Feminism

Well, it’s comment of the week, really, because it feeds into a topic that’s greatly in the news this week, lone parents and benefit cuts. It’s been announced that in the UK women with children as young as 7 will be forced into low-paid jobs or face benefit cuts, emphasis on the women (I don’t see any mention of men). The blame culture strikes again, setting ‘good’ women against ‘bad’.

So this, from kactus, who’s been guest-blogging at Feministe, was sytartlingly apropios:

kactus Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

I was going to ask the same question as anonplease. You’re literate, well-spoken-I can only assume it’s bias against your colour and disability.

Actually, I’m white, JPlum. I do have a mixed-race daughter, whose picture I plaster all over my blog, and I live in a mostly-black community, but no, actually being white has helped me navigate the welfare system much more than my sisters in poverty who are struggling against the racism in the system.

Look, being well-spoken and educated is no fail-safe protection against poverty. Neither is being white. Although those things help, they are not a guarantee of a middle-class life. I was raised working class, which used to mean something. Now it means almost nothing, except that you still have illusions about what used to be called upward mobility.

I have a quote on my blog from Johnnie Tillmon, a great early welfare rights activist. She says that welfare is like a traffic accident: it can happen to anybody. But especially it happens to women, which is why welfare is a women’s issue.

Women go from middle class comfort to unpredictable poverty all the time, just from something so simple as losing their partners, either to death or divorce or other calamity. As long as the wage gap between women and men is so huge this will continue to be an issue. Women raise children alone all the time, without the benefit of child support. Women often end up working low-wage, dead-end jobs. Women lose jobs because of their children.

Poverty is absolutely a women’s issue. That is why it is a feminist issue, and a human rights issue. And in the end it really doesn’t matter why somebody is poor, or what brought them there. What matters is that it could happen to every single one of us. One slip and bam–we’re in that traffic accident called welfare.

I’m literate and well-spoken too and I’ve been on welfare too: intelligence is no predictor of misfortune and being well-spoken does not negate the effects of institutional misogynism – in fact if you are well-spoken and literate you are considered to be all the more culpable for your own poverty by the ‘caring’ agencies.

This overt equation of poverty with moral failure in the US is becoming more obvious in the UK too as Labour’s neoliberal economic policies create an ever-widening poverty gap by giving tax breaks to the richest and making life ever harder for the poorest.

It made me livid yesterday to listen to the posh voices of the bourgeois ‘left-wing’ think tank wonks on Radio 4 , talking about Labour’s swingeing, unfair cuts to lone parent benefits as taking a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to ‘recalcitrant’ mothers, as though women raising small children alone were lazy, shiftless animals.

Why is it that motherhood is a worthy full-time job for them, the smug middle-class Yummy Mummy marrieds, with their 4X4 baby buggies, Tumble Tots and their insatiable Daily Mail-fed terror of the icky urban poor – but not for mothers bringing up children alone?

Aren’t less well-off children entitled to the same quality of parenting as those born to the luckily well-off? Why does addition of a man to the equation make their children more worthy of a decent upbringing?

Is the government saying that married mothers are morally more worthy than unmarried? It certainly sounds like it. You’d think the Labour sisterhood’d be up in arms, wouldn’t you?

Hello….? Harriet Harman? Anyone?

Nope, didn’t think so. Labour sisterhood never was for shit, except as it furthered certain women’s political careers, as I and many other ex-Labour members can testify. That those women would now sit back, mum, while the Treasury thumps the most overtaxed, most vulnerable families in society, the people who voted for them to be where they are because they thought Labour and Labour wonen would be a voice for women and children…

I was a good lone parent. I did everything I was supposed to, even though I was sick – I went back tio University to got a degree, I went on training courses, I took low-paid jobs to get on the ladder. I’m not unique in this, it’s what a lot of women do, because we have to and we don’t like being un-self-supporting.

When I first graduated I worked 3 years for 60-70 hour weeks for nothing getting an anti-poverty campaigning and advice agency off the ground and funded, a] because I was committed to it, having seen myself what an impenetrable maze bureaucracy can be for the uninitiated b] because legal aid is hard to get and c] because I knew that doing it myself was the only way I’d ever get a legal job . I know because I tried but no-one wants someone with a patchy medical history and I can understand why. No problems with jobs as a part-time temp, yes, but that doesn’t feed children or pay the rent…

Then a man was given the paid post I raised the money for, over my head, because of local political infighting, aka the sexual appetites of prominent Labour councillor’s partner. I walked out and the organisation went tits up later when a deal was done by the very same councilllors for the land it stood on.

It knocked me right back on my heels, three year’s hard work down the tubes, but I did manage to get an antipoverty strategy put into local council policy, albeit briefly, which is something, I suppose – every decision made by the council had to be considered in the light it would have on those on low incomes. But not for long, cheers, New Labour. Once back in power they always forget who put them there. Lone mothers. Poor people, people like me ho’ve seen the injustice poverty causes.

Blaming lone mothers for their own poverty and accusing them of being leeches on society iis very useful to the government because it enables the real plight of the poor to be disregarded. But poverty can hit very quicly and few women are immune.

