poor

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 10th 2010

Woman's Prison

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Katie Madonna Lee

Although Woman’s Prison is not a documentary, writer/director Katie Madonna Lee presents a realistic story of poverty and the struggles women, children, and to some degree, men face who experience it. From birth, Julie Ann Mabry is a quiet, shy person, who just wants to be safe with her mother (played by Lee). Sadly, her father takes away that option by murdering her mother, and she is left quietly battling predators, including her uncle.

When Julie encounters heart-wrenching situations, she does not lose hope. After she runs away from her uncle, she meets Butch, a guy who, at first, takes care of her. Because he does not force himself on her, she feels safe—but the honeymoon wears off when he begins to see her as just another financial burden in the two-bit town they live in. In one of the scenes, Julie is so hungry that she sneaks money out of his wallet to buy groceries at a nearby store.

Without community support or education, Julie drowns in postpartum depression, which leads to a prison term after she shoots Butch. She is given the choice of shutting up, putting up with the situation and getting out on good behaviour, or taking a stand to end the escalating sexual abuse that she suffers at the hands of one of the prison guards. Julie must decide whether prison is safer than the outside world, where her voice is silenced at every turn.

Lee has done a great job of assembling a cast of unknowns to play these characters. The movie has its finger on the pulse of poverty and how it gnaws away at both young and old. Woman’s Prison may be too painful for some audiences, but I hope they see it. Julie Ann Mabry is not just a character; she is thousands of women in America who have and will continue to experience such struggles.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, February 27th 2010

An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Edited by Lorraine M. López

University of Michigan Press

In An Angle of Vision, we are presented with a series of extraordinarily well-written essays centered upon one of the most taboo topics in U.S. culture: class. More specifically, we are presented with first-person, female-centered examinations of two groups who are steadily disappearing from both the public discourse and the popular culture of the United States: the poor and working class. As the myths of meritocracy and the “middle class nation” take up ever more space in the public discussions that the United States has about itself, the space assigned to these two groups shrinks. When the poor and working class do garner some attention, their stories are generally told from and distorted by a perspective completely alien from their own. They are spoken of or for, but do not truly get to speak for themselves.

This anthology is then both welcome and needed, especially since it grants us the perspective of a group far more diverse that can usually be expected. We hear the voices of Dorothy Allison, Bich Minh Nguyen, Angela Threatt, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Mary Childers, and others in the dialects born of distinct cultures and subcultures from around the United States and throughout the world. Having only their gender and class background in common, these women writers represent a variety of races, ethnicities, sexualities, generations, and geographies and do so in a way that makes the foreign familiar and approachable.

However, their stories, written in the intersections between multiple identities, share common themes that emerge explicitly and implicitly throughout the book. Perhaps the most compelling is the lingering doubts of “authenticity” that plague those who find themselves moving into a world where discussions of the class in which they were born is deemed taboo and one is expected to achieve (or at least fake) fluency in the dialect of the privileged. Despite the cult of social mobility immortalized in the American Dream, one is often supposed to pretend not to have moved at all since such an admission may embarrass those who were born into their social status.

Having grown up in desperate poverty in the Deep South and finding myself suddenly part of the shrinking middle class, I found these essays in general riveting and deeply authentic. It is, perhaps, difficult for me to overcome my class bias enough to truly understand how they would be taken by someone who does not share the writers’ experiences with class. However, I hope that the appeal of truly great writing, filled with pathos and humor, might overcome any discomfort readers may have with the topic.

Written by: Melinda Barton, January 21st 2010

Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America

admin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:59:00 +0000

By Tiny (a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia)

City Lights Books

We never hear from the poor. They are simply not represented in public life. Perhaps it is because we don't think they deserve to have a say. After all, one of the strongest myths in American society is that any person can succeed as long as she is willing to work hard and never give up. What I like about Criminal of Poverty is that the writer, Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, proves that is simply not the case.

In her gripping, although often awkwardly written, memoir, Tiny portrays her formative years growing up with her mother, Dee, as a very tumultuous time since they lived in grimy apartments, motels or in their car. She was unable to attend school because Dee was mentally ill – agoraphobia – and relied on her daughter to take care of the most basic tasks of survival, including securing housing, healthcare and community services. At certain points, Tiny even manages her mother's personal relationships with men because these boyfriends can help them survive by providing rent or food money.

Dee is an artist, and it is through this expression that she and her daughter cope with their struggles. She and Tiny come up with creative ways to make art and money by opening up a fashion clothing business, but, ultimately, it is Tiny who ends up doing most of the work, especially after Dee's avant-garde clothes are not selling, and they have to switch to cartoon-based designs for their covert t-shirt business. During this time, Dee's agoraphobia is worsening, and she is unable to fulfill many responsibilities required for the smooth running their operation. Because of Dee's utter dependence, Tiny has no time where she doesn't have to worry about money and having a place to sleep at night.

Throughout Criminal of Poverty, Tiny seems to carefully emphasize how much she respects her mother and does not blame Dee for loss of childhood; it is the system that puts women in such a powerless position that they are forced to make bad decisions. I believe Tiny wants to feel this way, and maybe even mostly does; yet in some places I could feel the tension in her writing between the pain she felt as a young woman and the carefully distanced writer of today. Assigning the blame of her living conditions to the system is deserved, but it doesn't always make for the best reading. Sometimes Tiny's careful protection of Dee got in the way of the narrative because this doesn't allow the reader to make one’s own judgments.

A dense book, Tiny writes with very little dialogue and scene, nor does she often refer to the settings, which are Los Angeles, Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead, her writing style is very reflective and analytical; she describes what happens and what the consequences are, which doesn't make for a quick read. Although this book is not gracefully written overall, there are a few passages that stand out as exceptional and the story trumps any writing flaws because it is simply compelling. I was left with a few questions after the last chapter, not completely sure if the cycle of poverty was finally over, but I liked this open ending because it gives me space to think about how the term poor is defined and what wealth really means, not only for American society, but also for me.

Written by: Logan Perkes, April 17th 2007