(Page 4 of 25) - I DO Know How She Does It: Kate Reddy and Feminism`s Unfinished Business authored by Ford, Lynne.

revolutionaries who are prepared to fight for a better way even though they themselves
may not directly benefit. In this, there is considerable unfinished business.

The Nature of Our Deepest Conflict

Our deepest conflict is multi-faceted and inexorably complex. As author Mona Harrington
argues in Care and Equality (1999), the conflict pops up frequently in highly-charged,
political mini-crises (e.g. Zoe Baird’s failed nomination for attorney general, the
vilification of Hillary Clinton and failed health care reform, the punitive nature of the
1996 welfare legislation, and the Louise Woodward trial—to name just a few), but the
true nature of the conflict rarely gets articulated by either conservative or liberal forces.
She maintains, and I agree, that the root of the problem lies in our failure to fully
acknowledge women’s changing roles over the last century and in the last three decades in
particular. Women entered the workforce in substantial numbers throughout the 1970s
and 1980s. Although some women have always worked in the labor force, the intersection
of second-wave feminism’s push for employment on an equal footing with men with the
realities imposed on families by a shifting economy, made women’s move into the paid
workforce different this time in both character and magnitude. Women entered at all
levels of the occupational and pay scale without any expectation that their employment
would be temporary. Simultaneously, women gained admission to higher education and
professional programs enabling them to intentionally plan for a career, rather than simply
taking a job. With nobody home and no new social institutions to take women’s place in
the home, severe social upheaval followed in the wake of their permanent entrance into
the workplace. Traditionalists blamed feminists for these new problems, and liberal
feminists dug their heels in more deeply committed than ever to achieving the promise of
equality for women in all of their new public roles. Women, regardless of whether they
were at home or in the marketplace became easy targets for blame, but women themselves
did not take the lead in helping society understand and effectively take measure of the
changes taking place. Nobody objectively evaluated the situation for what it was—the
inevitable and unavoidable collision of the private and public spheres.

The crux of our deepest conflict, therefore, can be found in the “massive collision
occurring between the country’s need for caretaking and the ancient American promise of
equality….we have not devised any equality-respecting system to replace the full-time
caretaking labor force of women at home” (Harrington, 1999. pp 16-17). We have an
underfunded patchwork system of inadequate care for some, but nothing that approaches
the level or quality of care provided by women at home in previous generations. The
consequences of inadequate care are evident in a long list of social ills suffered over the
last three decades: high rates of divorce, single-parent households mired in poverty, two-
income households with too little time for parenting, schools overwhelmed by new duties
as surrogate parents, courts full of children and adolescents in trouble, elders without
family or community supports, marriages and families stressed by long work hours, and
women torn between the demands of the workplace and the needs of their family at home
(Harrington, 1999).