檳榔嶼

- The emphasis on work as the key to women's leberation led many white feminist activists to suggest women who worked were 'already liberated'. They were in effect saying to the majority of working women, 'Feminist movement is not for you'.
  - Working for low wages did not liberate poor and working-class women from male domination.
- In many college classrooms today students both female and male will argue that feminist movement is no longer relevant since women now have equality.
  - They do not even know that on the average most women still do not get equal pay for equal work.
- Indeed, there are many high-paid professional women, many rich women, who remain in relationships with men where male domination is the norm.
- Economic self-sufficiency is needed if women are to be liberated.
  - Clearly better-paying jobs with comfortable time schedules tend to offer the greatest degree of freedom to the worker.
- Women are wrong to "blame" feminism for making it so they have to work, which is what many women think.
  - The truth remains that consumer capitalism was the force leading more women into the workforce.
    - Given the depressed economy white middle-class families would be unable to sustain their class status and their lifestyles if women who had once dreamed solely of working as housewives had not chosen to work outside the home.
- When men did most of the work, women worked to make home a site comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were no present.
  - Most women have not even been able to find satisfying work, and their participation in the workforce has diminished the quality of their life at home.
- If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better-paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women. Feminist focus on careerism, getting women employed in high-paying professions, not only alienated masses of women from feminist movement; it also allowed feminist activists to ignore the fact that increased entry of bourgeois women into the work force was not a sign that women as a group were gaining economic power. Had they looked at the economic situation of poor and working-class women, they would have been the growing problem of unemployment and increased entry of women from all classes into the ranks of the poor.
- White supremacist capitalist patriarchal attempts to dismantle the welfare system in our society will deprive poor and indigent women of access to even the most basic necessities of life: shelter and food.
  - Indeed a return to patriarchal male-dominated households where men are providers is the solution offered women by conservative politicians who ignore the reality of mass of unemployment for both women and men, and the fact that jobs simply are not there and that many men do not want to provide economically for women and children even if they have wages.
- The path to greater economic self-sufficiency will necessarily lead to alternative lifestyles which will run counter to the image of the good life presented to us by white supremacist capitalist patriarchal mass media.
- Indeed much of the class power elite groups of women hold in our society, particularly those who are rich, is gained at the expense of the freedom of other women.
- Many men blame women working for unemployment, for their loss of the stable identity being seen as patriarchal providers gave them, even if it was or is only a fiction.
  - An important feminist agenda for the future has to be to realistically inform men about the nature of women and work so that they can see that women in the workforce are not their enemies.
- When women work to make money to consume more rather than enhance the quality of our lives on all levels, work does not lead to economic self-sufficiency.
  - More money does not mean more freedom if our finances are not used to facilitate well-being.
  - Rethinking the meaning of work is an important task for future feminist movement.