Unemployed Women Quotes

Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

And if your son is unemployed? Three out of four women say they would not date an unemployed man. In contrast, for two-thirds of men, dating an unemployed woman is a nonissue.

To drive a woman away, tell her that you are unemployed. To bore her, tell her that you are single.

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

Like racism, sexism is one of the great justifications for high female unemployment rates. Many women are “just housewives” because in reality they are unemployed workers. Cannot, therefore, the “just housewife” role be most effectively challenged by demanding jobs for women on a level of equality with men and by pressing for the social services (child care, for example) and job benefits (maternity leaves, etc.) which will allow more women to work outside the 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.

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun - the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it.

In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I’m afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.

Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome’s ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens.

One of the greatest tragedies of prayerlessness is the unemployment of angels. Millions of angels line up at heaven’s unemployment office when no one on earth prays to God. Angels are attracted to the place of prayer. In Acts 12:5, the church prayed without ceasing for Peter, and an angel came and touched him. When Peter awakened, the chains fell off as a result of the angel’s touch and he was freed.

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms.

Hell, there're already too many psychologists; too many everythings. Too many engineers, too many chemists, too many doctors, too many dentists, too many sociologists. There aren't enough people who can actually do anything, really know how to make this world work. When you thing about it; when you look at the way it really is; God, we've got - well, let's say, there's 100 percent. Half of these are under eighteen or over sixty-five; that is not working. This leaves the middle fifty percent. Half of these are women; most are so busy having babies or taking care of kids, they're totally occupied. Some of them work, too, so let's say we're down to 30 percent. Ten percent are doctors or lawyers or sociologists or psychologists or dentists or businessmen or artists or writers, or schoolteachers, or priests, ministers, rabbis; none of there are actually producing anything, they're only servicing people. So now we're down to 20 percent. At least 2 or 3 percent are living on trusts or clipping coupons or are just rich. That leaves 17 percent. Seven percent of these are unemployed, mostly on purpose! So in the end we've got 10 percent producing all the food, constructing the houses, building and repairing all the roads, developing electricity, working in the mines, building cars, collecting garbage; all the dirty work, all the real work. Everybody's just looking for some gimmick so they don't have to actually do anything. And the worst part is, the ones who do the work get paid the least.

Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,” she went on as we worked. “Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They

...our criminal legal system makes it harder for people to be employed, while knowing full well that unemployment is directly correlated to crime.

The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.

We were black, white and brown, women and men, rich and poor, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, employed and unemployed, doctors and patients, people of faith and people who struggle with faith.

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.

they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how complaining, say, about a traffic jam, about politicians, about the “greedy wealthy” or the “lazy unemployed,” or your colleagues or ex-spouse, men or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why. When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.

When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century.

Those men who accepted the myth that black women were matriarchs did regard black females as a threat to their personal power. Such thinking is not at all peculiar to black men. Most men in a patriarchal society fear and resent women who do not assume traditional passive roles. By shifting the responsibility for the unemployment of black men onto black women and away from themselves, white racist oppressors were able to establish a bond of solidarity with black men based on mutual sexism.

Studies show there is but one circumstance in which men’s and women’s household work will tend to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. And even then, the operative word is approach. She will still do a bit more. Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context.

Margaret Sanger offered her public approval of this development. “Morons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes and dope fiends” ought to be surgically sterilized, she argued in a radio talk. She did not wish to be so intransigent as to leave them with no choice in the matter; if they wished, she said, they should be able to choose a lifelong segregated existence in labor camps.

In full intellectual honesty and disclosure I do not believe in the social sciences or sociological studies.  I think the fields are completely bunk and bogus, and are more of a welfare jobs program for unemployable hacks who have political agendas rather than any serious study into society with the goal of helping - let alone resolving - the sociological problems that plague it.  If there was any veracity in the social sciences, we would have solved poverty, crime, divorce, racial/sexual gaps, unemployment, etc., long ago, and the fact these scourges continue to exist – and are in most cases, worsening – is proof enough these “fields” are of no value, perhaps even damaging to society.

In the present state of the world, not only are many people destitute but the majority of those who are not being haunted by a perfectly reasonable fear that they may become so at any moment. Wage-earners have the constant danger of unemployment; salaried employees know that their firm may go bankrupt or find it necessary to cut down its staff; businessmen, even those who are reputed to be very rich, know that the loss of all their money is by no means improbable. Professional men have a very hard struggle. After making great sacrifices for the education of their sons and daughters, they find that there are not the openings that there used to be for those who have the kinds of skills that their children have acquired. If they are lawyers, they find that people can no longer afford to go to law, although serious injustices remain unremedied; if they are doctors, they find that their formerly lucrative hypochondriac patients can no longer afford to be ill, while many genuine sufferers have to forgo much-needed medical treatment. One finds men and women of university education serving behind the counters in shops, which may save them from destitution, but only at the expense of those who would formerly have been so employed. In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-wracking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.

