The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink
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The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink
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Overview
Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a War on Poverty and enlisted Sargent Shriver to oversee it, the most important social issue of our day is once again the dire economic straits of millions of Americans. One in three live in poverty or teeter on the brink—and seventy million are women and the children who depend on them.
The fragile economic status of millions of American women is the shameful secret of the modern era—yet these women are also our greatest hope for change, and our nation’s greatest undervalued asset. The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink asks—and answers—big questions. Why are millions of women financially vulnerable when others have made such great progress? Why are millions of women struggling to make ends meet even though they are hard at work? What is it about our nation—government, business, family, and even women themselves—that drives women to the financial brink? And what is at stake?
To forge a path forward, this book brings together a power-packed roster of big thinkers and talented contributors, in a volume that combines academic research, personal reflections, authentic photojournalism, groundbreaking poll results, and insights from frontline workers; political, religious, and business leaders; and major celebrities—all focused on a single issue of national importance: women and the economy.
“A startling wake-up call for policymakers and anyone hoping to survive a culture that siphons wealth upward to a very powerful few.” —Booklist
Contributors include: Carol Gilligan, PhD * Barbara Ehrenreich * Beyoncé Knowles-Carter * LeBron James * Anne-Marie Slaughter * Kirsten Gillibrand * Hillary Rodham Clinton * Tory Burch * Sister Joan Chittister * Arne Duncan * Kathleen Sibelius * Howard Schultz * and more!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795339615 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 33 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part I: How We Got Here
POWER Powerful and Powerless
By Maria Shriver
!STUNNING FACT
More than 100 million of us live on or over the brink of poverty or churn in and out of it — and nearly 70 percent of this group are women and the children who depend on them.
Let me state the obvious: I have never lived on the brink. I have never been in foreclosure, never applied for food stamps, never had to choose between feeding my children or paying the rent. I have never feared I'd lose my paycheck when I had to take time off to care for my sick child or parent. I'm not thrown into crisis mode if I have to pay a parking ticket or if the rent or utility bill goes up. If my car breaks down, my life isn't thrown into chaos. I am one of the lucky ones in this country, because I am not stressed about my financial security.
But the fact is, one in three Americans do live with this kind of stress, struggle, and anxiety every day. More than 100 million of us live on or over the brink of poverty or churn in and out of it — and nearly 70 percent of this group are women and the children who depend on them. That's almost 42 million women and more than 28 million kids living on the brink.
These are not women who are wondering if they can "have it all." These are women who are already doing it all — working hard, providing, parenting, and caregiving. They're doing it all, yet they and their families can't prosper, and that's weighing the U.S. economy down. Finding out why that is and what we as a nation can do about it is the mission of this report. This is a national reality check.
The fact that more than 70 million women and kids live on the brink today in our nation, the most powerful country in the world, is the kind of stark fact that drove my parents into action.
You see, I am the child of two social innovators, two architects of change — a man and a woman who imagined a better America, a more conscious, caring, compassionate America, and then went out and tried to make it a reality. Neither one of them held elective office, but each felt a profound spiritual calling to right what they saw as social injustice.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned the Great Society and called for a War on Poverty, naming my father, Sargent Shriver, the architect of that endeavor. My dad and his team at the Office of Economic Opportunity conceived, created, and implemented a suite of powerful public programs such as Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps, Legal Services to the Poor, and Foster Grandparents — all still operating today.
Back then, the phrase "poverty in America" came with images of poor children in Appalachian shacks and inner-city alleys. It was "them" and "us." But President Johnson's War on Poverty shocked Americans into awareness and then national outrage that said: "Not here! Not in America. We can't have this kind of poverty in the greatest country on earth!" And the War on Poverty, alongside strong and shared economic growth, cut the official poverty rate a striking 42 percent over the next decade — from 19.5 percent down to 11.1 percent — despite the fact that the nation's attention and resources were eventually diverted to another war, the one in Vietnam.
My mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, fought a different war. Although she came from one of the most powerful families in America, she made it her life's work to help the powerless.
In the 1960s, she decided that people with intellectual disabilities like her sister Rosemary, who were treated so unfairly and unjustly, deserved to have full lives. She believed they didn't belong in institutions and could live at home, go to school, and have fun competing on playing fields. To prove her point, she started a summer day camp in our backyard, which eventually grew into the global Special Olympics movement — permanently changing the world for the millions of people with intellectual disabilities and transforming the way the world saw them.
