Posts Tagged working class

50 years into the war on poverty, gender analysis needed

Bourgeois (read: mostly white) feminism is currently, finally untenable — politically, personally, and almost universally. Thanks to many, many working class people and minorities raising their voices and elevating their experiences as a political priority, there’s a general consensus around this these days, even if many feminists, old-guard and new-guard alike, don’t know quite what that will look like. Like so many feminist breakthroughs, this one has stemmed from a great, at times unspeakable, need. Because even though it’s been fifty years since President Lyndon Johnson declared an ”unconditional war on poverty in America”–and despite the many important social safety net programs that came out if this commitment–poverty in this country remains a dire problem.

Bourgeois (read: mostly white) feminism is currently, finally untenable — politically, personally, and almost universally. Thanks to many, many working class people and minorities raising their voices and elevating their experiences as a political priority, there’s a ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Coming Up Short

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a  freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would think that everyone born between 1981 and 2000 was white, wealthy, and facing a wonderful world of choice. Articles describe a selfish generation unable to commit, or young people who waltz from one experience to another without giving back. Absent is any description of the youth who fall outside of the narrow band of privilege.

Jennifer Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty fills this gap. Silva, a post-doctoral fellow in sociology at Harvard, interviewed 100 working-class men and women over the ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a  freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would ...

The Feministing Five: Jack Stephens

Jack Stephens is quite literally a jack of all trades. He organizes with the anti-imperialist, national democratic organization Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance, or, BAYAN) and has been organizing with them for the past six years. He serves on the executive committee for San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP) and also sits on the board for the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN). He’s worked the graveyard shift full-time as a UPS employee loading trucks for over five years and is the union representative at his work, organized by Teamsters Local 2785. If that list of occupational and volunteer community organizing (and acronyms!) wasn’t enough to exhaust you, he’s also a ...

Jack Stephens is quite literally a jack of all trades. He organizes with the anti-imperialist, national democratic organization Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance, or, BAYAN) and has been organizing with them for the past six ...