. . . one of the lessons of a UBI is that our policy outcomes are not inevitabilities but choices. The United States would be significantly richer right now if it had passed more fiscal stimulus at the onset of the Great Recession. It would be richer if it invested in infrastructure. It would be richer if it chose to ensure that no child grew up in poverty. It would be richer if it had worked to make black and white Americans, as well as men and women, true equals. . . poverty in the United States is a choice. Stagnant middle-class incomes are a choice. Technology-fueled mass unemployment is a choice. Racism is a choice. The patriarchy is a choice. This is not to discount how deeply entrenched existing policies, interests, and tendencies are—but to recognize that while they might be entrenched, they are not immutable.

Student indebtedness expemplifies neoliberalismś strategy since the 1970s: the substitution of social rights (the right to education, health care, retirement, etc.) for access to credit, in other words, for the right to contract debt. No more pooling of pensions, instead individual investment in pension funds; no pay rises, instead consumer credit; no universal insurance, individual insurance; no right to housing, home loans. The individualization process established through social policies has brought about radical changes in the welfare state. Education spending, left entirely to students, frees up resources which the state quickly transfers to corporations and the wealthiest households, notably through lower taxes. The true welfare recipients are no longer the poor, the unemployed, the sick, unmarried women, and so on, but corporations and rich.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

The competition for accumulation requires that the capitalists inflict a daily violence upon the working class in the work place. The intensity of that violence is not under individual capitalists' control, particularly if competition is unregulated. The restless search for relative surplus value raises the productivity of labour at the same time as it devalues and depreciates labour power, to say nothing of the loss of dignity, of sense of control over the work process of the perpetual harassment by overseers and the necessity to conform to the dictates of the machine. As individuals, workers are scarcely in a position to resist, most particularly since a rising productivity has the habit of 'freeing' a certain number of them into the ranks of the unemployed. Workers can develop the power to resist only by class action of some kind — either spontaneous acts of violence (the machine-breakings, burnings and mob fury of earlier eras, which have by no means disappeared) or the creation of organizations (such as the unions) capable of waging a collective class struggle. The capitalists' compulsion to capture ever more relative surplus value does not pass unchallenged. The battle is joined once more, and the main lines of class struggle form around questions such as the application of machinery, the speed and intensity of the labour process, the employment of women and children, the conditions of labour and the rights of the worker in the work place. The fact that struggles over such issues are a part of daily life in capitalist society attests to the fact that the quest for relative surplus value is omnipresent and that the necessary violence that that quest implies is bound to provoke some kind of class response on the part of the workers.

Fine people on both sides? I was disgusted. Here was the same man I’d gone on television to defend when I believed it was appropriate. While I hadn’t been a supporter at the start of his campaign, he’d eventually convinced me he could be an effective president. Trump had proved to be a disrupter of the status quo during the primary and general election. Especially when he began to talk about issues of concern to black Americans. Dems have taken your votes for granted! Black unemployment is the highest it’s ever been! Neighborhoods in Chicago are unsafe! All things I completely agreed with. But now he was saying, 'I’m going to change all that!' He mentioned it at every rally, even though he was getting shut down by the leaders of the African American community. And what amazed me most was that he was saying these things to white people and definitely not winning any points there either. I’d defended Trump on more than one occasion and truly believed he could make a tangible difference in the black community. (And still do.) I’d lost relationships with family members, friends, and women I had romantic interest in, all because I thought advocating for some of his positions had a higher purpose. But now the president of the United States had just given a group whose sole purpose and history have been based on hate and the elimination of blacks and Jews moral equivalence with the genuine counterprotesters. My grandfather was born and raised in Helena, Arkansas, where the KKK sought to kill him and other family members. You can imagine this issue was very personal to me. In Chicago, the day before Trump’s press conference, my grandfather and I had had a long conversation about Charlottesville, and his words to me were fresh in my mind. So, yeah, I was hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Sad.

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dan- gerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief. Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can can change over time to meet changing social circumstances--for example, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or kept under the surface—but the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, painkiller, and threat.

