The construct of the ‘feminisation of poverty’ has helped to give gender an increasingly prominent place within international discourses on poverty and poverty reduction. Yet the way in which gender has been incorporated pragmatically – predominantly through the ‘feminisation’ of anti-poverty programmes – has rarely relieved women of the onus of coping with poverty in their households, and has sometimes exacerbated their burdens. In order to explore how and why this is the case, as well as to sharpen the methodological and conceptual parameters of the ‘feminisation of poverty’ thesis, this paper examines four main questions. First, what are the common understandings of the ‘feminisation of poverty’? Second, what purposes have been served by the popularisation and adoption of this term? Third, what problems are there with the ‘feminisation of poverty’ analytically, and in respect of how the construct has been taken up and responded to in policy circles? Fourth, how do we make the ‘feminisation of ...

The ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ and the ‘Feminisation’ of Anti-Poverty Programmes: Room for Revision?

GUTMAN, Matthew C., THE MEANINGS OF MACHO: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996, 330 pp., $17.00 / fI 13.95 softcover, $45.00 If 35.00 hardcover. Reviewed by : PABLO VILA * A welcome addition to the increasing (but still insufficient) literature about masculinities, this thoughtful and penetrating ethnographic work analyzes the contradictory meaning of being a male in Mexico City's colonias populares [shanty towns]. Gutmann's primary goal is to challenge the stereotypical way Mexican males are usually depicted by both academicians and lay people alike. In the process he points out the complex relationship that exists between gender and national identity in Mexico. Thus, according to Gutmann, machismo in Mexico, as an archetype of masculinity has always been closely linked to Mexican cultural nationalism and this linkage was fueled by the work of prestigious intellectuals like Octavio Paz and Samuel Ramos: "For better or for worse, Ramos and Paz gave tequila-swilling machismo pride of place in the panoply of national character traits. Through their efforts and those of journalists and social scientists on both sides of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande, the macho became `the Mexiacn.' This is ironic, for it represents the product of a cultural nationalist invention: you note something (machismo) as existing, and in the process help foster its very existence" (p.240). But this linkage between the Mexican nation and a particular gender identity, machismo, has obscured the existence of multiple versions of male gender identities in Mexico. In this sense, "the argument for a uniform and timeless Mexican male identity is all the more without merit. What is needed instead is a revisionist analysis that clearly calls attention to anthropological complicity in the creation of stereotypes such as that of the Mexican Macho" (p.248). Attempting to pursue such revisionist analysis, Gutmann found in his fieldwork in Mexico City a much more complicated picture of Mexican male identities, where at least four main groups were easily identified by his interviewees: "the macho, the mandilon, [a male who wants to be commanded] the neither-macho-nor-mandilon, and the broad category of men who have sex with other men" (p.238). In order to show how these categories work in the everyday experiences of his interviewees, and how processes of degendering (men have affairs but so do women, alcohol consumption is no longer solely a male activity, men are active participants in rearing their kids and doing household chores, etc. …

The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City

The “feminization of poverty” is often referred to without adequate specification or substantiation, and does not necessarily highlight aspects of poverty that are most relevant to women at the grassroots. The United Nations Development Programme's gender indices go some way to reflecting gendered poverty, but there is scope for improvement. In order to work towards aggregate indices that are more sensitive to gender gaps in poverty as identified and experienced by poor women, the main aims of this paper are two‐fold. The first is to draw attention to existing conceptual and methodological weaknesses with the “feminization of poverty”, and to suggest how the construct could better depict contemporary trends in gendered privation. The second is to propose directions for the kinds of data and indicators that might be incorporated within the Gender‐related Development Index or the Gender Empowerment Measure, or used in the creation of a Gendered Poverty Index.

/pdf/re-thinking-the-feminization-of-poverty-in-relation-to-53q093s9xj.pdf

Re‐thinking the “Feminization of Poverty” in Relation to Aggregate Gender Indices

Low-wage workers in the United States face obstacles including racial and ethnic discrimination, a pervasive lack of wage enforcement, misclassification of their employment, and for some, their status as undocumented immigrants. In the past, political parties, unions, and fraternal and mutual-aid societies served as important vehicles for workers who hoped to achieve political and economic integration. As these traditional civic institutions have weakened, low-wage workers must seek new structures for mutual support. Worker centers are among the institutions to which workers turn as they strive to build vibrant communities and attain economic and political visibility. Community-based worker centers help low-wage workers gain access to social services; advocate for their own civil and human rights; and organize to improve wages, working conditions, neighborhoods, and public schools.In this pathbreaking book, Janice Fine identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.

