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Women's Liberation and National Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America
Women's Liberation and National Health Care Confronting the Myth of America Author:Kathie Sarachild, Jenny Brown, Amy Coenen In this new book published by the grass roots women’s liberation think tank Redstockings, an intergenerational team of radical feminist organizers makes a case for a change in the strategic direction of U.S. feminism. They start by puncturing the myth of America, the heavily hyped notion that the U.S. is number one in wages, living standards... more », health care, and that U.S. women are the most liberated in the world. Not true, Redstockings argues. U.S. women are tracked into unpaid care work and made dependent on men and employers because we lack the kind of universal "social wage" or "citizen wage" programs so familiar in other industrialized countries. Redstockings dissects the job-linked benefits system in the U.S., showing how it further skews the balance of power in favor of men over women and in favor of employers over workers. The book focuses on the urgent example of health insurance, which most U.S. women currently rely on their employers or their husbands’ employers to provide. Meanwhile, nearly every other industrialized country in the world provides universal free health care regardless of employment, age, or marital status. The book offers an arsenal of facts, arguments, and feminist history and provides an energetic and encouraging analysis of what the feminist movement has accomplished and where we can go from here.« less