In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation… The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

I am?” “Why are you letting an unemployed man live in your apartment? It’s okay for both husband and wife to work, but not in a casual job! Aren’t you going to get married? What about children? Get a proper job! Fulfill your role as an adult! They’re all going to be on your back now, you know.” “Nobody in the store has ever talked to me like that before.” “That’s because you’re just too far out there. A thirty-six-year-old, single convenience store worker, probably a virgin at that, zealously working every day, shouting at the top of her lungs, full of energy. Yet showing no signs of looking for a proper job. You’re a foreign object. It’s just nobody bothered to tell you because they find you too freaky. They’ve been saying it behind your back, though. And now they’ll start saying it to your face too.” “What?” “People who are considered normal enjoy putting those who aren’t on trial, you know. But if you kick me out now, they’ll judge you even more harshly, so you have no choice but to keep me around.” Shiraha gave a thin laugh. “I always did want revenge, on women who are allowed to become parasites just because they’re women. I always thought to myself that I’d be a parasite one day. That’d show them. And I’m going to be a parasite on you, Furukura, whatever it takes.” I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about. “Well anyway, what about your feed? I put it on to boil, and it should be done now.” “I’ll eat it here. Bring it to me, please.

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

The more that injustice, exploitation, inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and misery prevail in human society, the more Che's stature will grow. The more that the power of imperialism, hegemonism, domina­tion, and interventionism grow, to the detriment of the most sa­cred rights of the peoples-especially the weak, backward, and poor peoples who for centuries were colonies of the West and sources of slave labor-the more the values Che defended will be upheld. The more that abuses, selfishness, and alienation exist; the more that Indians, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants suffer dis­ crimination; the more that children are bought and sold for sex or forced into the workforce in their hundreds of millions; the more that ignorance, unsanitary conditions, insecurity, and homelessness prevail-the more Che's deeply humanistic message will stand out. The more that corrupt, demagogic, and hypocritical politicians exist anywhere, the more Che's example of a pure, revolutionary, and consistent human being will come through. The more cowards, opportunists, and traitors there are on the face of the earth, the more Che's personal courage and revolution­ary integrity will be admired. The more that others lack the ability to fulfill their duty, the more Che's iron willpower will be admired. The more that some individuals lack the most basic self-respect, the more Che's sense of honor and dignity will be admired. The more that skeptics abound, the more Che's faith in man will be admired. The more pessimists there are, the more Che's optimism will be admired. The more vacillators there are, the more Che's audacity will be admired. The more that loafers squander the prod­uct of the labor of others, the more Che's austerity, his spirit of study and work, will be admired.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Discrimination against minorities and immigrants. High unemployment. Murder of innocent people. Politicians controlling women's choices. Lack of treatment for mental health issues. Never Ending Wars. Current headlines? No. They have made news for hundreds of years. "Little did I know that my novel's themes would be ones of current interest," Helene Uhlfelder says about her first novel, Secrets & Deceptions: A Three-Generation Mystery. "The inspiration for Secrets & Deceptions came when I began learning more about my heritage and family – what they had lived through in both Germany and America. I didn't plan to write about the societal issues facing us today.

An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.

There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.

I WOULD OFTEN think back to that Santelli clip, which foreshadowed so many of the political battles I’d face during my presidency. For there was at least one sideways truth in what he’d said: Our demands on the government had changed over the past two centuries, since the time the Founders had chartered it. Beyond the fundamentals of repelling enemies and conquering territory, enforcing property rights and policing issues that property-holding white men deemed necessary to maintain order, our early democracy had largely left each of us to our own devices. Then a bloody war was fought to decide whether property rights extended to treating Blacks as chattel. Movements were launched by workers, farmers, and women who had experienced firsthand how one man’s liberty too often involved their own subjugation. A depression came, and people learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame. Which is how the United States and other advanced democracies came to create the modern social contract. As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance, with each of us chipping in through our tax dollars to protect ourselves collectively—for disaster relief if our house was destroyed in a hurricane; unemployment insurance if we lost a job; Social Security and Medicare to lessen the indignities of old age; reliable electricity and phone service for those who lived in rural areas where utility companies wouldn’t otherwise make a profit; public schools and universities to make education more egalitarian. It worked, more or less. In the span of a generation and for a majority of Americans, life got better, safer, more prosperous, and more just. A broad middle class flourished. The rich remained rich, if maybe not quite as rich as they would have liked, and the poor were fewer in number, and not as poor as they’d otherwise have been. And if we sometimes debated whether taxes were too high or certain regulations were discouraging innovation, whether the “nanny state” was sapping individual initiative or this or that program was wasteful, we generally understood the advantages of a society that at least tried to offer a fair shake to everyone and built a floor beneath which nobody could sink.

