Women, the Recession, and the Stimulus Package

Last winter, as Barack Obama's transition team developed a stimulus package to jumpstart the U.S economy, feminist economists and historians organized petitions, e-mails, and meetings to call attention to women's needs. Their activism was unprecedented; I have not seen the like during all my time in the nation's capital. While it bears some resemblance to the work of academic women around welfare reform in the early 1990s, this mobilization was more spontaneous, more rapid, and probably less visible to the public. It also faded fairly quickly. The mobilization targeted the transition team, largely through e-mail petitions. Although feminists wrote op-eds and letters to the editor, there were no press conferences or ads in the New York Times, as there had been during the longer welfare reform campaign. Arguably, though, this mobilization was more successful in its outcome.