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90 Years After the Vote, U.S. Women Still Seek Economic Citizenship
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Women won the right to vote 90 years ago today. As historian Christine Stansell points out, the seemingly “no-brainer” move to ensure women have the same political citizenship rights as men was contested in this country until 1984, when Mississippi became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
That’s 1984—19 years after the Voting Rights Act and 13 years after 18-year-olds got the right to vote.
Working women today still are fighting for complete citizenship—economic citizenship. The Joint Economic Committee yesterday released a report on economic advances by women over the past quarter century and found that despite a quarter-century of progress,
challenges remain. Certain industries remain heavily gender-segregated. In addition, millions of women are struggling to juggle work outside the home with family care-giving responsibilities.
Sometime this year, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce became equal to that of men. Yet, as economists point out, the recent decrease in the pay gap between men and women is a reflection of the loss of pay for men, not an increase for women. Women still only make 78 cents for every dollar a man is paid. Further,
wives’ earnings play an increasingly important role in the families’ incomes. In 1983, wives’ incomes comprised just 29 percent of total family income. By 2008, wives’ incomes comprised 36 percent of total family income.
The report also finds women accounted for 45 percent of all union members in 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, up from 34 percent in 1984.
The growing importance of women in the labor movement is likely due to the expansion of female-concentrated sectors such as health care, education, and the service sector combined with the contraction of male-concentrated sectors such as manufacturing.
The pay gap is a lot less for women in unions. But lack of pay equity take a huge chunk out of women’s standards of living as well as their families. Lawmakers finally took action this year and passed the Fair Pay Act. The Senate needs to follow suit. The male-dominated Congress needs to acknowledge that America’s women lack complete economic citizenship.
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1 Comment
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The gender wage gap stubbornly persists because pay-equity advocates stubbornly ignore this:
Despite feminists’ 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no wages at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, stay-at-home wives, including the childless, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living lives of luxury? Virtually any teen knows how: “They’re supported by their husband!”
If millions of wives can accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, refuse to work overtime, refuse promotions, take more unpaid days off — all of which lowers women’s average pay. They can do this because they are supported by husbands who must earn more than if they’d remained bachelors — which is how MEN help create the wage gap.
By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone. http://tinyurl.com/yab2blv