Linda Hirshman’s excellent oped in today’s NYTimes, “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?”, brings light to a conversation I’ve been lurking on among feminist historians and economists, and I’m so glad to see that argument reaching the light of day. (There was a Boston Globe piece on it earlier, too, titled “Macho Stimulus Plan,” which we reported on here at GWP.)  The call is basically this: Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the New Deal, which failed to apply a gender lens.

As Hirshman notes,

[W]omen constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

…A public works program can provide needed economic stimulus and revive America’s concern for public property. The current proposal is simply too narrow. Women represent almost half the work force — not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children’s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.

Amen to that.  And speaking of F.D.R., which makes me think of Eleanor, which makes me think in general of powerful Presidents’ wives, may the Obama team take up Abigail Adams’ cry to “remember the ladies”. For reals.

(And thanks to Elizabeth Curtis for the, er, correction that it was Abigail and not Eleanor who said that!)