Say you have a husband, a house, a mortgage and two children under 5: you’ve left your job to go part-time, or you’ve had to leave to look after the children. One day your husband just ups and leaves you for someone else, shutting down all the bank accounts, taking the car and barring access to money. As happened to my sister one Christmas Eve.

How do you feed your kids while coping with the aftermath? But milk, or nappies? How do you pay the childminder to go to your part-time job? What if you have to leave your job, what then?

These are the current UK benefit rates for a lone parent on means-tested benefits:

Lone parent
under 18 35.65/46.85
18 or over 59.15

Dependent children 47.45

Family premium 16.43

Max total 170 pounds, plus housing and council benefit if in rented accommodation (nothing at all if in your own home, you’ll have to find the mortgage payment out of the 170) say, around another 100 pounds a week if not living in London, less elsewhere.

That gives a maximum weekly income of around 270 pounds a week to find everything out of – food, electric, gas, rent, travel costs, school lunches, school uniforms, books… It certainly looks generous on the face of it, but not when you consider what has to come out of it and that the national average weekly household income is 570 pounds. Lone parents must do all the parenting that two parents do on around half the income.

Lone parents are disproportionately women and for some reason people think women can cope with poverty, that we don’t need a decent income, that we’ll manage, because that’s what we do – and that our lot in life is to just shut up and take it, wait until someone deigns to hand us some charity and then we must be duly grateful and publicly so.

What is conveniently forgotten is that these meagre benefit entitlements have been paid for several times over by ours and our parents’ and grandparents’ National Insurance contributions and will be by the future contributions of our children, should they be able to get a job and not be trapped in poverty.

This attitude illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of the welfare state: the Brown government, as the Tories did before it, would like the public to think that social security is charity, and that those seeking alms from the charity can somehow be sorted into the ‘deserving’ and undeserving’. You can see how well this has worked by reading the comments to this Scotsman article onthe benefit cuts, of which this is a representative example:

I am in complete harmony with the principle that individuals should be accountable for their actions, and see no reason why I should help someone to raise a child if they are not prepared to work, even if it’s part time. The welfare system in this country was never set up to fund lifestyles, and sadly that’s basically what it does now, fund lazy eegits, criminals and slappers, and other wasters.

Delinquent fathers is another topic of irritation, and we should be relentless in finding them and forcing them to contribute to the childs up bringing expenses.
Rant over!

:

State benefits are not charity, they are an arrangement between the citizen and the state to provide support out of work in return for contributions from income when in work. Why? So that no more generations of children would be raised in poverty. That was why we voted Labour.

The British media would have the public believe that lone parents get more benefit than couples: not so –

Couple

both under 18 35.65/46.85/70.70
one under 18 46.85/59.15/92.80
both aged 18+ 92.80

Even though lone mothers have to do the work of two parents on less money iand less time and the cost of running a household is the same for a lone parent as it is for a couple.

Instead of enabling lone parents (and isn’t it odd how the public discourse has slipped back from ‘lone parents’ to ‘single mothers’? – talk about feminising the situation for blame purposes) to raise their children in a way which does not exclude them from participating in society – after all children do not choose the families they are born into, why should they suffer? – the less morally worthy single mothers must be made to work and work hard for their charitable handout, even if it means spending time that should be spent raising children properly in filling out constant, pointless forms and doing empty busywork preparing for jobs they won’t get anyway because there are a thousand younger, more qualified new graduates or recent economic migrants with no children or other baggage right in line before them.

The jobs that are available to lone parents don’t pay enough to cover the loss of housing benefit or are in low-paid shift work, or on-demand hours, requiring the most minutely arranged time-management, transport and hugely expensive and precarious childcare arrangements for very little reward after direct and indirect taxation are taken into account.

And where’s all the extra childcare to come from? The government is planning that schools should become child-care centres and children should attend from 7 am till 6pm, with drastically reduced vacation time. I wonder who’ll be forced to apply for the childcare jiobs at these childcare centrres? Lone parents forced out to work…

We’re building a nicely circular low-paid system of poor women looking after other women’s children while having to put their own into… paid childcare. But hey, at least they’re not scrounging.

With all this in mind it doesn’t help at all that that women who do currently, temporarily, have money and security look down on lone parents as moral failures. No – we were sick, or our partner turned out to be an asshole, or the condom broke or the pill didn’t work or we got made redundant. Some of which has happened to me at some point as it can happen to any parent. That’s the whole point of the benefit system: there but for the grace of whatever deity or randomness go you.

And don’t talk to me about relative poverty. If you can’t pay your bills you can’t pay your bills whether in pounds, dinar or Zimbabwean hyper-currency.

A family is a family, one parent or two and deserves state support. families are what makes the state – but as Gordon Brown so constantly reiterates, it’s only ‘hard-working’ families. Well, lone parents are hard-working too: they’re working hard at raising the next genration of taxpayers that will help fund the currently comfortable’s pensions.

It’s they who are the bedrock of a very unequal society, doing all the shit unpaid jobs no-one else will, for bugger all reward except the blame of the tabloids for causing all the ills of society.

But blame is useful it enables the currently comfortable to ignore real poverty, to feel smug, to have someone to despise: not only that, it sets women against one another and is yet another way of dividing and ruling.