The Boston Overseers of the Poor, dating back to the seventeenth century, operated a lodge for unemployed men who were required to perform manual labor, and a temporary home for poor women and children in return for their household labor.

Using data from 2004 to 2011, they found that rates of violence did not go up as unemployment went up overall. However, the devil was in the gendered details. When men's unemployment went up, incidents of domestic violence against women went down. In fact, an increase in men's unemployment of less than 4% corresponded to a 10% to 12% drop in domestic violence. Yes when women's unemployment went up, so did domestic violence against them. A 3% increase in women's unemployment translated in a 9% to 10% increase in domestic violence. This pattern was unique to domestic violence - it didn't hold up for things like theft or more general violence.

Few women would prefer an unemployed and rudderless man to an ambitious and successful one, all other things being even roughly equal; and few men would choose an obese, unattractive, and dull woman over a shapely, beautiful, sharp one.

Craters. Burnt houses. Women weeping for sons and daughters. Suffering. In my profession, there is no chance of unemployment. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that someone will care.

But the new century brought a ‘New Liberalism’, which saw social improvement as something which the state should deliberately direct. The President of the Board of Trade took this up with the zeal of a convert, proposing a minimum wage, creating labour exchanges to find work for the unemployed, suppressing ‘sweat shops’ – small garment factories where men, and often women, many of them immigrants, worked very long hours for very low wages – and then helping Lloyd George, who had been promoted as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce National Insurance and an old age pension.

The disruption of those social ties disproportionately affects girls and women.11 What happens when you feel less connected to your neighborhood, less trusting of the people who live next door or down the street? If you’re a guy, then maybe you just stay home and spend a few extra hours playing your video games or put some extra time into your fantasy football league. Girls and women seem to need that network of human connection more, so they miss it more when it’s not there. Professor Twenge examined the correlation between 16 different indicators and the likelihood that a woman is feeling anxious. She found that lack of social trust is the highest predictor of anxiety—higher than the divorce rate, higher than the unemployment rate, and more important than economic conditions generally.12

Add to this poverty and broken families, absent fathers, unemployed fathers, fathers who couldn’t provide for and protect their families and marinated in that humiliation—realities that cut across all these girls’ lives. Immigration often meant long years of separation that caused marriages to fail, as Sharmeena’s parents’ had; it meant marriages not surviving the strains of arrival, through which women often coped better and men languished in shame-faced, low-wage bitterness; it meant having to dedicate vast time and energy to basic things like securing the rent, navigating the health service, caring for ill relatives, all within a bureaucratic system that was foreign and confusing.

Do blacks drop out of school? Teachers are insensitive to their needs. Do black women have children out of wedlock? Slavery broke up the black family. Are blacks more likely than whites to commit crimes? Oppression and poverty explain it. Are ghetto blacks unemployed? White businesses are prejudiced against them. Do blacks have IQ scores fifteen points lower than whites? The tests are biased. Are blacks more likely to be drug addicts? They are frustrated by white society. Are half our convicts black? The police are racist.26 There is scarcely any form of failure that cannot, in some way, be laid at the feet of racist white people. This kind of thinking denies that blacks should be expected to take responsibility for their own actions. More subtly, it suggests that they cannot do so. When whites make excuses for the failures of blacks—excuses they would scorn for themselves or for their own children—they treat blacks as inferiors, whether they mean to or not.

She refuses to apply for unemployment benefits, preferring to survive on her husband’s salary because she fears perpetuating the stereotype of black people on welfare. “Happiness is limited when

MURRAY CONTINUED TO RAISE the issue of sex discrimination in her writings and presentations to academic and civic groups. On June 19, 1970, at a hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, she described the multilayered discrimination black women faced, using an impressive array of charts to compare salary and unemployment rates by race, sex, and age to supplement her testimony. From her days as a restaurant worker in college to her career as an attorney and educa-tor, she had been paid less than, and denied the respect accorded to, her male peers. She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African American, only to discover that she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman. 'If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be,' Murray told the committee, her voice laden with emotion, 'I survived.' Three months later, she would testify before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, headed by fellow Yale Law School alumna Eleanor Holmes Norton. Unable to hold back the tears, Murray openly wept as she recounted the opportunities she had been denied.

