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Class Action
June 2008 E-news:
Class and Women
In this Issue
1. Women Building Bridges
2. Class and Gender - guest editor Erin Van Anglen
3. Book of the Month: Without a Net
4. Featured Articles on Class and Gender
5. Resources
6. Action of the Month
7. Take our Survey
8. Call for Zine Submissions
1. Women Building Bridges
Women comprise the majority of adults (56%) living below the poverty line in the United States. Beginning in June, Class Action will lead a two-year cross-class community project called Women Building Bridges for Economic Development and Justice that brings together congregants from four local congregational churches and consumers, Board, and staff from a local survival center to more deeply and personally address poverty and economic injustice for women in our community.
The project evolved as a direct outgrowth of the churches’ efforts to develop more engaged community service with local non-profit human service agencies, the survival center’s desire to move beyond simply providing for basic needs to working to address the causes of poverty, and Class Action’s expertise in designing and facilitating collaborations to address inequity and class issues. Through workshops, sermons, meetings, and ongoing women’s cross-class dialogue groups, values—the key to what motivates change—will be explored and common ground identified. Congregants and survival center consumers will use their new skills and new relationships to initiate an economic development project focused on creating opportunities for the survival center’s low-income women. Women Building Bridges is funded by a Seeking Common Ground grant from the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts.
2. Class and Gender
The issues of women and class have more elements and layers than could possibly fit in our E-News this month. It has already spurred us to think of more topics we could address in future issues, such as motherhood and class, and feminist theory and class. We’ve incorporated articles and resources around a few major areas such as conditions in the workplace, government and policy, and life experiences. They can help us think more about how class impacts people differently based on gender and how closing the gender gap will help us affect the economic gap.
3. Book of the Month:
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
By Michelle Tea
Review by Sheri Whatley
Without a Net is a book of essays collected and edited by feminist writer and kickass poet Michelle Tea. The essays are written by women who either grew up poor or are currently living in poverty. All give personal accounts of struggles that came up because of their experience growing up female and working class. Read more...
4. Featured Articles on Class and Women
The High Price of Beauty
by Virginia Sole-Smith
Tomi Tran works as a nail technician in Raleigh, North Carolina. She pays around $100 per week to rent a booth in a hair salon, buys all her polishes and supplies and finds her own clients, often giving free manicures at local malls and distributing fliers to drum up business. It's hard work, but Tran, 22, says it's heaven compared with her last salon job. Read More...
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Class Issues: The Bottom Line For Feminist Change?
by Karla Mantilla
So if we want women to be free from financial coercion in making life choices, especially with regard to marriage and sexual relationships, we have to find creative ways to surmount the very real effects of the deep financial chasm between women who have access to financial resources through a man and those who don't. Read More...
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A New Job Track for Single Mothers in Wyoming
by Kirk Johnson
Here in a state with the highest gap in the nation between a woman’s wage and a man’s, and a divorce rate 30 percent above the national average, some women are finding a new way to storm the economic barricades. Read More...
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Women's Philanthropy in the United States
by Elsa M. Davidson
What are the challenges facing women's philanthropy? This question in part reflects the fact that women are increasingly at the forefront of a philanthropic field that is coming to be defined as "hands-on" and issue- focused. Read More...
5. Resources
Magazine:
Off Our Backs : Women, Money and Class; Jan/Feb 2005
Websites:
Women of Color Resource Center
Institute for Women’s Policy Research
9 to 5, National Association of Working Women
Women of Color Web Sites
Women's Funding Network
Books:
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
By Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild
Read the review by Michelle Goldberg
6. Action of the Month: Support the Fair Pay Act
According to the National Organization for Women "the Fair Pay Act is really quite simple, and it does nothing new. It just gives women back the rights that the Supreme Court took away from them.
The Fair Pay Act will fix the Court's misinterpretation of Title VII and ensure that pay discrimination victims get their fair day in court. This Act will simply return us to the longstanding rule that treated each and every discriminatory paycheck as a new act of discrimination.
It's sad enough that women are still only paid 77 cents or less to men's dollar, even though civil rights laws banned wage discrimination over four decades ago. The Supreme Court's decision could push back much of the progress that women have been making in closing the wage gap."
Go to our Action Page to learn more about this act and how you can help support its passage.
7. Take our Survey
How has your gender affected your class experience?
Submit a response here. Read other survey responses here.
8. Class Action Zine - Call for Submissions
Class Action is publishing our second Zine and we need your help! Do you have thoughts, drawings, cartoons, poetry or any other kind of creative output concerning class? Send it to us! Email us submissions at zine @ classism.org or call us with questions at 413.585.9709, ext. 201.
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