CATHERINE RAMPELL reports in The New York Times that, “With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.”
In “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force,” Rampell says that, “The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.” The ax is falling on jobs that have been dominated by men. “Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.”
This, I believe, is a major shift in our cultural construction of how power is controlled, even determined. In fact, this bit of news can be seen as a last breath of the old hegemony that has nearly driven us to the point of complete destruction.
The jobs typically held by women–education and health care–are the fabric of society; everything else –finance, construction, high-tech, etc–is crumbling. The old guard is indeed falling apart, but the fabric of society, patched together by women, is holding. And with the Obama stimulus package, even increasing its strength.
According to Peter Sloterdijk, the renowned German philosopher and a professor of philosophy and media theory at the Karlsruhe School of Design, there have been 3 phases of globalization: (1) the metaphysical globalization of Greek cosmology; (2) the nautical globalization of the 15th Century that creates global provincialism; and, finally, (3), the overcoming of distance.
It is this last phase–our age–that is extremely interesting from the perspective of a new world order and the emergence of women in powerful positions. For the past 10 to 15 years, women from traditionally male-dominant cultures have found their way to Western colleges and universities. It’s an amazing ratio. Women from the East, especially China and Korea, accompany women from South Asia–India and Afghanistan , for instance–and mingle with women from Africa and the Middle East and Latin America.
These young women, to use Homi Bhabha’s term, choose to be “unhomed” in order to advance. This, for them, is where “presencing begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of relocation of the home and the world–the unhomliness–that is the condition of extra–territorial and cross-cultural initiations”, says Bhabha. It is a form of exile apprehended so as to better themselves. In this condition, women are shifting, apparently always in movement, and challening deeply held beliefs about what has been accepted–to a fault–as the location of women in culture. Women are re-articulating boundaries. They are redefining material reality.
This re-articulation of boundaries increases the potential for the feminization of cultures. The current generation of women in our colleges and universities and heading into the (traditional) world is searhing for interconnectedness, though they suffer a sense of estrangement in doing so. These are the women of the Third Wave of Feminism: the overcoming of boundaries, I call it, which is consistent with the movement’s history. Following Bhabha, women are inhabiting a space “narrower than the human horizon” that provides an “ethical entitlement to, and an enactment of, the sense of community.” This is something new, different. Michelle Obama’s planting of a White House garden, which follows Elenor Roosevelt’s garden historically speaking, is a case in point. The First Lady’s garden implies the need for a healthier nation, one that grows foods locally and that eats healthier–challenges to health care, the food industry, and the psychology of dependency of American citizens.
Moreover, Michelle Obama is a new model. Gracious, elegant, classy and beautiful, she is also in shape, as our obsession with her arms shows. Mrs. Obama is the Third Wave of Feminism, as opposed to Hilary Clinton who represents the Second Wave. The difference is fundamental: the professional women of Mrs. Obama’s generation did not give up men or family; they pursued careers, but also kept the hearth moving. This Third Wave comes with an “ethical entitlement to, and an enactment of, the sense of community.” Women are demanding very different things of the social structures and the institutions that support them.
Women are negotiating languages used in the past to (pre) define notions of reality–and truth. Nationhood, we can see by how women are stretching themselves across boundaries, is a morally arbitrary notion, a necessity of the post-colonial state, for instance. Rather, women are more concerned with an “insufficiency of self” and the needs of new urban communities of interest. Women fully understand the precarious sense of survival we are living today since this has been women’s historical position. They are best qualified to guide us through. Women are therefore the agents of change we need. Women working through their identities, as these come into conflict with ancient–and broken–models, discover their agency and, in turn, transform formally oppressive ways of thinking and being. It is a slow process, historically, but we are on a path we cannot now change.
What in the past has been perceived as less valuable and thus exploitable, disposable and forgettable in the global political economy, now is no longer. Opportunities are shifting. We may be in fact witnessing the emergence of the Fourth Wave of Feminism–matriarchal societies.
The Uncanny 