Feminism, Political Economy and the State

by Armstrong, Pat

• ISBN13: 9781551301488
• ISBN10: 1551301482
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-06-01
• Publisher: Canadian Scholars Pr

Summary

Feminist struggles have targeted corporate capital, male-dominated social structures, and patriarchal ideas and culture. The contest with the state, however, has provided the most substantial focus. The public sector is an employer of great numbers of women; women are the largest consumers of state services; the state regulates both the capitalist economy and the private household; struggle with the state has brought about change that is favourable to women's lives. Or has it? This collection looks at struggles in education, health care, and welfare in Canada, Latin America, and Europe. It includes thirteen brilliantly nuanced reports from the front lines of the feminist revolution. In these accounts the contradictions of women's struggles are made clear. Each victory has its victims. State reforms lead to new contradictions and provide new terrain for the struggle. Readers of this book will be exposed to different modes of understanding the state. They will advance their understanding of how the struggle against the state is to be shaped. And they will be energized to carry on the struggle.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Contested Terrain	1	(22)
Pat Armstrong
M. Patricia Connelly
The Incorporation of Public School Teachers into the Industrial Order: British Columbia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century	23	(34)
Terry Wotherspoon
Changing Labour Process and the Nursing Crisis in Canadian Hospitals	57	(34)
Jerry White
The Retreat of the State and Long-Term Care Provision: Implications for Frail Elderly People, Unpaid Family Carers and Paid Home-Care Workers	91	(34)
Jane Aronson
Sheila M. Neysmith
The Mixed Social Economy as a Canadian Tradition	125	(30)
Mariana Valverde
The Blurring of Boundaries: Private and Public Welfare for Single Mothers in Ontario	155	(22)
Margaret Little
Depoliticizing Insurgency: The Politics of the Family in Alberta	177	(28)
Lois Harder
The Dilemma of Liberal Citizenship: Women and Social Assistance Reform in the 1990s	205	(32)
Katherine Scott
The Radical Potential of the European Community's Equality Legislation	237	(20)
Wendy McKeen
Duet for Peasant and Socialist Revolutionary, with Obbligato Feminism: Lessons of the Nicaraguan Case	257	(36)
Phil Ryan
The Womb is to the Nation as the Heart is to the Body: Ethnopolitical Discourses of the Canadian Indigenous Women's Movement	293	(34)
Jo-Anne Fiske
A Critical Feminist Analysis of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies	327	(18)
Lorna Weir
Jasmin Habib
Of Gifts, Gametrics, Victim Women and Surplus Peoples: New Reproductive Technologies and the Representation of `Third World' Women	345
Navsharan Singh