/pdf/worker-centers-organizing-communities-at-the-edge-of-the-36c1x98o49.pdf

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

GORDON, Linda, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. New York: Free Press, 1994, 433 pp., $22.95 hardcover Reviewed by: HEATHER JON MARONEY * Gordon's multifactor historical analysis of the development of policy on female-headed households in the United States of America starts with a contemporary question: why is "welfare" (Aid to Dependent Children), designed by feminists, so bad for women and children? The study contributes to two debates: first, about the nature, mode and timing of the US welfare state; and second, about the utility of neo-institutionalist as opposed to society-centred perspectives to explain its origins. Gordon argues that there is a gendered (or "two channel") welfare state with origins in the nineteenth century, agrees with Barbara Nelson and Theda Skocpol that women activists helped shape it before they won political rights, but is critical of Skocpol's emphasis on the agency of state managers. She responds to the neo-institutionlist challenge with a detailed analysis of the influence of US state actors and political forms on the tortuous passage of legislation through the multi-layered Congressional committee structure, but still persuasively demonstrates that a whole range of actors in social movements and from class and race positions were crucial in its development. Gordon's work is engaged history. It asks readers to think critically about a two tier system which sharpens existing inequalities. The US has a privileged stream that provides universal, higher, federally administered benefits understood as rights or earned benefits (like contributory old age pensions) for social groups who are already better off (workers wit stable jobs, men, middle and business classes, and whites). In addition, a range of "welfare" provisions benefit the better off (tax deductions for education, interest on mortgages or children, corporate tax breaks) or everyone (parks, garbage collection or sewage collection and disposal). In contrast, the poorest groups, where single mothers, blacks and hispanics are over-represented, are part of a stigmatized stream of means and morals tested, state or locally administered, lower benefits that are seen to be unearned and undeserved and so easy targets for right wing cost-cutting and moralistic attack. Gordon pushes the issue of agency by inquiring about responsibility for historical actions. Mother's aid campaigns by white and to a lesser extent by black women were so influential that the 1935 Social Security Act, which still shapes provisions, simply added mothers' aid to new federal programmes. What, then, in the ideological stances, analysis and political position of welfare system designers led to its inadequacies? Most important was maternalist feminists' insistence on women's special qualities as mothers, in a "breadwinner-dependent wife" family, which bought into organized labour's demand for a "family wage" and sometimes conflicted with campaigns for better jobs and wages for women. …

Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935

https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=sociology_fac

The Strategic Uses of Gender in Household Negotiations: Women Workers on Mexico’s Northern Border

This study explains why the power of neoliberal business over the Mexican state increased during the last three decades of the twentieth century. It identifies three sources of increased neoliberal business power that occurred in conjunction with neoliberal reforms: (1) active mobilization by neoliberal business, (2) increased access to the state by neoliberal business, and (3) increased economic power of neoliberal business. It thereby contributes additional evidence that counters the view of Mexico’s state neoliberalizers as acting autonomously from business. It further outlines two conditions that were instrumental in bringing about the increased power of neoliberal business: the onset of economic crisis in the 1970s, and a shift in foreign capital preferences in Mexico. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico’s sources and conditions of business power differed from those in advanced industrial societies, and outlines why the Mexican case may be a good starting point for devising a historically-contingent theory of business power in the semiperiphery.

/pdf/theorizing-business-power-in-the-semiperiphery-mexico-1970-vl15dimq03.pdf

Theorizing business power in the semiperiphery: Mexico 1970-2000

Unlike much of the gender and welfare literature, this study examines why a regime that constrains pressure from below would adopt gendered social policies. The Salvadoran case (1944-1972) suggests that political instability rather than societal pressures may prompt semi-authoritarian regimes to adopt gendered labor reforms. We extend the motivations for adopting gendered labor reforms to include coopting labor by examining gendered labor reforms in the context of El Salvador’s historically contingent labor strategy. This gendered analysis helps explain how a semi-authoritarian regime secured political stability and reveals the special appeal gendered labor reforms may have to semi-authoritarian regimes.

/pdf/a-state-s-gendered-response-to-political-instability-29x0mabe3f.pdf

A State's Gendered Response to Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy in Semiauthoritarian El Salvador (1944–1972)

This article uses the Venezuelan case to shed light on the potential role of interest-group systems in discrediting liberal democracies and to identify challenges that the region's democracies are likely to confront in constructing effective and fair interest-group systems. It first analyzes the role Venezuela's interest groups played in discrediting its 40-year two-party democracy. It argues that the discrediting of a system heralded by many as the region's ‘model democracy’ cannot be understood by merely assessing how the structure of the group system excluded certain groups. The study shows that the inclusion of certain business interests in visible positions of power also helped discredit the two-party democracy. The article then compares the above system with the new group system which has emerged since 1998 as part of a new democratic system inspired by Latin America's 19th century Liberator, Simon Bolivar. This comparison reveals that the current system inverts the former system of inclusion and exclusion, even as it has retained a number of the old system's less virtuous features. The implications of the Venezuelan case for the region's democracies are elaborated in the conclusion. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

/pdf/interest-groups-in-venezuela-lessons-from-the-failure-of-a-3kmurjhjle.pdf

Interest groups in Venezuela: lessons from the failure of a ‘Model Democracy’ and the rise of a Bolivarian democracy

This essay shows how world-systems analysis provides a more rigorous explanation for the recent rise of disparate populisms, countering negative stereotypes of mainstream accounts that obscure how formative populist leaders emerged from authentic progressive movements which challenged capitalists. Existing analyses have also failed to specify the varied economic projects of populists, their likely social bases and their relationships to world markets. The essay recommends relational comparisons of populists to unravel populism’s puzzles and advance world-systems analysis.

/pdf/populism-a-puzzle-without-and-for-world-systems-analysis-2tgo0dahe5.pdf

Leslie C. Gates

Papers

The Strategic Uses of Gender in Household Negotiations: Women Workers on Mexico’s Northern Border

Theorizing business power in the semiperiphery: Mexico 1970-2000

A State's Gendered Response to Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy in Semiauthoritarian El Salvador (1944–1972)

Interest groups in Venezuela: lessons from the failure of a ‘Model Democracy’ and the rise of a Bolivarian democracy

Populism: A puzzle without (and for) world-systems analysis