The Senate Just Took a Baby Step Toward the Feminist Goal of a Universal Child Benefit
On International Women's Day, the good news is that the new COVID-19 relief bill will include a kind-of, sort-of universal child benefit — a policy that feminists have long called for. But the overly complicated, burdensome way the policy is implemented means that on this issue, the Left still has its work cut out for it.
During the coronavirus pandemic, with schools and day cares closed, many women have had to work simultaneous or double shifts as workers and parents. Others have found it impossible to do both jobs.
This past weekend, as today’s International Women’s Day approached, the US Senate voted to allocate some funding toward a problem that has long preoccupied socialist feminism: women’s uncompensated labor in the home.
Granted, Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Rosa DeLauro haven’t been debating Lenin’s thoughts on this subject, nor have they been parsing the fine points — or the radical implications — of Selma James’s famous 1972 call for “Wages for Housework!” But an expanded version of the child tax credit as part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill does provide a small and long-overdue way to compensate parents — especially mothers — for all the extra care work the coronavirus has entailed.
It is extraordinary that those who reproduce the human race are still unsupported and impoverished for this fundamental biological and societal work. Unwaged, in a world dominated by money.
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