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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

1971-06-04 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 5

Class in the Poverty Biz
or
Your Love is like a Ball & Chain

   I am an outreach worker in a government sponsored community action program. It's my job to find the poor of this county, tell them about the services available to them and when asked, act as their advocate in dealing with other agencies. A good job for a nice middle-class, socially-concerned, self-styled radical woman, right? Wrong. The job is inherently classist and in doing the job I have perpetuated that classism, albeit, unknowingly. (That's one of my white, middle-class privileges--I can be a classist, a racist, a homosexist unknowingly. I am allowed to "discover" oppression but I don't have to feel it, just perceive it intellectually. That is the trouble with whites in the black movement, men relating to a politics with which they have no experience. You always have to sit down and take your political pulse and ask yourself, "Am I the oppressor?" Blacks don't have to do that with racism, women feel sexism in their guts and working class people must feel classism without having to think about it or even name it.)
   Back to the job. I found out early in the game that I wasn't just an outreach worker. I was the super-duper social-worker Jesus Christ savior of the poor people of this county, and besides that I got to wear pants and be the office radical. Put'em all together and what does it spell? Co-option. I act as the rev-proof safety valve for the poor of Johnson County. When they've had it out with Welfare, or they can't make their rent or they're out of food, they come to me and my counterparts and we dig up the money, or smooth the ruffled feathers or get an extension or whatever. What we do is shield the enemy: put off the time when the poor will realize that the enemy is not their neighbor who's ripping off more food stamps than them. That is is whoever put a price on food to begin with.
   The point I'm trying to make is that my job has revealed a classism and a class arrogance in myself that I didn't know was there. The arrogance of believing that I can speak for the poor better than they can. The arrogance that comes from having power over people; a job here, a food order there all add up to power.    
    I took the job for the money and also because I thought I was doing something at least politically palatable. Well, I'm choking on the politics but the money still looks good. So what can I do? (You've heard that question before, right? It's always asked by some earnest person in the back of the auditorium. Asked of Third World people, asked of women. The oppressor asks it of the oppressed. It reeks of guilt.)
   What can I do? It's really not a question I can answer. Probably just shut up and listen.

Sponsored by Action Studies
  Last June I applied for a job as coordinator of Action Studies at the U of I and got it. Action Studies is sort of a free university within the structure of and funded by the state university.
   The office is run by a coordinator and a secretary. All the coordinators up until me had been men and all the secretaries had been women. At the time I came into the office, the secretary, who was my age, had been working at AS for two years and knew how to do everything. She knew the procedures and channels for setting up courses, and about all university forms (there are thousands) and how to use them. I knew none of this so she taught me. Of course, the easiest part to learn was the prestige work of setting up courses. It took me six more months to learn about the voucher invoices, requisitions, local small order forms and which one to use for what. But isn't that the way it always is. The prestige work is the easiest by any standard of intelligence or skills. All it takes to do these jobs is PR and personality skills that only people of the upper classes have the opportunity to develop.
   Anyway, even though I didn't like it and tried to equalize things by learning her job, the time and work factors in the office were often such that we couldn't afford the time for me to slowly and painstakingly type out a requisition. The result was that because of this division of labor, we fell into a boss-secretary power relationship.
   After about two months she had to leave and another woman whom I had known for a long time got the secretary job. We talked and agreed that since we both knew pretty much the same amount about how to run the office, were both women, and were both the same age that there was no good basis for either one of us being the boss and the other doing the typing. So because
there was no one else who was immediately superior to us and controlled the office we decided to do away with the boss job and share all the work.
