Equal Rites Unequal Outcomes

Equal Rites, Unequal Outcomes

Thirteen years ago, in June 1988, the Radcliffe Classof1953 celebrated its 35th Reunion. Amidst the festivities, we who participated repeatedly asked ourselves the same two questions: Is Harvard as sexist as it was when we were undergraduates? If not, what is the status ofwomen at Harvard today? To find the answers we formed an ad hoc committee and charged the members to report back to the class in five years. The committee interviewed selected senior and junior Harvard faculty, Harvard and Radcliffe administrators, students, and alumni/ae. We identified and studied Harvard and Radcliffe reports on their institu tions and on their student organizations. We contributed to and participated in a 1990 Radcliffe Focus Group, "ASurveyofAlumnae and Undergraduate Perceptions. " We found that the University was not as sexist in 1988 as it had been in 1953. Yet the status ofwomen, though improved, remained quite unequal to thatofmen. (Radcliffe College was organizationally separate from Harvard University until 1977, when a "non-merger merger" was implemented. However, Radcliffe had no fac ulty of its own and employed Harvard faculty to teach its students, in strictly separate classes until World War II. The merger effort was com pleted in 1999 with the complete integration ofthe two institutions and the formation ofthe Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a "tub on its own bottom" like other Harvard graduate and professional schools. ) In 1993 the Class of'53 voted unanimously to form the Commit tee for the EqualityofWomen at Harvard (CEWH).

Equal Rites, Unequal Outcomes

The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States

In the United States, the causes and even the meanings of poverty are disconnected from the causes and meanings of global poverty. The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States provides an authoritative overview of the relationship of poverty with the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the context of globalization. Reorienting its national economy towards a global logic, US domestic policies have promoted a market-based strategy of economic development and growth as the obvious solution to alleviating poverty, affecting approaches to the problem discursively, politically, economically, culturally and experientially. However, the handbook explores how rather than alleviating poverty, it has instead exacerbated poverty and pre-existing inequalities – privatizing the services of social welfare and educational institutions, transforming the state from a benevolent to a punitive state, and criminalizing poor women, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Key issues examined by the international selection of leading scholars in this volume include: income distribution, employment, health, hunger, housing and urbanization. With parts focusing on the lived experience of the poor, social justice and human rights frameworks – as opposed to welfare rights models – and the role of helping professions such as social work, health and education, this comprehensive handbook is a vital reference for anyone working with those in poverty, whether directly or at a macro level.