Yes, of course, the U-shaped curve—she’d been mentioning that a lot lately, whenever Jack prodded her in this way. It was a phenomenon well known among certain economists and behavioral psychologists, that happiness, in general, over a lifetime, tended to follow a familiar pattern: people were most happy when they were young and when they were old, and least happy in the middle. It seemed that happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction. This was, Elizabeth insisted, a universal constant: the U-shaped curve pertained to both men and women, both the married and unmarried, the rich and poor, the employed and unemployed, the educated and uneducated, the parents and the child-free, in every country, every culture, every ethnicity, for all the decades that researchers had done this work—the science showed that people in midlife were carrying around with them, all the time, a feeling that was, statistically speaking, the equivalent of someone close to them having recently died. That’s how it felt, she said, that’s how far you were from your early-twenties peak, according to objective measures of well-being. Elizabeth suspected it had something to do with biology, natural selection, evolutionary pressures millions of years ago, as it had been recently shown by primatologists that great apes also experienced the exact same happiness curve, which suggested that this particular midlife sadness must have provided some kind of prehistoric advantage, must have helped our ancient primate ancestors survive. Perhaps, Elizabeth hypothesized, it was because the most vulnerable members of any troop were the young and the old, and so it was important

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.

Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.

I do not believe in the social sciences or sociological studies.  I think the fields are completely bunk and bogus, and are more of a welfare jobs program for unemployable hacks who have political agendas rather than any serious study into society with the goal of helping - let alone resolving - the sociological problems that plague it.  If there was any veracity in the social sciences, we would have solved poverty, crime, divorce, racial/sexual gaps, unemployment, etc., long ago, and the fact these scourges continue to exist – and are in most cases, worsening – is proof enough these “fields” are of no value, perhaps even damaging to society.

I wish we taught the modern generation the true meaning of "love" and the human race. The love for all people regardless of their religion, race, culture or Political beliefs.The love of justice in the face of injustice.The love of wisdom in the face of ignorance, the love of country in the midst of unpatriotic beings and the love of self in the face of wanna be's. I wish we showed them that racism is not something that "Human Beings" should accept or brand. I hope we teach them that character matters more than race. I wish we taught them that "Islam" is not the biggest problem that America faces and vengeance, itself, is harm! In this time of divides, we have seen what the media can do. It has the power to uplift and break a candidate. In this uncertain times, we must be courageous as Americans and stand for what's right, not what the media think is. In this time, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Donald J. Trump will not and can not change this country. It will take you, as an American to liberate your minds from "HATE", racial divides, injustice, and discrimination. It will take you as an American to rethink Islam, Health Care issues, Free Education for all, Unemployment, Environment and Climate Change, Obesity, Foreign Relations, Illegal Immigration, Equality Between Men and Women, and Individual Liberty vs. Government Control#Movebeyonddisparities.

Many a woman would not be in a relationship with or married to her man, if he earned half of what he earns; and many a man would not be in a relationship with or married to his woman, if he earned twice as much as he earns.

Lithuanian citizens are the rudest and most animalistic I have ever seen in Europe. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are very rude, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in Lithuania is a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. These people should be ashamed to be part of Europe and be removed from the European Union. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster: Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, they deserve to be unemployed and starve to death. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ a Lithuanian, marry a Lithuanian or be friend with a Lithuanian. Lithuanias are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Lithuanian women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. Nevertheless, Lithuanians are also extremely racist and ignorant about the planet they live in. They are selfish, sadistic and parasitic. Probably the same could be said about all baltic countries, namely, Latvia, but for now, it is suffice to say this statement is an undoubted fact for the country in analysis. If Latvian and Lithuanian sovereignty ever end within this generation due to major unemployment, massacres and civil wars, and the vast majority of its people perish, I would say Divine justice has been made on both nations.

A skeptic of all sentimentality, she has a witty, rueful voice that gives a deadpan appraisal of the past and present. We see the patriotism of World War I turn to chalk as the telegrams begin arriving at home. During the red scares of the 1930s, we listen to the rumbles of labor strife while wealthy barons deride those downtown ruffians pretending to be unemployed. Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton - but don't forget that side order of comic-book science fiction. How goofy to repeatedly interrupt this haunting novel with episodes about the Lizard Men of Xenor. And yet, what great fun this is - and how brilliantly it works to flesh out the dime-novel culture of the 1930s and to emphasize the precarious position of women.

Those hundreds of “gender projects” funded by aid money might have been more effective if they had also included men. The fact that Westerners often came in intending to promote only women in a country where the majority are unemployed also contributed to the perception that the entire idea of human rights and gender equity was a stand against men.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE? “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ’railroads’ and the federal government must preserve the canals. . . . If canal boats are supplanted by ’railroads,’ serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed growing hay for the horses. . . . As you may well know, Mr. President, ’railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ’engines’ which, in addition to endanging life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” The above communication was from Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, to President Andrew Jackson on January 21, 1829. In 1832 Van Buren was elected vice president of the United States under Andrew Jackson’s second term. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president of the United States. It is also interesting that the first railroad into Washington, DC, was completed in time to bring visitors from Philadelphia and New York to Van Buren’s inauguration. Sources: Janet E. Lapp, “Ride the Horse in the Direction It’s Going,” American Salesman, October 1998, pp. 26–29; and The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 20 (Chicago: World Book—Childcraft International, Inc.), 1979, p. 214. 2

the enforced idleness—including not just unemployment but also involuntary underemployment and withdrawal from the labor market—that meritocratic inequality now imposes on mid-skilled workers roughly equals, in size and scope, the enforced idleness that gender discrimination imposed on women at midcentury.