My mother took her campaign to the top, where the power was: from every state capital to every world capital, from the halls of Congress to her brother in the White House. She pushed for the creation of the first President's Council on Mental Retardation. She pressed the National Institutes of Health to create an Institute on Child Health and Human Development, which now bears her name. She changed the world for people with intellectual disabilities and their families with her passion, her drive, her relentless energy — and her understanding of where power resided and how to use it.
Throughout my life, I watched my mother navigate through the nexus of power in politics, sports, philanthropy, business, faith, and her family, and it made me think a lot about power and powerlessness.
About a year before she died, I sat outside with her on a sunny day. I was her only daughter, and she had pushed me to believe I could do anything my four brothers could do. I looked at my mother, frail at the age of 87, and started thinking of all she had accomplished in her life. At the time, my husband was the governor of California and I was first lady — a job that brought a certain amount of acclaim, visibility, and, yes, power to make an impact.
I said to her, "Mummy, you've had so much success in your life. When you look back, aren't you proud of all you've been able to do?"
She was quiet for a moment and then said, "No, not really."
I was shocked. "How you can you say that? You built the world's biggest organization for people with intellectual disabilities. You've changed laws, you've changed attitudes, you've changed lives all over the world. You had a great marriage and raised five kids who've been inspired by you and done well. How could you not regard yourself as a success?"
She said, "Of course, I'm proud of my children and my marriage." I'll never forget what she said next: "But I never had any real power. I never ran for office, and that's where the power is. If I'd run for office, I would have had the power to make the changes I really wanted to make."
Wow. Here was my mother — a woman so smart, so savvy, so accomplished, so honored, and yet somehow she didn't perceive herself as powerful? How could that be?
I believe it was because my mother was raised in a patriarchal family where the message was, "Run for office, and you get the power to change the world." The power was in the office, not in the person, and the power to run for office was in the men. In my mother's time, women almost never ran for office, just like they never became steelworkers. So she never achieved elective office and therefore thought she wasn't powerful enough. This despite the fact that she was the only living woman ever put on the U.S. silver dollar, despite the fact that she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and despite the fact that she was a hero and an inspiration to millions around the world.
If she felt that way, imagine how women feel who are without her resources, without her opportunities, without her visibility. In my work I have met, talked with, and listened to so many of these women, who have told me they not only feel powerless — they feel invisible.
They say you can't help but feel powerless and invisible when you're working at a job eight or more hours a day and still can't make ends meet. You feel powerless and invisible when you can't get help with child support from the man who fathered your kids. You feel powerless when you can't get any flexibility in your schedule so you can take off a few hours to take your kid to the doctor or care for your parent who has Alzheimer's. You feel invisible when your employer is oblivious and doesn't even understand why you're asking for that flexibility in the first place. They've told me they feel not only powerless and invisible, but also hopeless when they don't see their elected officials implementing policies that would help them work and help them make their own lives more manageable.
For the millions of American women who feel this way, the dream of "having it all" has morphed into "just hanging on." Everywhere they look, every magazine cover and talk show and website tells them women are supposed to be feeling more "empowered" than ever, but the truth is, they don't feel empowered. They feel exhausted.
Which brings me to The Shriver Report. For the past several years, these reports have been tracking the status of women in this country. They grew out of my work as first lady of California.
When I became first lady, I decided to use my experience as a reporter to find out how California's families were doing, what they needed, and how I could be of service. I traveled the state and saw firsthand that millions of low-income working families were struggling to combine breadwinning and caregiving. I saw firsthand that so many of them didn't know anything about the public programs designed specifically to help them. I saw firsthand how much good can happen when the private sector worked with the public sector — and how individuals could be powerful agents of support and change.
For instance, while I was first lady, I developed WE Connect, a public-private partnership working with organizations in underserved communities to connect families to resources, including the state's Healthy Families Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), energy assistance, and the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, which puts money back in their pockets — money they spend on their families, their bills, and out in their communities. It's estimated that to date, WE Connect has helped connect more than 20 million Californians to programs promoting healthier and more financially independent lives. In fact, its success has inspired us to create the Shriver Corps of volunteers that we're presenting in this report.
In 2004, I started producing the California Governor's Conference on Women. The Conference ballooned into an annual gathering of 35,000 women from every walk of life — foster-care graduates, students, teachers, homemakers, public servants, blue-collar workers, businesswomen, and CEOs. These women were hungry for information and inspiration, eager to talk about the obstacles they faced and the experiences they had. They wanted help with managing and succeeding in their various and shifting roles in the family and society. Corporations also came, hungry themselves to learn how they could adapt to a changing America. That's when I decided to dig deeper into the change I was seeing — quantify it, examine it, and find out what it meant for American women and men. The result was The Shriver Report.