   It was pretty easy to initiate this because we both were at the same low level of competence on running the office and could learn the work together and equally -- both the prestige work and the shit work. We worked this way all year with only a few problems. It's amazing how powerful the labels are that are put on you and it was hard for us to quit thinking of ourselves as coordinator and secretary. Especially when the structure of the university enforced it and most everyone that would come in (especially males) would relate to us in terms of that hierarchy. The structure of the university was difficult to deal with because they require one person's name to be signed to all forms and letters and only invite that person to meetings with the deans. 
   My job as coordinator was only a one year job and after about nine months it was time to begin thinking about picking a new one. The steering committee (10 people) which is the governing body of Action Studies does the choosing. 
   Sara-savage (the other office worker) and I (both of us are on the steering committee) began to reminisce about the nice time we'd had working together and about how different it would be if they picked a man for coordinator -- the old order would be reinstated. We decided that we would ask the steering committee to make a policy that the office work be shared equally between coordinator and secretary. Well, we did ask and immediately realized the result as to be classist. 
   Although everyone on the steering committee agreed that it was a fair idea, their conception of how to do it was very different from ours. They immediately began to talk about how the name of the job would have to be changed from "secretary" to "co-coordinator" or something like that, how there'd have to be an ad in the paper stating the qualifications and then an interview. Listening to them, I realized that the way the job was going to be publicized would eliminate a lot of women (if we can assume that only women consider secretarial jobs) from applying for the job. When you start calling it a high-fallutin job the women who think of themselves as only qualified to be secretaries will be afraid to apply. As they talked the two jobs started seeming more and more equal. They began to say that if the jobs are equal, our ad for secretary should state the same qualifications as the ad for coordinator (which is billed as a big boss-coordinator job with qualities centering around PR etc).
   Sara-savage and I objected that advertising the secretary job similarly to the coordinator made it no longer a job a lot of women would apply for. There are few enough jobs around that women can get without Action Studies eliminating one of them.
   I'm really sorry we started the whole thing. Our intentions were good, but we were naive. We wanted to be fair to women, but the result was definitely more unfair--the elimination of a woman's job. We were also naive about the structured-in class bias of academic institutions. One of the most classist ways the steering committee began thinking of the secretary job as it was newly defined was that the person had to have an interest in Action Studies, think of it as not just an eight-to-five job, be dedicated. All of that is middle class value that implies that there is something wrong with doing a job for money or needing a job because you need the money. It also eliminates the kind of woman who hasn't had the opportunity to see that an elitist thing like experimental education is something to be dedicated to.
   We argued and argued on that point and they just couldn't see it. Finally I realized that it was futile to argue against class bias here; it is built into the university. Every time I would say that requiring applicants to have special interest in the job biased our selection in favor of middle class people, they would look at me and say, "That's unreasonable. The person has got to be interested." And they're right. Within the elevated context of higher education which deals with ideas and ideals and encompasses much meaningful work, suggesting that someone be hired just because they need a job, is unreasonable. 
   I learned a lot by constantly having to accuse the steering committee of class bias and argue against it. I learned how hard it is to always have to argue in defense of yourself; how committees like that must always beat down working class people. It's too degrading a situation for anyone who is in that position of having to defend their dignity at every turn of the conversation. People who don't directly experience working class prejudice should be the one to point it out. If the women's movement is to become united along class, race, and sexual lines then it is up to middle class women to constantly root out class bias; white women, racism; and straight women, homosexism.

