The view from my window over here in Iowa – so pretty! Grinnell is AWESOME. Off to catch some zzz’s….

Big news. Feminist media are covering unions. Thanks to a report from GWP friend John Schmitt over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the feminist blogosphere is on the case–at Ms, at Feministing, at Feminist Majority. There’s also an excellent editorial in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The CEPR report, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers,” identifies what’s in the union movement for women. Schmitt reports that women in unions make 11.2 percent more than their non union peers. What’s the value of that? “All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree,” reports Schmitt in a press release.

GWP talked with Schmitt about the report, to explore whether it is relevant to think of unions as a feminist institution, and here are a few thoughts he had for GWP:

GWP: What has changed for women in unions?
Schmitt: Women are now 45 percent of all unionized workers, up from 35 percent in 1983. If the trend holds,  women will be the majority of unionized workers by 2020.

GWP: What’s the significance–besides the increased wages you report?
Schmitt: There is a perception that unions are about white guys in their fifties who work in manufacturing and live in Michigan and Ohio. But, our study, which is one in a series focusing on different kinds of workers, shows that increasingly unions are about men and women. Union men and women are Latino, African American, white, Asian, and from other racial and ethnic groups, and more than ever union workers are in the service sector. I think the facts help to counteract some of our old-fashioned preconceptions of unions as not being representative of the workforce as a whole. For women today, unions have the potential to be a freestanding institution of the larger feminist agenda.

GWP: How are unions doing on health insurance?
Schmitt: Health insurance and pensions were two of the areas we examined. Part of the current health insurance “system” in the United States has been that marriage and jobs are gateways to health insurance, and this so-called system has the disadvantages of often making women dependent on their partner status for health insurance. In our study, we found that while 51 percent of non union women had health insurance, 75 percent of union women did. For low wage workers, the benefits were even more striking–union membership doubled a woman’s odds of having health insurance. Without a union, 26 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. With a union, 59 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. These large union advantages remained large even after we controlled for a host of demographic factors such as age and education levels.

GWP: What about women’s pensions?
Schmitt: Our retirement system has historically counted on women’s relying on their husband’s pensions–another case of dependence. Unions change that, nearly tripling the likelihood that low-wage women in unions have some kind of pension. While 21 percent of non union, low-wage women workers have a pension, 58 percent of these women do if they are in a union. For women workers overall, the pattern is similar: 43% of women workers without a union have a pension, while 76 percent of women workers with a union do. Again, the union effect holds even after we control for demographic differences between the union and non union groups.

GWP: What’s up ahead?
Schmitt: One of the key drivers of second-wave feminism was the incorporation of women into the workforce. But getting to work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for advancing the cause of women–and everybody, for that matter. What is happening today is that unions are increasingly acting to defend the interests of working women of all social classes and backgrounds, over issues such as flexible work schedules, extending the Family Medical Leave Act, and improving access to paid sick days and paid vacation.

–Virginia Rutter

My apologies for the quiet day over here. I’ve been scrambling to get ready for my trip this week — first stop, Iowa! For anyone in the vicinity, here’s where I’ll be, and what I’ll be talking about:

Dec 3 – Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild
Grinnell College
JRC 101
7pm

Dec 4 – Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild
Drake University
Bulldog Theater
7pm

Dec 5 – Workshop on Being an “Engaged Scholar”
Drake University
9-11am

I’m so excited to hang out with Astrid Henry (author of Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism) and Renee Cramer (author of, among other things, “This Bridge Called Barack“), and the students and faculty at Drake and Grinnell. My grandfather hailed from Iowa, and I’ve never been there before, so I’m double excited to visit this land of that legendary caucus not so long ago… After Iowa, it’s sweet home Chicago for two days, where Marco and I are being feted with a post-wedding wedding celebration. Very sweet.

I’ll try to post from the road!

Needless to say, this makes it hard for this girl to type. Man, does this thing sleep a lot.

At the gracious invitation of the wonderful and savvy Renee Cramer (see her prescient GWP post, “This Bridge Called Barack”, from February), I am giving a workshop at Drake University on Friday on the topic of being an engaged scholar. Engaged, as in, with a public outside of the academy. As always, I’m encouraging folks to try to FRAME issues in public debate rather than simply react when others do the framing for us, and rely on shoddy evidence to support their claims.

And so I thought I’d ask GWP readers who have had experiences “crossing over” from a more academically-inclined universe to more “pop” or public writing and speaking.

• What have you learned from your experience circulating in a more public realm?
• Any advice to other scholars who wish to do the same?

And if you have not (YET!) done some of that crossover activity but want to, what holds you back?  Please tell me, in comments.

