To the editors:
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In order for women like Miner’s wife to have both careers and children (and to live in a nuclear unit in their own house)–a demand of middle-class mainstream feminism–it is economically necessary to underpay a person–almost invariably female–to care for their children while they perform work more highly valued by capitalism. This same class of women, 20 years ago, were advocating the radical notion of being paid for their own domestic labor in their own homes, a proposition that never materialized due to capitalism’s dependence on unpaid female labor. Instead, middle-class feminists, and those mostly white women they paved the way for, went to work outside the home, where the money is, and found younger, foreign, or less-privileged women, women of color, or–like myself–women between jobs, to care for their children at the barely livable wages that this economic system called for. I don’t need to point out that most people will pay a mechanic to fix their car ten times what I was paid to care for living human beings. The difference between my life-style and Miner’s is approximately as great as the difference between his own and the Bairds’.
The part of Miner’s reply that really sent a chill through my spine, however, was his implication that my dissatisfaction with “watching” his children led me directly to work on abortion rights. (Is calling what I did “watching” the children a way to justify $4 an hour? Watching, as if the kids were television sets? Such a characterization subtly denies the amount of psychic energy it requires to be with four-to-ten-year-old kids, as any mother or caretaker can attest to.) In the interest of accuracy, I feel compelled to point out that over a year elapsed before I took the directorship of the Chicago Abortion Fund.
Michael Miner replies:
Perhaps these circumstances pit Richlovsky and I against each other in a kind of nascent class conflict waged along generational lines. I can see myself through her eyes, and I’m a have. But what I’m not is a have so predetermined by class that I assume nothing from her and her like but servitude. We offered Richlovsky a job, not a station in life. A predecessor of hers stayed three years in our house and now manages my wife’s shop. Or is that just a higher form of peonage?
