It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about whether the plans to have a 21st century WPA will actually avoid the mistakes of the old WPA by ensuring fairness to women and minorities.  Linda Gordon and other prominent women’s historians have put together the following letter to send to the President Elect.  Here’s information on how to submit your name too:

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Friends and colleagues,
Attached is a letter to President-elect Obama making a historical case for
more attention to gender equity in the proposed stimulus package.  It is
based on a draft circulated by Linda Gordon with input from several others.
We are sending it out to you now in the hope of gathering signatures from
students of history–which we mean in the most inclusive sense.  To sign on,
please send an email with your name and affiliation to Alice O’Connor:
aoconnor@history.ucsb.edu.  Please respond NO LATER THAN 5pm (PST) Monday
December 15.  We plan to send the letter on Tuesday, and then to have it
posted on appropriate websites.  And DO forward to others.
With thanks in advance for your help,

Linda Gordon, New York University
Mimi Abramovitz, Hunter College
Rosalyn Baxandall, SUNY Old Westbury
Eileen Boris, UC Santa Barbara
Rosie Hunter
Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University
Alice O’Connor, UC Santa Barbara
Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College
Sally Stein, UC Irvine

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Dear President-elect Obama,

As students of American history, we are heartened by your commitment to a jobs stimulus program inspired by the New Deal and aimed at helping “Main Street.” We firmly believe that such a strategy not only helps the greatest number in our communities but goes a long way toward correcting longstanding national problems.

For all our admiration of FDR’s reform efforts, we must also point out that the New Deal’s jobs initiative was overwhelmingly directed toward skilled male and mainly white workers. This was a mistake in the 1930s and it is a far greater mistake in the 21st century economy, when so many families depend on women’s wages and when our nation is even more racially diverse.

We all know that our country’s infrastructure is literally rusting away. But our social infrastructure is equally important to a vibrant economy and livable society, and it too is crumbling. Investment in education and jobs in health and care work shores up our national welfare as well as our current and future productivity. Revitalizing the economy will require better and more widespread access to education to foster creative approaches and popular participation in responding to the many challenges we face.

As you wrestle with the country’s desperate need for universal health insurance, we know you are aware that along with improved access we need to prioritize expenditure on preventive health. We could train a corps of health educators to work in schools and malls and medical offices. As people live longer, the inadequacy of our systems of care for the disabled and elderly becomes ever more apparent. While medical research works against illness and disability, there is equal need for people doing the less noticed work of supervision, rehabilitation and personal care.

We are also concerned that if the stimulus package primarily emphasizes construction it is likely to reinforce existing gender inequities. Women today make up 46 percent of the labor force. Simple fairness requires creating that proportion of job opportunities for them. Some of this can and should be accomplished through training programs and other measures to help women enter traditionally male-occupied jobs. But it can also be accomplished by creating much-needed jobs in the vital sectors where women are now concentrated.

The most popular programs of the New Deal were its public jobs. They commanded respect in large part because the results were so visible: tens of thousands of new courthouses, firehouses, hospitals, and schools; massive investment in road-building, reforestation, water and sewage treatment, and other aspects of the nation’s physical plant–not to mention the monumental Golden Gate and Triborough Bridges, the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams. But the construction emphasis discriminated against women. At best women were 18% of those hired and, like non-white men, got inferior jobs. While some of the well-educated obtained jobs through the small white-collar and renowned arts programs, the less well educated were put to work in sewing projects, often at busy work, and African American and Mexican American women were slotted into domestic service. This New Deal policy assumed that nearly all women had men to support them and underestimated the numbers of women who were supporting dependents.

Today most policy-makers recognize that the male-breadwinner-for-every-household assumption is outdated. Moreover, experts agree that, throughout the globe, making jobs and income available to women greatly improves family wellbeing. Most low-income women, like men, are eager to work, but the jobs available to them too often provide no sick leave, no health insurance, no pensions and, for mothers, pay less than the cost of child care. The part-time jobs that leave mothers adequate time to care for their children almost never provide these benefits.

Meanwhile the country needs a stronger social as well as physical infrastructure. Teachers, social workers, elder and child-care providers and attendants for disabled people are overwhelmed with the size of their classes and caseloads. We need more teachers and teachers’ aides, nurses and nurses’ aides, case workers, playground attendants, day-care workers, home care workers; we need more senior centers, after-school programs, athletic leagues, music and art lessons. These are not luxuries, although locality after locality has had to cut them. They are the investments that can make the U.S. economically competitive as we confront an increasingly dynamic global economy. Like physical infrastructure projects, these jobs-rich investments are, literally, ready to go.

