SOC 393: Women, Welfare, and the State

...it is, as it always has been, the daily lives of women which most directly absorb the shocks and contradictions of these mean yet widely disparate times. What women do, when they do what is most expected of them as women, is not something best organized according to the dictates of profit or capitalist market relations. Therein lies the radical potential of feminism as a oppositional politics: one which dares to fight a culture and a political system which tries to numb us into acceptance that it can fulfill our needs and desires. Why feminism? Because a feminism which is serious about the potential and obstacles to political change, and which knows that we are never outside either the personal of the cultural, still has something unique- if hardly ‘new ’- to offer. Part of that offering should be an understanding of the complexity of subjectivity, and the significance of presentation, not to mention the difficulty of arguing for a socialist economics in the present climate. The special legacy of feminism lies in its striving to keep relating the personal and cultural to the economic and political, however forbidding and precarious that enterprise may be. Why feminism? Because it’s most radical goal, both personal and collective, has yet to be realized: a world which is a better place not just for some women, but for all women