A Woman?    June 4, 1971    Page 5

Saving...

Class in the Poverty Biz or Your Love is like a Ball & Chain I am an outreach worker in a government sponsored community action program. It's my job to find the poor of this county, tell them about the services available to them and when asked, act as their advocate in dealing with other agencies. A good job for a nice middle-class, socially-concerned, self-styled radical woman, right? Wrong. The job is inherently classist and in doing the job I have perpetuated that classism, albeit, unknowingly. (That's one of my white, middle-class privileges--I can be a classist, a racist, a homosexist unknowingly. I am allowed to "discover" oppression but I don't have to feel it, just perceive it intellectually. That is the trouble with whites in the black movement, men relating to a politics with which they have no experience. You always have to sit down and take your political pulse and ask yourself, "Am I the oppressor?" Blacks don't have to do that with racism, women feel sexism in their guts and working class people must feel classism without having to think about it or even name it.) Back to the job. I found out early in the game that I wasn't just an outreach worker. I was the super-duper social-worker Jesus Christ savior of the poor people of this county, and besides that I got to wear pants and be the office radical. Put'em all together and what does it spell? Co-option. I act as the rev-proof safety valve for the poor of Johnson County. When they've had it out with Welfare, or they can't make their rent or they're out of food, they come to me and my counterparts and we dig up the money, or smooth the ruffled feathers or get an extension or whatever. What we do is shield the enemy: put off the time when the poor will realize that the enemy is not their neighbor who's ripping off more food stamps than them. That is is whoever put a price on food to begin with. The point I'm trying to make is that my job has revealed a classism and a class arrogance in myself that I didn't know was there. The arrogance of believing that I can speak for the poor better than they can. The arrogance that comes from having power over people; a job here, a food order there all add up to power. I took the job for the money and also because I thought I was doing something at least politically palatable. Well, I'm choking on the politics but the money still looks good. So what can I do? (You've heard that question before, right? It's always asked by some earnest person in the back of the auditorium. Asked of Third World people, asked of women. The oppressor asks it of the oppressed. It reeks of guilt.) What can I do? It's really not a question I can answer. Probably just shut up and listen. Sponsored by Action Studies Last June I applied for a job as coordinator of Action Studies at the U of I and got it. Action Studies is sort of a free university within the structure of and funded by the state university. The office is run by a coordinator and a secretary. All the coordinators up until me had been men and all the secretaries had been women. At the time I came into the office, the secretary, who was my age, had been working at AS for two years and knew how to do everything. She knew the procedures and channels for setting up courses, and about all university forms (there are thousands) and how to use them. I knew none of this so she taught me. Of course, the easiest part to learn was the prestige work of setting up courses. It took me six more months to learn about the voucher invoices, requisitions, local small order forms and which one to use for what. But isn't that the way it always is. The prestige work is the easiest by any standard of intelligence or skills. All it takes to do these jobs is PR and personality skills that only people of the upper classes have the opportunity to develop. Anyway, even though I didn't like it and tried to equalize things by learning her job, the time and work factors in the office were often such that we couldn't afford the time for me to slowly and painstakingly type out a requisition. The result was that because of this division of labor, we fell into a boss-secretary power relationship. After about two months she had to leave and another woman whom I had known for a long time got the secretary job. We talked and agreed that since we both knew pretty much the same amount about how to run the office, were both women, and were both the same age that there was no good basis for either one of us being the boss and the other doing the typing. So because there was no one else who was immediately superior to us and controlled the office we decided to do away with the boss job and share all the work. It was pretty easy to initiate this because we both were at the same low level of competence on running the office and could learn the work together and equally -- both the prestige work and the shit work. We worked this way all year with only a few problems. It's amazing how powerful the labels are that are put on you and it was hard for us to quit thinking of ourselves as coordinator and secretary. Especially when the structure of the university enforced it and most everyone that would come in (especially males) would relate to us in terms of that hierarchy. The structure of the university was difficult to deal with because they require one person's name to be signed to all forms and letters and only invite that person to meetings with the deans. My job as coordinator was only a one year job and after about nine months it was time to begin thinking about picking a new one. The steering committee (10 people) which is the governing body of Action Studies does the choosing. Sara-savage (the other office worker) and I (both of us are on the steering committee) began to reminisce about the nice time we'd had working together and about how different it would be if they picked a man for coordinator -- the old order would be reinstated. We decided that we would ask the steering committee to make a policy that the office work be shared equally between coordinator and secretary. Well, we did ask and immediately realized the result as to be classist. Although everyone on the steering committee agreed that it was a fair idea, their conception of how to do it was very different from ours. They immediately began to talk about how the name of the job would have to be changed from "secretary" to "co-coordinator" or something like that, how there'd have to be an ad in the paper stating the qualifications and then an interview. Listening to them, I realized that the way the job was going to be publicized would eliminate a lot of women (if we can assume that only women consider secretarial jobs) from applying for the job. When you start calling it a high-fallutin job the women who think of themselves as only qualified to be secretaries will be afraid to apply. As they talked the two jobs started seeming more and more equal. They began to say that if the jobs are equal, our ad for secretary should state the same qualifications as the ad for coordinator (which is billed as a big boss-coordinator job with qualities centering around PR etc). Sara-savage and I objected that advertising the secretary job similarly to the coordinator made it no longer a job a lot of women would apply for. There are few enough jobs around that women can get without Action Studies eliminating one of them. I'm really sorry we started the whole thing. Our intentions were good, but we were naive. We wanted to be fair to women, but the result was definitely more unfair--the elimination of a woman's job. We were also naive about the structured-in class bias of academic institutions. One of the most classist ways the steering committee began thinking of the secretary job as it was newly defined was that the person had to have an interest in Action Studies, think of it as not just an eight-to-five job, be dedicated. All of that is middle class value that implies that there is something wrong with doing a job for money or needing a job because you need the money. It also eliminates the kind of woman who hasn't had the opportunity to see that an elitist thing like experimental education is something to be dedicated to. We argued and argued on that point and they just couldn't see it. Finally I realized that it was futile to argue against class bias here; it is built into the university. Every time I would say that requiring applicants to have special interest in the job biased our selection in favor of middle class people, they would look at me and say, "That's unreasonable. The person has got to be interested." And they're right. Within the elevated context of higher education which deals with ideas and ideals and encompasses much meaningful work, suggesting that someone be hired just because they need a job, is unreasonable. I learned a lot by constantly having to accuse the steering committee of class bias and argue against it. I learned how hard it is to always have to argue in defense of yourself; how committees like that must always beat down working class people. It's too degrading a situation for anyone who is in that position of having to defend their dignity at every turn of the conversation. People who don't directly experience working class prejudice should be the one to point it out. If the women's movement is to become united along class, race, and sexual lines then it is up to middle class women to constantly root out class bias; white women, racism; and straight women, homosexism. A Woman? June 4, 1971 Page 5