Barack Obama, Feminist in Chief?

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted December 8, 2008.

Obama needs to meet that longing for a big leap forward. He needs to become a truly feminist president. That means more than protecting reproductive rights and appointing lots of women to significant positions in his administration, important as those things are. And it means more than rolling back the worst effects of the Bush years through laws like the Fair Pay Restoration Act. Basically this would return women's right to sue for pay discrimination to what it was before the Supreme Court narrowed it in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. If women are to move forward, we need to move beyond a piecemeal approach.

Obama can't make fathers stay home half the time a child is sick, and he can't make Chris Matthews stop being a jerk about women. But he can take a leaf from the book of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and make gender equality a keystone of his administration. For example, he can set up a task force to review law and policy on welfare, Social Security, unemployment and tax policy to rectify outmoded assumptions that disadvantage women. Did you know, for example, that most working wives do better if they take their husbands' Social Security benefit over their own, so in effect they pay into the system and get nothing back? That a stay-home wife whose husband made $50,000 a year gets more in Social Security benefits than a working wife in a couple where each made $25,000? That welfare reform keeps low-income single mothers from getting an education?

The economic stimulus is a great place to start addressing gender inequality. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed, "The Macho Stimulus Plan," economist Randy Albelda points out that the jobs Obama talks about -- building roads, bridges and schools, developing eco-friendly technologies -- are overwhelmingly held by men. It would be nice if suddenly half of construction workers were female, but given that they're now 2.7 percent, realistically that is not going to happen. Even doubling or tripling the small number of women in the relevant job categories would be a stretch. Albelda proposes an additional stimulus plan, for the female side of the economy: "Caring for those who cannot care for themselves, healthcare, and primary education are the very foundation of a civil society. Investing in these outcomes is as vital to our long-term economic health as airports, highways, wind turbines, and energy-retrofitted buildings." Not only do these jobs disproportionately employ women, she points out, but "investments in direct care, education, and healthcare would also go a long way in alleviating poverty."

"We need to put pressure on him now, about concrete policies," historian Linda Gordon, co-founder of Feminists for Obama, told me. "You can be sure that's what the right is doing."

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Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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