Friday, June 25, 2010

Institutionalizing Women's Work

Parenting has long been the province of mothers, and so the expertise in parenting has been developed over the course of millennia by women. This has led many to claim that the women's work of parenting was intuition based, and discredited as not knowledge based. However, much of what these women developed was valuable. Many children were raised successfully, healthfully and literate despite great odds. The best of the parenting technology developed by these women was often discovered by the wealthy (the oppressors) and used with their own children.
Powerful kings and wealthy lords deliberately sought out lower class women to raise their children, and often supplemented the technologies of these women with educators from Aristotle to Galileo. Eventually, America got into the act by forcing black women to raise the children of wealthy white slave owners, a trend that continues with chains of indebtedness and advertising driven desire instead of iron to this day.
During all of these millennia, women's work was used by the oppressor against the oppressed, even though the technology was developed almost exclusively by the oppressed. This is par for the course with human history. Education was used in exactly the same way until it was institutionalized to create equality by offering public schools and then by (attempting to) desegregate them in the 1950's. All technology is harmful until it comes into the hands of the people and becomes a tool for equality.
Starting in the 1950's, cognitive science started to make the women's work of parenting available to the people. It turns out that a lot of things that women have been doing for millennia were right, and a lot of other parenting techniques were harmful.
The Harlem Children's Zone has had an immense amount of success sharing this traditionally women's technology with people who never had access to it. The base of the Harlem Children's Zone is parenting classes. In this way, they began to institutionalize women's work and value it society wide, and as a result of giving it value we are creating equality. The Harlem Children's Zone has gone from having schools that were desperately below average, to average and above in only a little less than a decade, not by changing how children are educated, but by giving children's parents access to the best parenting technology. This technology was pioneered, hypothesized, and tested by women exclusively, and now it is being valued by society at large. More importantly, it is being valued as a skill by men, who are coming to realize that women's work may not be "intuitive" and therefore exclusive to women, and may therefore be accessible to everybody, the same way that office work and leadership roles are not exclusive to men.
This institutionalizing of technology is what made America great. Universal access to neccesities such as public education and governmental decision making create freedom precisely because they create equality, not in form but in fact. And it is this idea that continues throughout Europe, but has come to wither on the vine in the hands of people who proclaim themselve patriots while actively attacking the very thing that makes the country histroically notable. I suppose if I were busy attacking everything that was good about my country, I also would want to shout louder than anyone else in the room "God bless America!!!" because, like an abusive husband, I wouldn't want the country to wake up and realize that I was not contributing.