility and raising payments received to at least the poverty level. If these are serious proposals, however, their political reality needs to be considered. Their passage th ro ug h C ong ress would require massive mobilization behind them. Why have women, in fact, been so passive towards their declining conditions? How can men and women be politically organized in order to make these reforms possible? Ruth Sidel does not consider these questions, and she does not connect her proposals with a women’s or a people’s movement. Thus, her analysis ends up being a report, and her recommendations fail to become a political agenda. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in The Lesser Life, also argues that women need legislation to upgrade their lives as workers and mothers. She claims that a family policy, including prenatal care, maternity leave and childcare, is essential. Unlike Ruth Sidel, however, Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes a politically conscious book, aware of the need for women’s political power to achieve desired reforms and legislation. She critically examines the sixties Women’s Movement in relation to what is happening to women now; judges it to be essentially flawed; and suggests alternative strategies. Hewlett’s analysis starts with the observations that in 1984, one out of every four women earned less than $10,000 a year when working full time, and that 45 percent of working women took prime respons ib ility for themselves and their children. While the median income for fuIlt im e emp loyed women was $14,479, similarly employed men earned $23,218. She asks why such a wide wage gap between men and women persists, when in fact, American women are the best educated in the world. It is true, she admits, that women now hold more executive and professional positions than a decade ago, but she adds that the wage gap in these positions has widened, rather than narrowed, during this time. Women continue to occupy the lower levels of the managerial pyramid. So, Hewlett wonders, why does the genderbased wage gap persist and grow? She recognizes two fundamental conditions: the persistence of occupational segregation and the continuation of family responsibilities on women .She suggests that women’s success in challenging occupational segregation depends upon their changing role in the family. So far, however, women have not been able to change the traditional division of labor at home. After all, what are the incentives for men to take on genuine responsibility for housework and childcare? The declining state of the economy exacerbates the competition in the marketplace and makes men reluctant to take on home responsibilities. Men feel that they must do more on their jobs to retain or advance their positions. Women, of course, have no choice: they have to be good at their jobs, despite enormous responsibilities at home. Women’s double-duty handicaps them in the marketplace. Furthermore, women receive no social assistance in being workers and mothers at the same time. The United States has the weakest family support system and daycare assistance among all the Western industrial nations. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized country with no statutory maternity leave. Most countries guarantee women leave, cash benefits and job protection after childbirth. Hewlett makes the case that the lack of maternity provisions in the United States especially handicaps women as wage earners. The sixties Women’s Movement must bear some responsibility for this state of affairs, Hewlett suggests. She contrasts American feminism with the social feminism of Western Europe. The sixties Women’s Movement aspired for two objectives: equal rights and the emancipation of female subjectivity from male domination. Regarding the women who began to struggle for the latter objective, insisting that the personal is political, emale consciousness, because o f its proclivity fo r nurture, peace, feelings and relations, points us to a female future, i f we are going to have a future at all. she writes . .the participants were too privileged, their concerns were too private, and the groups were too ephemeral for them to develop a unified public voice.” Regarding the former, she contends that the struggle for equal rights in America engendered organizations such as The National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and the Women’s Equity Action that developed strategies isolating women’s issues from mainstream politics. The struggle for equality remained formal and abstract, unable to deliver materially and concretely. In contrast, Western European women defined their emancipation more concretely and struggled to change their material conditions as workers and mothers. As a result, their material conditions are better than American women’s, enabling European women to move more effectively towards equality. Her figures on Sweden are impressive. In Sweden, women are entitled to nine months of maternity leave with 90 percent of their salary, plus an unpaid leave of six months with job protection. Husbands are also eligible for leave during the birth of children. Sweden also has extensive and high quality childcare and a host of family services that aid women in competing effectively in the marketplace. In 1980, while women in the United States made only 65 percent of the wages of men, Swedish women earned 81 percent of the wages of Swedish men. The British and Italian statistics are not as impressive, but they support her case: that women compared with men are better off materially in Western Europe than they are in the United States. Hewlett is critical of the American Women’s Movement on several accounts. First, since it is primarily concerned with formal equality and regards women generically, it is unable to acknowledge class and race differences among women and to recognize that oppression devolves differently on different women. For most women oppressed by class and race, the discussion and politics of gender oppression in isolation are not concrete enough. Second, she claims that American feminism puts the cart before the horse, focusing on raising consciousness rather than struggling to change social conditions; in fact, it deflects from social change by exam in ing p riva te re la t ions rather than the public domain. Third, it sees gender as a dynamic between specific men and women, dividing women among themselves, since women have a va rie ty of re la t ions to men. Fourth, the rejection of women’s dependence on men, family, and motherhood, claimed to be essential to the realization of equality, excludes the ma jority of women. Fifth, it tends to define equa lity independent of and often in contradiction to wife-and- motherhood. Yet, 90 percent of women have children before the end of their childbearing years. These women are made to feel that they must choose between equality and their families. Hew lett’s crit ic ism s of the W om e n ’ s M o vem e n t have emerged within the Movement itself. Her charge that feminism is hostile to fam ily and motherhood is being confronted. Most women, even those who, in the m id-s ixties, sought independence from family life and motherhood, ended up with families and children. This leads to the double burden of women. Feminist writers are reconsidering their previous rejection of family life and children. Betty Friedan, in The Second Stage, contends that women in the' sixties went overboard in rejecting family and motherhood. Zillah Eisenstein considers this issue more systematically in Feminism and Sexual Equality. The fact that Hewlett does not consider these developments within feminism makes her discussion seem hostile to feminism, rather than being a contr ibu t ion to an on-go ing reassessment. Having c rit iqued American Feminism, Hewlett makes an important observation, that it has divided women into two hostile camps: on one side there are the women who reject domesticity, champion independence and liberation; and on the other side, there are the women who closely identify themselves with family and motherhood, but who are also wage earners because of economic reasons. Their conditions are more or less the same, yet they feel opposed to one another. According to Hewlett, the reason for this is to be found in the feminist preoccupations with formal equality and women’s control of their bodies, issues that do not confront the material and concrete conditions of the majority of women. These women require adequate maternity leave and reliable daycare if they are to successfully move towards equality. Yet feminism, according to Hewlett, remains indifferent to these concerns, which in turn, isolates the majority of women from the Movement, undercutting its potential for delivering concrete benefits to women. Hewlett’s analysis and recommendations should be examined seriously by feminists. It would benefit women and unify them more successfully, if feminists were to agitate actively for maternity and daycare rights. All feminists need to support the maternity leave legislation that is being sponsored by Representatives Pat Schroeder and James Klein. This bill provides for four months of leave for the mother or father, without pay—it guarantees job security without any cash benefits. Therefore, it should be viewed as the first step towards giving women a longer maternity leave and an adequate financial compensation. Of course, a stronger legislation than the Schroeder/Klein Bill would require the political mobilization of women in large numbers. We must ask ourselves why we do not have it, especially at a time when women have been losing ground both economically and socially. Why are we so depoliticized? Has the Movement’s rhetoric satisfied us, despite the failure to generate change at the national level? To seek answers to these questions, we need to examine the larger dynamics of American life, the breakdown 12 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987
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