Blog the Eighth

The two responses to Lisa Belkin's article that I found after I managed to stop seething with heteronormativity and class-based rage were this Columbia Journalism Review stub and this excellent piece about Silda Spitzer. My principle problem with the argument, which is something that both of the responses talk about and bell hooks does an excellent job of highlighting in FIFE, is that only upper-class women with partners in lucrative jobs even have the choice of "Opting Out".

And as Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about in The F Word, the "Opt-Out" phenomenon is not equally accessible to everyone because not all women have experienced the same access to education that enables you to be a person with a Masters' choosing to leave the workplace in the first place- Women of Color are far less likely to have had the access and support to get that degree in the first place, and are more likely to need the money from their job to support themselves due to the massive racially motivated wage gap that compounds their difficulty as women in an unequal work environment.

And then there's the part where none of the articles even mention the possibility of women not being married to a man who can support them, or even a man at all. Because single mothers and lesbians don't exist, don't you know. [/rage]