But unemployment statistics suggest instead that there isn’t much slack in the workforce,” Hiltzik smugly wrote. “At 4.4%, the unemployment rate is at about the point economists judge to be full employment.”83 Hiltzik was just as confident Trump would have no success turning productivity around. Thankfully, the naysayers lost. Under Trump, wages rose for the first time in two decades.84 In November 2018, unemployment dropped to its lowest rate in a half century. Black unemployment reached its lowest recorded level in May 2018, at 5.9 percent, and unemployment rates for Latino, young, and low-skilled workers are lower than they’ve been in years. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities also reached an all-time low.85 In the same year women’s unemployment reached its lowest rate in sixty-five years. By the close of 2018 there were more job openings in America than unemployed people for the first time in this nation’s history. More than five million jobs had been created since Trump took office.

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

threat, whether as wives or workers or both. Marriage, divorce, and birth rates all fell sharply in the early 1930s. It was often too expensive to get a divorce or to have children. There was evidently a decline in sexual relations owing to fear of pregnancy, psychological demoralization following loss of a job, and women fatigued by having to work both outside and inside the home. Married women were tempting targets for legislators and organizations. Of 1,500 school systems contacted in 1930–31, over three-quarters would not hire married women and almost two-thirds dismissed women teachers if they were married. Although the unemployment rate for women was 4.7 percent in 1930 compared to 7.1 percent for men, this was partly because many women held low-income jobs for which men could not or would not compete.

As usual, women were highly vulnerable to economic threat, whether as wives or workers or both. Marriage, divorce, and birth rates all fell sharply in the early 1930s. It was often too expensive to get a divorce or to have children. There was evidently a decline in sexual relations owing to fear of pregnancy, psychological demoralization following loss of a job, and women fatigued by having to work both outside and inside the home. Married women were tempting targets for legislators and organizations. Of 1,500 school systems contacted in 1930–31, over three-quarters would not hire married women and almost two-thirds dismissed women teachers if they were married. Although the unemployment rate for women was 4.7 percent in 1930 compared to 7.1 percent for men, this was partly because many women held low-income jobs for which men could not or would not compete.

Despite education or intelligence, despite unmatched levels of creativity, of soul-piercing sincerity, or analytical genius, women on the spectrum are the most likely to find themselves under- or unemployed, financially dependent, and without guidance.

As I began posting more frequently, I saw a curious trend develop: Nearly all my detractors were young, single, white, self-described Democrat women passionate about cats and dogs. Many supported BLM, transgender activism, and other Left-wing causes. All of them hated Donald Trump and equated him with pure evil. They also appeared to be largely unemployed, with considerable free time. Although

Rather, in her study of the California prison system, Gilmore shows how what she terms the “prison fix” takes care of four surplus crises for neoliberal capital: surpluses of government capacity, land, finance, and labor. The last point is key, as Gilmore demonstrates how prisons serve to take out of circulation unemployed low-wage workers for whom enough of a reserve already exists.

In any event, as a hint of what is now in store for Egypt, consider the city of Alexandria—for decades the Muslim Brotherhood’s stronghold. Once it was a cosmopolitan summer resort famous for its secular, carefree atmosphere. Now it is about the least fun place to live in North Africa. All Muslim women in the city are veiled, among the young often for fear of otherwise being labeled whores by the unemployed guardians of public morality; and violence between local Christians and Muslims is commonplace. Extremist Muslims rioted in the city when the postrevolutionary regime happened to appoint a local mayor who was a Christian. Most bars have stopped serving alcohol. The

[Those two Kurdish women soldiers] made me feel guilty towards the goodness I had not seen because pettiness had blinded me to it. How had I failed to register the many people who did accept me as I was, veiled and alien in their world, just because there were some who stared, or muttered—or shouted, like that crazy woman on the bus? How had I failed to see the decency of vibrant parks with children, care for the weak and unemployed—for what can one call it but decency? How, I sometimes wondered with shock and pain, how had I failed to register this basic decency, simply because there were also idiots in the world who excluded me and mine?