A jobs-centered stimulus package to revitalize and “green” the economy needs to make caring work as important as construction work. We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges, the social connections that create cohesive communities. We need a stimulus program that is maximally inclusive. History shows us that these concerns cannot be postponed until big business has returned to “normal.” We look to the new administration not just for recovery but for a more humane direction—and in the awareness that what happens in the first 100 days and in response to immediate need sets the framework for the longer haul of reform.

The past two days I attended the 18th annual Women’s Studies conference at Southern CT State University, the topic of which was “Girls’ Culture & Girls’ Studies: Surviving, Reviving, Celebrating Girlhood.” Some interesting resources and papers I learned about included:

Leandra Preston teaches a course on girls’ studies and  has a fascinating virtual center for Girls Studies at the University of Central Florida.  She teaches the course on girls studies partly online — they meet every other week and in between the students are supposed to blog.  She had some interesting points to make about blogging as a form of social activism and media resistance.  I thought her paper was a nice counterpoint to one I heard earlier in the day, which hauled out the generational myth about “digital natives”  and warned that shows like “Hannah Montana” are way worse for girls than the “Partridge Family” and the “Monkees” were for our generation.  [for some excellent debunking of this myth, see Siva Vaidhyanathan’s and Thomas Benton’s recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education]

Sarah Projansky from University of Illinois gave an interesting paper on feminist girls’ studies.  She argued that we need to look not just at representations of girls in the media, but also how girls produce media. She too deflated the assumption that the dominant media opresses girls and that it’s worse than ever before. She said this assumption is based on the myth of an innocent, pre-media girl who needs to be protected. She traced this imagined child back to the early twentieth century and discussions of pulp novels, romance magazines, and early film — I would go back even further, perhaps even to the eighteenth century novels like “Charlotte Temple.”  Her main point is that girls, past and present, have often worked against the media aimed at them — mainly through humor and satire.  She mentioned the book Girls Make Media, by Mary Celeste Kearney, which I will have to take a look at if/when I get the time.  For now, I’ll just have to make do with her blog.

Miriam Forman-Brunell presented her work on the website, Children and Youth in History, one of the latest digital projects by the Center for New Media.  The project looks great.  I hope I can pull off something similar — although she warned me it was really hard to get the NEH to fund anything that had “girls” or “women” in the title, hence the words children and youth.  Guess they won’t go for a project on our Gender Equity Collection which has all sorts of GLBT stuff in it!

The last panel, and perhaps the coolest, I attended was one on “Girls in the Library: Documenting Third Wave Feminist Activism through Zines.”  Both Barnard and Duke have huge collections of these zines (numbering in the thousands).  Kelly Wooten from the Sallie Bingham Center at Duke talked about how zines fit within the longer history of girls’ literature as well as feminist theory and activism. In some ways they are etiquette manuals for the underground — i.e. how-tos on how not to conform. According to Kate Eichhorn, zine-making continues and some zine-sters are trying to write a history of Riot Grrls and similar zine scenes.  She made an interesting point about the problems of writing an “official” history of a movement that was polyvocal, and suspicious of authority and linear narrative.  I asked why not have a hypertext history, or a wiki, to which Jenna Freedman warned that zines should not be confused with blogs [see her article on this at the Barnard website.] I think she missed my point — I understand the importance of the material objects, but new media can address many of the concerns about multiple voices and experiments in language that Eichhorn raised.

Anyway, I left the conference energized but also exhausted.  I’m always envious when I go down to SCSU because their program is much bigger, much better funded, and in general much more respected than ours is.  If only I could get that level of participation on my campus!

Yesterday, we had the privilege of a return visit by Dr. Mary Jo Kane from the Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota, who gave a great presentation on her research on media representations of female athletes.  Her main points were that the “Sex sells” argument in favor of representing female athletes in sexualized ways is not only demeaning but counterproductive in that it alienates the core audience for women’s athletics — i.e. women and girls, and Dads of female athletes.  Media images depicting female athletes in action, demonstrating physical competence, is what sells women’s sports, she argued.  Great talk, but few attended – the eternal problem of getting folks to attend something in the middle of midterms with dozens of other stuff going on around campus at the same time.