Women Breadwinners

Times have defiantly changed when it comes to women in the workforce. In earlier times women did the house work; the cleaning, cooking, taking care of the kids, and making sure they took care of their husbands by having dinner on the table when he got home from work. Now that times are changing and women are establishing themselves in the workforce a lot of men are not the main provider anymore. More and more women are the breadwinners of the families and we are hearing more about "stay at home dad." These husbands take the role that women use to have. They do the cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the kids. One thing I don't know is how this effects them? Does it bother them? Do they feel "less of a man" or are they happy to be the stay at home dad? Does it effect their marriage or does it not change anything. I know many men at first didn't respect women in the workforce as they should. They thought maybe they didn't deserve certain jobs or they couldn't handle it. (None of that is true obviously women can hold their own, as they have proved) How many women compared to earlier times are the breadwinners and what are their husbands feelings toward this. Also, I wonder if women like being the breadwinner or if they feel like their husbands should step it up. I know growing up in my house my father was the breadwinner, but has always told me since day one to support myself. He always says don't depend on a man to take care of you. So I have always planned to be very successful and make my own. I don't think I would mind being the breadwinner, so hopefully I find a husband that doesn't mind being the stay at home dad and take on the household responsibilities. I don't see myself giving up a career. But this might bother many women and men. I want to know if it causes psychological problem in the male? If they become depressed. I feel that a lot of men would. Then you throw kids into the mix and which child steps it up? The son or daughter. I feel the daughter would just from watching her mother. I think to a certain degree each daughter takes traits their mother has and son follows the father. (not in all cases of course) Which child is more goal driven? More motivated? Maybe the women being the breadwinner does change things, but I feel that it does and could cause problems in a marriage.

College, the over-priced ticket up the ladder

What is a college education now a days? You're told a 4 years excursion, where you'll have the best 4 years of your life. An environment to find yourself. Where you'll have an (insert high number)% job placement guarantee after you graduate. that college graduates make hundreds of thousands more income compared to non-college graduates. well, the college education is an over-rated expense that someone could by-pass. if they are focused and savvy enough they could rise above anyone who obtains a college education. in the 4 years that someone spends in college, or many times even longer for some people, a person could gain invaluable experience in the field working and honing their skills. instead of throwing away thousands of dollars of their own money or their parents money, they could save up that money to place a down payment onto a house or into their own business. since many college programs focus on research over practical experience many collegiate graduates get thrown into the working world really un-prepared to face it. AveQ states this trouble quite nicely, "what do you do with a BA in english?what is my life going to be? 4 years of college, and plenty of knowledge, has earned me this useless degree. i can't pay the bills yet, because i have no skills yet." instead of throwing away money at college, the high school graduate should focus on expanding their skills through apprenticeships and expanding their social networking skills.

Precious Dreams

The film, Precious, depicts a poor young black girl in urban America as she dreams of escape. Precious finds herself in destructive and abusive family life and escapes by imagining she is a famous starlet loved by all. She dreams of being white and thin. But she does little to escape her situation until she meets a dedicated teacher willing to love Precious as she is. Precious reflects the desires and disparities of the lower class.. Precious' survival may be dependent upon the images she sees on television and magazines. The plight of the lower class is designed to be self-perpetuating and fosters not only continued poverty but low self-esteem, depression, crime, fear, hatred, violence and a multitude of other societal ills. Class plays a role in the circumstances Precious faces but also in the treatment she receives from her family. Her economic status simply aids in the perpetuation of her class distinction. Precious has no hope of moving above middle class and being accepted. But it may also be said that she has no chance of moving into the middle class either.

What really makes up social class?

I particularly liked reading this book only because Bell Hooks addresses particular issues that many of the U.S. population are ignorant to. She writes about how we should combine race and gender into class. Where We Stand: Class Matters addresses the same issues we have been studying in other books and films but it is different in that it is told from a different point of view.

In the beginning of her book she talks about poverty. She says that “poverty in the white mind is always primarily black” and “the black poor are everywhere.” At one time I even thought this way until I saw different. Cincinnati in particular has particularly painted that picture on poverty. I have been in Over the Rhine, Avondale, and Covington and all these places have multiple races and genders that make up poverty.

I have volunteered at a halfway house, soup kitchen and drop in center and it was surprising to me to see so many different types of people that come into these places. While over in Covington I got to survey the homeless and most of them were white males who had been living in poverty for at least five years.

I found Chapter Six, Being Rich, interesting to read. I never thought about television, newspapers and magazines as ways to identify with class. I now think into more about what is shown and what I watch on TV. I believe it is important to have sitcoms, soap operas and talk shows that identify a variety of social classes. It allows multiple people to identify with particular class and learn more about the classes they aren’t in. What is shown on Television isn’t always accurate to what really happens in reality in the different classes.

Hooks suggest that many of us should start thing about class in a different perspective. I believe it may be a better way of getting somewhere in our future but the chances of it happening are slim. This book highlighted some of the same issues I have studied and discussed in most of my courses for social work.

...see opening quote...

