15: Engendering Prisons and History of Women Guards: Part II

Women's prison populations began booming in the past 25 years, and their growth has continued to unprecedented and unexpected numbers. This has resulted in lower standards in female prisons, and thereby more instances of illness and deaths due to illness. This is the result of women not being perceived as possibly violent, but as naturally idle, sweet beings. Work done in male and female prisons is While men's prisons have employed men for hard labor and harsh punishment. Conversely, women have been charged with distinctly "womanly" labor: sewing, cleaning and cooking, namely.

14: Engendering Prisons and History of Women Guards: Part I

The theory of gendered organization purports that organizations are not neutral organisms, but have definite identities. These identities give attributes to members of the organization, and play on already present assumptions and roles that are assigned to specific types of people in society and then serves to perpetuate them.

Britton uses this theory to frame her research question in asking how prisons continue to detect and then reproduce gender through their structure, practices, and policies. She is asking why and how women continue to hold lower positions on the proverbial totem pole, while men continue to hold positions of ultimate power and authority in institutions, particularly prisons.

Structure, agency and culture are all interlinked in the ongoing processes of organization gendering. This happens through the rewarding of workers who can take on more shift work, often at hours that are nonstandard, meaning that women who have children cannot do things like pick them up from school or perhaps spend time with them at all. Better, more standard, shifts are designated to workers with seniority, because they have earned their dues. This leaves those same women in an impossible situation: they must start at the bottom, and if they cannot meet the odd structure found there, they cannot be promoted and thereby either remain in menial positions or none at all. That completely exemplifies what Britton meant when stating that "organizations are gendered at the level of structure," (p. 7). Men have the capacity to excel in a prison environment, and women, by and large, do not. Finally, women, either in making their own gendered choices or falling subject to the stereotyping of others, tend to take on work that is considered more feminine. This means women work in cleaning and cooking, which are fields where there is no real authority.

When Britton stated that "organizations are gendered at the level of structure" (p. 7), she meant that

Both public and private spheres become gendered concepts by

These are reflected in labor history, labor practices and labor law via

13: Women in Non-Traditional Jobs: Part II

Images of prison guards and correctional officers that are popularized in the media usually are sexualized and minimize the actual responsibility and power of women in those non-traditional roles. These women are either portrayed as extremely feminine, and desiring sex constantly, or extremely masculine, and uninterested in anything sexual. This is combined with another notion: that women are not naturally attuned to the violence that is inherent to men. Because "normal" women are not violent in nature, these women in prisons are seen as a sort of freakish anomaly. This leaves women as either sexual objects, asexual objects, or monsters.

These notions are a stark contrast to how women in non-traditional roles are portrayed in promotional and recruitment videos. The “Women at Work” recruitment video portrays women in non-traditional fields such as aviation, automotive mechanics, drafting, construction. There is a mix of very feminine and slightly masculine women. Women are in power, taking action, and, interestingly, the only male voice in the piece is the narrator. This note is reflected in the real-life continued domination of males in these fields. If a man was not speaking as the ultimate authority, the video might be less effective in persuading females to pursue jobs that men dominate. It’s a voice of permission, allowing women to want to try their hands at new and typically male careers.

The images portrayed of men as correctional officers in male prisons are usually intensely violent. Additionally, men's prisons are generally a gender segregated and not welcoming to women taking on authoritative positions within them. Conversely, men taking on authoritative positions in women’s prisons tend to be welcomed with open arms. This sexism within male institutions is a result of men feeling threatened by women coming into fields that are not gender typical, and infiltrating what had been a boys’ club. Women probably tend to be more welcoming to men in female institutions because men are more likely to be viewed as experts in the field of corrections, because they have dominated the field over more time.

12: Women in Non-Traditional Jobs: Part I

Occupational segregation exists because society classifies professions by gender. This gender socialization leads members of different genders to gravitate towards certain types of professions. For example, women are socialized for working in more emotional fields like teaching, while men are socialized for working in more powerful fields like police work.

This is also tied in with the differing expectations for women and men as far as family roles go. While women can hold traditional nine-to-five jobs, they are generally not associated with jobs that have odd hours or require more masculine traits like police officer, security guard or prison worker. Odd hours equate to the inability to be what society sees as a proper mother, but they also are responsible for a the wage gap that is evident between male and female positions. The ability to work longer, later hours means more money, promotions, and a higher profile job within a field. The notion of a balancing act that women must take on in order to succeed at work and still remain a good mother is not reflected to the same dramatic extent on the male side.

Women gain multiple advantages when breaking into traditionally male-dominated careers. Because these fields are not largely populated by women there are sometimes fiscal benefits to pursing these fields. For instance, to study particular topics in a college setting, women can receive scholarships merely for their gender. This can assist in diversifying a workplace, or school environment, and encourage equality between males and females where it was previously not present. Additionally, pursuing a non-traditional field can be empowering.

Men absolutely benefit from women entering male-dominated professions because it forces them to take in new ideas, see jobs from a different perspective and, possibly, discover a newfound respect for women.