A quick hit:

Do check out this this Boston Globe op-ed, “The Macho Stimulus Plan,” about Obama’s stimulus package ignoring women, by Randy Albelda, a professor of economics and senior fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Say some prominent feminist historians, “We could be repeating the mistakes of the New Deal.”

Thoughts?

I tell ya, a girl trying to scramble her way to motherhood can sure get whiplash these days.  There’s some great reading out there, and some frustrating reading.   My response to Alex Kuczynski’s cover story in this weekend’s NYTimes magazine (Her Body, My Baby) was pretty much summed up by this commentor’s comment:

I made the mistake — I guess you could call it that — of looking at the photos before reading the article. The surrogate mother is sitting, barefoot, on a dilapidated porch in one photo, whereas the mother and child are standing in front of a hugely expensive, well manicured home with their baby’s nurse, a black woman, in the other photo. This view tainted my reading of the article, and I couldn’t help but notice every self-conscious admittance of guilt or passing acknowledgment of class or social status. Perhaps the surrogate, as the writer tells it, is fiscally better off than her photo shows; perhaps the nurse, who was not mentioned in the article, just happens to be black. But someone, either the journalist or the photojournalist, is deceiving us.

I am trying, very hard, to be happy for the writer and her new baby — how wonderful after all the years of heartache! — but all I have in my head right now are images of how our country is so racially and socially divided. Is it always going to be this way?

On other fronts, I caught a fresh breeze blowing through the fields of the mommy wars — a call for truce — when I came across Meghan O’Rouke’s post over at XX Factor, “No More Advice for Michelle Obama.  Except This!”, in which she writes:

As Michelle herself has said, being first lady is a powerful platform. And the modern professional marriage, for better or for worse, usually requires some alternating in who gets to take the professional lead (that is, if you want your kids to get any attention). It’s too bad, sure, that there aren’t more men stepping up to support their wives—but it’s not as though that’s not happening in our political culture. (Hi there, Todd Palin!) The best way Michelle Obama can act as a role model for women right now is not by making the decision any one of us would make (because we’d all make different decisions), but by reminding us that life is fleeting, and we ought to immerse ourselves in the opportunities and joys of our own life as it exists. Not as it might exist.

And meanwhile, for some hands-on practical support for pregnant and parenting students, check out the National Women’s Law Center’s latest webinar.  Though the event has passed (it was on Weds), you can download the presentation and materials here.

Back from a little Thanksgiving break, we bring you today Family Stories, the monthly column from Jacqueline Hudak.  Still stunned, energized, and moved, I think we’ll all be processing Obama’s victory for a long while. -Deborah

As GWP readers know, I am fascinated by which stories are told in our culture, which remain silenced, and what conditions bring certain ones to the fore. I often say my work as a family therapist entails listening to stories – stories that either cannot be spoken or heard outside of my office.  From the personal to the cultural, it’s often not a great leap.

As so brilliantly documented in a book by a former history prof of mine at BU, (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present), Howard Zinn presents history through the eyes of those rarely heard in mainstream texts.  I was reminded of this the other week when my friend Trina Scordo, a longtime union organizer, began to tell stories she heard in North Carolina as she knocked on doors for the Obama campaign as the election approached. Trina asked one of her fellow union members why he chose to travel from New York to Charlotte for this election eve.  He told Trina that his father had said there would never be an African-American president in the United States.  He said, “My Father always told me racism was too strong.  My grandparents were slaves and my father faced racism on his job and in the neighborhood in which we lived.  My Dad always tried to avoid the discussion of race because he did not believe it would ever change.  He died believing that.  I had to be here on this day, on this night for him.”  When Barack Obama surpassed 270 electoral votes, Trina told me, this gentleman fell to his knees and wept.  He held in his hand a picture of his father.

Other stories came from those on the other side of the doors.  As Trina said, “African-Americans shared their histories with organizers at their front doors and porches.  It was a collective history of slavery, civil rights and unions.  Some told me it was the first time they had shared this history outside of their families and further, with a white person.”

This election gave a sense of liberation to the marginalized: youth, women, communities of color, the exploited and working class.  Yet it was a bittersweet victory – a victory tinged with sadness about the passage of California’s Prop 8. I asked in my column last month: How do we fill the gap between what we wanted and what we get in this election?

I found an analysis of the breakdown of who voted for Prop 8 at Pam’s House Blend, one that did not engage in racial scapegoating.   Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, Dec 1) points to the tens of thousands of people who took to the streets all over this country in spontaneous protest, and believes “It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.”

In the afterword of the young readers version of A People’s History, Howard Zinn asks youth to “imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change.”

We are on the cusp of such a movement.  May it be so.

—Jacqueline Hudak

Before jumping the fence…. And after!