It’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.
For centuries under common law, wives and daughters were the property of the family patriarch or, upon his death, the closest relative with a penis. Whatever was theirs was his, and even more importantly, he oversaw his wife’s most valuable asset—her womb. In early medical thought, a womb was seen as fertile ground in need of guarding with fences to establish property rights, with her to be plowed and planted with seed, quite literally semen.
Without her bearing the next generation of males, men had no successor for his business or his patch of land. No successor meant the end of a fortune, a castle, a pasture or a hut. Heads of households controlled mating and whether a child would live in the household or not. Though rarely done, a woman’s divorcing her spouse resulted in the children being taken away from her to be in his sole custody—as the children which were his by law as the product of his seed, grown in his womb property that was legally fenced in.
We thought such laws and cultural metaphors were behind us. Women’s rights under U.S. jurisprudence seemed well established after more than a century of legal wrangling. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for a married woman’s right to inherit and own property, which was won in 1858. It laid the groundwork that implied women themselves were more than property, if not fully citizens yet.
Though rarely done, a woman’s divorcing her spouse resulted in the children being taken away from her to be in his sole custody—as the children which were his by law as the product of his seed, grown in his womb property that was legally fenced in. We thought such laws and cultural metaphors were behind us.
Little by little women won the right to an education, the right to keep her own paycheck or have a profession, the right to sit on a jury, the right to vote in elections, and by 1974, the right to open a bank account without a male co-signer.
But the Texan cowboys of today have a different idea in mind—in September, a law came into effect in the state that put a bounty on women’s wombs. The men reclaimed property rights by building a time-fence around women who seek an abortion, shutting the gate on her freedom of choice at six weeks, and calling on anyone who feels the need to control women’s reproductive agency to sue her abortion providers.
Mississippi and 26 other states stand ready to round up American women seeking abortions with what are called trigger laws – state abortion bans that will come into effect immediately in the case that the federal law changes. Legal experts predict that this year SCOTUS may very well set aside 50 years of precedent set by one of its most famous rulings, Roe v. Wade that established that a woman’s unwanted pregnancy could potentially result in a “distressful life and future.”
A later case in 1992, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, went further by stating that abortion rights were needed if women were to be equal participants in the nation’s economic and social life. The stakes are women’s civil rights as citizens, surely, but also financial rights. With the USDA setting the cost of raising a child born in 2015 to college age at $233,610, trigger and womb-fence laws will trap many women in what is called the “informal economy.” It’s a polite phrase meaning, frankly, poverty.
In September, a Texas law came into effect that put a bounty on women’s wombs. The men reclaimed property rights by building a time-fence around women who seek an abortion, shutting the gate on her freedom of choice at six weeks.
Ironically, these setbacks in American women’s rights come nearly hand-in-hand with a call to honor the global economy’s “informal” workers around the world. Darren Walker, the president of Ford Foundation, and Sally Roever, the international coordinator at Women in Informal Employment, wrote an op-ed this past June in Time magazine comparing the world’s informal workers to the coal miners of the past. The majority of the 2 billion informal workers worldwide are women—about 20 percent of workers here in the U.S., and 58 percent of women globally.
What is “informal” work? It is work performed without state protections or regulations. It is ad hoc arrangements of trade and barter, self-employment, and work for cash under the table. It’s whatever a woman and her family can come up with to survive.
Walker and Roether wrote:
“Informal work is the essential service that billions of people give to a world that barely notices. These are workers who survive outside the social and labor protections that employees in the mainstream economy enjoy, doing countless invisible jobs…. Their workplaces are inside homes or out on the streets and sidewalks; they are everywhere and yet they are overlooked, forgotten, ignored.”
With the International Labour Organization (ILO) 109th Conference coming up that month, the op-ed writers expected the ILO to “demand [that] international governments and employer representatives chart a global economic recovery with the informal workforce at the center.” This sounds righteous, yet as they admitted, Tthe weak regulations and eroding labor protections of the globalized economy have contributed to grotesque inequality and concentration of wealth and the mass migrations of people desperate for economic security.”
What is “informal” work? It is work performed without state protections or regulations. It is ad hoc arrangements of trade and barter, self-employment, and work for cash under the table. It’s whatever a woman and her family can come up with to survive.
The pandemic revealed gaps in our supply-chains worldwide, and the particular vulnerabilities of working women. That was part of the reason President Biden addressed the ILO’s annual conference this year, only the third U.S. president to do so. He vowed commitment to building a global economic agenda shaped by workers and rooted in the protection of their rights. However, the speeches made at ILO and policy recommendations won’t become real until governments and transnational corporations agree to them.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest union federation that works with the ILO, is calling for a new social contract for all workers. This may take a while since the ILO, first founded in 1919, took a century to approve the first international treaty to eliminate gender-based violence and harassment on-the-job in 2019. Despite reports that dozens of countries now working on such a contract, gender-based violence and harassment in the home, or violence and harassment by the state itself isn’t part of their vision.
“Informal labor” is an economic word for work in the private world of our homes and neighborhoods, without the privileges of the traditionally male public world of the “formal” job market work receives state protections in exchange for paying taxes. Time, attention and skill are needed in both worlds of work—but the real difference between them is socioeconomic status, gender and race. These differences are only amplified in a global system dominated by mostly white male corporate wealth and global corruption.
Time, attention and skill are needed in both worlds of work—but the real difference between them is socioeconomic status, gender and race. These differences are only amplified in a global system dominated by mostly white male corporate wealth and global corruption.
Even by ILO’s international standards, the very real labor of reproduction, and the time and skill required to provision a family and maintain a home, isn’t on the table for even informal discussion. If you work in your home mending clothing for cash, under the table, that’s informal; if you are a mother cooking for your kids the food you’ve grown in a garden, that’s invisible. If you become an American mother before you are ready or can come up with a plan to raise $233,610 in the formal work world, you’ll be forced to work however you can—like 20 percent of women workers do in this country.
The bright side to this issue is women’s rising power within U.S. unions, which is a significant change from the past. Their dynamic leadership was noted last month by Bloomberg News. This is especially true in female-dominated realms of education and healthcare. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that while women overall continue to make only 80 percent of what male workers do in the formal work world, unionized women make 84 percent.
Now imagine if the women at the National Welfare Rights Union, who have long fought for wages for housework and mothering were joined by their other union sisters. Together, they can tear down a fake wall between informal and formal work—the time of our lives—and those imposed fences claiming women’s wombs as state property.
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