So, around age 31, I finally began to connect the dots, I think. The reasons for why women so often act in fucked up, selfish, whorish, hypocritical ways must be the same reasons for why my grandmother loves me unconditionally, and why after years of unemployment my mother still won’t kick me out of her house. It doesn’t make any fucking sense to a rational person (usually a man), but if you do look at the two sides of it… it sort of makes sense… even though it doesn’t… I guess.

Enormous stores of vital energy accumulate in unemployed women of sanguine temperament, which vent themselves in ways that are generally deplorable: in interfering with other people's affairs, in working up emotional scenes, in thinking about love and making it, and in bothering men till they cannot get on with their work.

The state ofmthe black family life in America evokes grave concern and graver criticism. . . .From the suffering of children in families that struggle to gain sufficient economic support, to the difficult plight of single black women, to the unemployment and overincarceration of black males, the black family is buffeted by a host of brutal social facts that compromise its quality of survival and make a mockery of King's vision of a black Promised Land,

Once I began to look for the flâneuse, I spotted her everywhere. I caught her standing on street corners in New York and coming through doorways in Kyoto, sipping coffee at café tables in Paris, at the foot of a bridge in Venice, or riding the ferry in Hong Kong. She is going somewhere or coming from somewhere; she is saturated with in-betweenness. She may be a writer, or she may be an artist, or she may be a secretary or an au pair. She may be unemployed. She may be unemployable. She may be a wife or a mother, or she may be totally free. She may take the bus or the train when she's tired. But mostly, she goes on foot. She gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind facades, penetrating into secret courtyards. I found her using cities as performance spaces or as hiding places; as places to seek fame and fortune or anonymity; as places to liberate herself from oppression or to help those who are oppressed; as places to declare her independence; as places to change the world or be changed by it.

I returned to Denmark in 1975 and was part of a group trying to set up an international lesbian front. To my surprise all kinds of new lesbians were “coming out” of the women’s movement. Although we had wanted this to happen it was surprising when it did, and difficult to adjust to. I had known some of the women as heterosexual feminists and it was hard to accept them as the new experts on lesbian political theory. They seemed in some way to lack what I felt was a lesbian identity, though I was unable to analyse quite why. I went to a lesbian conference in Amsterdam, with women who didn’t know and couldn’t have cared that there had been one there ten years before, and how important it had been. I sought out some of the 1965 lesbians and found them now quite anti-political. “We can’t stand all these new lesbians,” they said, “they’re so negative.” I disagreed, of course, on principle, but somehow there was less joy in the air. Unemployment was starting to happen in Europe, political discussions seemed different, we talked more about rape and violence, about men and what they were doing to the world. We talked less and less about sisterhood until finally we didn’t talk about it at all, because none of us could really believe in it quite the way we had when the sun shone and it was always summer, and the whole world was poised on the brink of change. I asked one of the new lesbians to dance at a social after a meeting. Then I tried to kiss her, gently, as we had been doing for the previous five years. She pushed me away roughly and said I was behaving like a man. I felt hurt and didn’t understand. I got drunk in a corner with some twenty-year-olds, crying into the schnapps bottle and trying to explain to them that there was something happening now that wasn’t what I thought I’d fought to achieve. Something uptight, critical, rejecting. Something not quite— lesbian. I was only 35, but I was beginning to feel like an old woman of the movement. Most of the lesbians my age were not to be found in the lesbian movement. Many were back working in the mixed homophile organizations, now changing their names to associations of gay men and women. Or they were branching out to start women’s refuges, getting involved in the peace movement, active in the political women’s movement. I had moved to Norway and found that the only lesbian group I wanted to work in was called The Panthers, involved in social and cultural activites of lesbian poetry, discussions, and sing-alongs. I got involved with the Norwegian F48 and a huge split over Marxist-Leninist politics, which resulted in the formation of the Worker’s Homophile Association (AHF)— which turned out to be not at all marxist anyway. It all made for interesting political intrigues, but I grew tired and began working very hard so that I could spend part of each year back in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My work as a tour guide made saving money easy, especially doing lots of trips through the USSR, where there were few consumer temptations. I did, of course, and dangerously, search for Soviet lesbians whenever I could.

The American people are finally fighting back. They realize that liberalism has failed them. It is a system that has both ignored them and created a foundation for failure; a system of dependency and surrender. A system of unaddressed violence. A system of controlling language so that only one voice, the liberal voice, can ever be heard. I’m a conservative because I believe the free market would have better served those struggling Americans. While writing this conclusion, unemployment hit the lowest numbers in sixty years, and employment for minorities and women has never been higher. Trump, for all his imperfections, did deliver on the conservative promise of a country with fewer political decrees and wealth-redistributive taxes. America’s businesses responded with a resounding yes!

Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion. The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing—all the things that sexual harassment feels like to those who’ve experienced it. Frequently, in those months, I was asked about how to address men’s confusion and again, their discomfort: How were they supposed to flirt? What if their respectful and professional gestures of affiliation had been misunderstood? Mothers told me of sons worried about being misinterpreted, that expression of their affections might be heard as coercion, their words or intentions read incorrectly, that they would face unjust consequences that would damage their prospects. The amazing thing was the lack of acknowledgment that these anxieties are the normal state for just about everyone who is not a white man: that black mothers reasonably worry every day that a toy or a phone or a pack of Skittles might be seen as a gun, that their children’s very presence—sleeping in a dorm room, sitting at a Starbucks, barbecuing by a river, selling lemonade on the street—might be understood as a threat, and that the repercussions might extend far beyond a dismissal from a high-paying job or expulsion from a high-profile university, and instead might result in arrest, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of police or a concerned neighbor. Women enter young adulthood constantly aware that their inebriation might be taken for consent, or their consent for sluttiness, or that an understanding of them as having been either drunk or slutty might one day undercut any claim they might make about having been violently aggressed upon. Women enter the workforce understanding from the start the need to work around and accommodate the leering advances and bad jokes of their colleagues, aware that the wrong response might change the course of their professional lives. We had been told that our failures to extend sympathy to the white working class—their well-being diminished by unemployment and drug addictions—had cost us an election; now we were being told that a failure to feel for the men whose lives were being ruined by harassment charges would provoke an angry antifeminist backlash. But with these calls came no acknowledgment of sympathies that we have never before been asked to extend: to black men who have always lived with higher rates of unemployment and who have faced systemically higher prison sentences and social disapprobation for their drug use; to the women whose careers and lives had been ruined by ubiquitous and often violent harassment. Now the call was to consider the underlying pain of those facing repercussions. Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”34 Suddenly, men were living with the fear of consequences, and it turned out that it was not fun. And they very badly wanted it to stop. One of the lessons many men would take from #metoo was not about the threat they had posed to women, but about the threat that women pose to them.

Middle- and upper-middle-class mothers can be excoriated for failing to appreciate the support that so many others lack. Working-class and poor mothers can be pilloried for their ignorance and inattentiveness and inability to provide the kind of care middle-class children receive. And those who criticize them can rest assured it’s not women they hate, or even mothers; it’s just that kind of mother, the one who, because of affluence or poverty, education or ignorance, ambition or unemployment, allows her own needs to compromise (or appear to compromise) the needs of her child. We hate poor, lazy mothers. We hate rich, selfish mothers. We hate mothers who have no choice but to work, but also mothers who don’t need to work and want to do so.

Level 1: Your Foundation (Complete 5 of 5) Join a gym: If you’re not already a member of a gym, join one. If you’re not familiar with how to work out properly, hire a personal trainer. Make this a weekly habit. Upgrade your wardrobe: Go out and upgrade your wardrobe based on the recommendations in Chapter 8. Challenge yourself to wear nicer clothes than you’ve ever worn before. It’ll change how you feel about yourself. Get a nice haircut: Go to a salon and drop the $50 on it. It’s worth it. It makes a difference. Job security/satisfaction: This is a complicated one, but if you’re not happy with your work situation, take some time and plan a way to fix it. If you work too much, try to find a way to work less. If you’re unemployed, stop everything else and get a job. Pursue one social hobby regularly: Pick a social hobby and pursue it regularly. You may already have one, but if not, find one. It could be dance classes, public speaking courses, language courses, cooking classes, joining a band, etc. Whatever it is, make it social. That means sitting at home and perfecting your model airplanes doesn’t count.

Her legacy lies not just in the New Deal achievements she brought about, but in the regularly updated codes that protect workers in offices and factories everywhere. Today few people appreciate how different life was before Frances Perkins. We take for granted that children can go to school, not mills or coal mines every day; that people work for eight hours, not fifteen; that they get paid "time and a half" for overtime; that they can receive checks when unemployed or disabled; that they needn't dread the day when they can no longer work. Over seventy million Americans receive benefits under Social Security every month. The figure includes retirees, survivors, dependents, and the disabled. There was only one priority item on her famous wish list she presented to FDR before becoming Secretary of Labor that she and the New Deal were not able to fulfill. It was universal health care. She left us a single major unfilled goal, one we as a nation are still striving to realize.