Working Poor Women's Unpaid Labor: Part III

I currently heard a news report on NPR's program Tell Me More titled "The Days of June Cleaver Have Come and Gone." The overall theme of the piece pertains to the fall of the commonality of women staying at home as mothers, and not working outside of their homes. Typically, society has viewed women who choose to stay at home with their children as able to do so because of their socioeconomic status: they either have familial wealth or husbands or partners who provide enough to allow their wife or partner to stay at home.

What has been found statistically is that the "there is no such thing as a 'typical' stay-at-home mother." Some women do not actually have a choice in whether they can stay at home or not. This is a group of women who cannot get jobs, cannot afford child care (perhaps wanting to save money on child care, also), or have held jobs that are incompatible with child care. Yet again, there is a group of women who feel that being a mother is a full-time job and the most important one that they can be carrying out. All of these women are lumped in with the women who compose the set of rich women who stay home as a luxury of sorts.

This diversification of the stay-at-home mother as someone who can be any color, of any class and be doing so for any reason. The major issue contended by Leslie Morgan Steiner is that motherhood as a full-time career is not all that beneficial to women. "... The unfortunate thing about motherhood is that it's a dead end job. And if you start out young and you didn't earn very much money before you had kids, no matter how long you stay home, your being a mom isn't going to improve your chances of taking care of yourself and your family financially," Steiner explained. This is true of all women, and, it should be noted, the longer someone, whether female or not, is out of the workforce, the more detrimental it is likely to be toward their professional skills.

Professor Stone sees current trends as showing that women are graduating from college at higher rates than ever, and after schooling is completed they want to work and spend time in their homes, and wanting both is difficult to deal with because there is no absolute, blanket support system. This signifies that no matter what class a woman belongs to, there is no set way of handling how she balances work and children because it is not a totally played-out trend.

Working Poor Women's Unpaid Labor: Part II

Within our course material, and specifically within the NPR stories that we've listened to, there are vast gaps between those of the opinion that welfare has been effective and those who think that it has not.

While those who champion welfare are correct in that there are less people enrolled in that system than ever, at the same time, enrollment increased for other programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits. Vivyan Adair, Associate Professor of women's studies at Hamilton College, argued that welfare needs to work to educate, instead of recipients being ushered into work but still needing to depend on services, where cannot be self-sufficient.

Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, argued that welfare is working positively because poverty numbers have declined in children and in single mothers. He believes the problem with welfare is that the whole system needs reform instead of simply getting mothers into the work force or offering them educational opportunities.

In Ajay Chaudry's "Putting Children First," the mothers in his sample use a variety of adaptive strategies after their welfare bouts have ended.


Chaudry's recommendations to make the system work to the advantages of the people begins with having the government increase funding for children's programs and making sure that the system is totally synchronized and usable. The system must also be usable and aware of the people who are to benefit from it and with whom it interacts: modern working women who are single mothers. In doing this everything must be made simpler, and redone from the ground up. Systems must work together for the benefit of children, their education and their well being by making programs available, flexible and seamless in their transitions from one stage of life to the next. Finally, the biggest, most sweeping and daunting recommendations from Chaudry is to work toward a society that has eradicated poverty as a whole. While this is the most far off of his ideas, it is certainly the most ideal and would be better than living in a society where we deal with existing poverty instead of proactively preventing it from happening.

Working Poor Women's Unpaid Labor: Part I

Working poor women's conditions revolve mainly around trying to work through a very complex system of red tape that comes with seeking government assistance and varieties of welfare, which is theoretically a system in place to help and make life easier for them in times of need. It would seem that, based on statistics from the National Center for Children in Poverty, the youngest of children and often the ones living in poverty. This could be attributed to a young mother's unfamiliarity with how to handle money, child care and maintaining a job. The NCCP backs up this theory: "researchers believe that parents of young children do not earn as much as parents of older children because they tend to be younger and have less work experience."

Because these young children have generally younger mothers with less job experience, they are poor. The main deficiencies found in these fiscally lacking families are food shortages, food insecurity (which means that the family is unsure of how they will get food and when their next meal will come), lack of housing that does not break the proverbial bank (it should be noted that 41% of families who rent their homes spend more than a third of their income on rent, according to the NCCP), and these children also lack health insurance, which either prevents their mothers from seeking care or ends up costing exorbitant amounts when they do.

The NCCP offers two major ways that society and effectively government policy can prevent children from living in such poverty. The first is to “make work pay.” This would mean that new policies should be created to allow workers to gain earned income tax credits, thereby lightening the burden of tax deductions on already meager checks. It is also recommended that regular increases in minimum wage be enacted to support growth and promise in the lives of these families whose breadwinners do not have much opportunity to grow their money. With these should also come health insurance, paid sick leave, vacation and the possibility of benefits that those making more money receive.

The second way that child poverty can be ridded, according to the NCCP, is by supporting parents and their young children. Educational opportunities, such as subsidized early child care with structured learning, need to be made more widely available