(my title wouldnt fit)
"Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I'm not perfect -and I don't live to be- but before you start pointing fingers... make sure you hands are clean!" Bob Marley

That is one of my favorite quotes ever because I feel that it is so true! We are always so quick to judge those around us, but never seem to recognize or own up to our flaws. This book completely picked apart and made perfect sense of our ignorance. We continuously hear about the particular "ism's" that infect our culture, racism this or sexism that, yet she somehow cuts through all the social trappings and gets to the heart of it. She describes class in a way that seems so simple to see, and yet so foreign to my mind. I was blown away with the pin point accuracy of her thoughts and feel she was able to write this because she saw past the social constraints and looked at the real "problem" with society, Class.

I believe that the world today is separated by classes and people are judged by what social class they fall under. bell hooks talks about how women are treated differently by how they dress and where they go to school. She brings up topics that society does not want to deal with. She did a wonderful job analyzing and describing the way things have changed and stayed the same since she was a child.

I felt strong about the chapter dealing with real estate, and how it is manipulated by "desirables" to keep "the undesirables" out. It is sad to think that you can put a dollar amount on the color of a person's skin. I felt ashamed at times, thinking the same things perhaps at one time or another. I think it is so disgusting that we really do seem to need for others to be poor so we can feel like we have success, it should not be like that; we should want to help those around us. This reading has helped me grow as a person and it opened me up to the ways of the world.

I appreciated her chapters on living simply, and think it is an appropriate and bold call to make in a world where ‘stuff’ and ‘achievement’ are social symbols of significance. I found this description of class from page 103, by Rita Mae Brown, to be important: "Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act." I know that these characteristics have come up many times in our discussions throughout this course. If we all really do believe this to be the definition of class, why don’t we take all of them into consideration as we judge those around us?

Constants are Changing

I'd like to begin with an apology: this becomes heavily political. It's sort of hard to avoid politics when discussing anything written by bell hooks (sic). I'm really not trying to bait anyone.
Bell hooks, an activist in every sense of the word, set out to accomplish a great deal when writing Where We Stand: Class Matters. She talks of class being the underlying issue, more prevalent than racism, more important than sexism, more life-changing than religion. To wit; "Ultimately, more than any previous movement for social justice, the struggle to end poverty could easily become the civil rights issue with the broadest appeal -- uniting groups that have never before taken a stand together...." (120) This quote closes out chapter 11, titled "White Poverty: The Politics of Invisibility," an impassioned rant against the idea that hate and poverty is monopolized by any race. Racism, while far from eradicated, now creates far less a stigma than class.
Do you agree? Is racism less important than class in society today? For my part, I'd have to say that it is. This book was written in 2000 -- how much has changed since then? Consider the angst and rage against the Bush administration's TARP fund, or the Obama administration's rescuing of what amounts to the entire American auto industry. When I spoke with people regarding these actions as they were happening, the anger was directed at the idea that the banks were too big to fail, or in other words, too important to fail. The government was guaranteeing their continued existence in spite of the free-market principles upon which this country was founded. They were more important to America than Americans.
Hooks is not so old a woman; at 57, she lived through the 60s and 70s and the vast cultural changes that took place, but not the Great Depression, which shaped an entire generation's view on the world and personal liberty. The economic recession in which we now find ourselves is creating new challenges to ideology, and highlighting class in a way that hasn't been seen since the Depression. Yet, at the very least, America had an enemy to focus on during those horrible years. Barring a major terrorist attack in the coming years, or a seemingly impossible return to our former economic glory, America is seeing class highlighted in a way it has never experienced, and will continue to see that trend play out as the Obama presidency and its aftermath unfold.
Hooks seems to agree. In chapter 5, "The Politics of Greed," she says, "Indeed, as a nation where the culture of narcissism reigns supreme, where I, me and mine are all that matters, greed becomes the order of the day. While the sixties and seventies can be characterized as a time in the nation when there was a widespread sense of bounty that could be shared precisely because excess was frowned upon, the eighties and nineties are the years where fear of scarcity increased even as a culture of hedonistic excess began to fully emerge."
Harsh criticism, to be sure. She even goes on to address the cocaine and crack booms of the eighties as a measure of keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. This is a debate that we've had in modern culture innumerable times -- people begin to believe that the only way to move up in class is to start selling drugs. A young, poor black man sees no opportunities in what has been touted as the "real world" of American society, and looks elsewhere for ideas.
I can't say one way or another whether this is truly the case; I didn't live through the progressive decades, although I did make it through the late eighties and early nineties. Certainly there is no question that conservatism and individualistic ideas have pervaded for some time, and several events in American politics bear this idea out -- the perceived failure of the Carter administration, the election of Ronald Reagan, the fall of Soviet Communism, the Republican Revolution of 1994. One could argue that the backlash against President Obama's policies is a sign of this. Yet one could argue just as convincingly that the sixties and seventies were equally individualistic. Young people sought out a different lifestyle, one that helped them to feel whole or at peace, so to speak. Is the argument that greed is what drives recent and current political trends applicable?

To be honest, I didn't think I was going to enjoy reading this book. Hooks has a reputation that marks her as a bit... well, obnoxious. For God's sake, she uses lower-case letters in her name on purpose, just to make a point! Why do that? I still don't understand that bit. It's like the Miss versus Ms. argument -- just let it go!
But I have to admit, however, that I came away from this book with what I hesitate to call a different perspective, but certainly one that is more developed. Her tie-ins with race and class and sexism augmented some of the opinions that I held beforehand, and I frequently found myself in agreement with her opinions, and engrossed by her anecdotes.
Was it the same for you?