In 2009, the first Shriver Report analyzed the seismic shift in our culture in partnership with the Center for American Progress. We reported that for the first time in U.S. history, women had become fully half the workforce and, even more momentous, mothers were now about two-thirds of the primary and co-breadwinners in American families — truly the engine driving the economy. We called this new state of American affairs A Woman's Nation Changes Everything, because the explosion of women becoming breadwinners changed not just the economy, but marriage, families, schools, the workplace, government, health care — everything, including men. As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives called a rare bipartisan subcommittee hearing to discuss The Shriver Report's findings.
Then the following year, The Shriver Report focused on women as caregivers. A Woman's Nation Takes on Alzheimer's was the largest study ever to examine the cultural, social, and economic impact of the Alzheimer's epidemic — just as the nation's 78 million Baby Boomers were moving into their mid-60s, straight into Alzheimer's territory. We reported that women were not only half the people living with the disease, but also more than half the country's unpaid caregivers. As a result of the report, the Alzheimer's Association experienced a 244 percent increase in people signing up for clinical trials.
Now it's 2014, and we're still A Woman's Nation all right, and tens of millions of women are struggling with their dual roles as breadwinners and caregivers, struggling all the way to the brink. Millions of them are providers without partners, finding themselves invisible to a government that doesn't have policies and practices that can help support and strengthen them in their multiple roles.
So 50 years after the War on Poverty, it's no longer "us" and "them." The bright lines separating the middle class from the working poor and the working poor from those in absolute poverty have blurred. The new iconic image of the economically insecure American is a working mother dashing around getting ready in the morning, brushing her kid's hair with one hand and doling out medication to her own aging mother with the other. She's run ragged, and she's running scared. She knows she's just a single incident — one broken bone, one broken-down car, one missed paycheck — away from the brink. And she's not crazy to feel that way:
• Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in this country.
• More than 70 percent of low-wage workers get no paid sick days at all.
• Forty percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income.
• American women are approximately half of all workers in this country, but the average woman earns only 77 percent of what the average man makes, and women of color earn even less.
The American Dream that for decades jet-propelled so many women into the workforce and a hopeful future has disappeared over the horizon and out of sight. It feels like a breach of contract. It feels like the promise of the Dream has been broken.
The promise that a woman could go to work and feel fulfilled and financially independent? Broken. The promise that working would enable her not only to help support her family but also help her to afford a better home and a second car, not to mention pay off the big fat college loan? Broken. The promise that she could provide her kids with a ticket onto the American Dream trajectory, too? For millions of women, that's another promise that's been broken, and they feel powerless to do anything about it.
So in this third Shriver Report, we're drilling down for some answers to the questions we women should be asking ourselves now: What is it with us that we've never been in a position where we've had more impact on this society, yet tens of millions of us are living on the brink?
Is it the jobs we choose that keep us insecure? Do we naturally gravitate toward the health care, home care, education, and public-sector jobs that don't pay enough, but may give us some of the flexibility we need to wear all of our hats?
Is it the children we love? Is it our maternal instinct — the desire or need to be caregivers and therefore available at home — that impels us to choose lower-rung jobs that let us take care of our kids? Or is it the "Mommy Penalty"— bosses not hiring women with kids, or if they do, paying them less, because they believe these women can't possibly be totally productive, focused, or committed to their work?
Is it the men we love, whom we think couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't do the caregiving that has to be done, so we don't even ask them?
Or is it because we don't know how to negotiate for what we need in the workplace? Or because our nation's labor laws are outdated, allowing our employers to stick to pay and benefits policies that keep us from prospering?
Is it because so many of us choose motherhood without marriage, and it's just plain impossible to keep away from the economic brink on one paycheck alone?
Or is it because we automatically go along with that old patriarchal propaganda that a woman doesn't deserve to earn as much as a man for the same job? Do we anesthetize ourselves by thinking, "Men have always had the power, and I can't change it"?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Julie's Story,
Preface By Neera Tanden,
PART I: HOW WE GOT HERE POWER,
Powerful and Powerless By Maria Shriver,
ESSAYS,
'When We Were 9, We Were Honest' By Carol Gilligan, Ph.D.,
Gender Equality Is a Myth! By Beyoncé Knowles-Carter,
Time to Wake Up: Stop Blaming Poverty on the Poor By Barbara Ehrenreich,
Are Women Devalued by Religions? By Sister Joan Chittister,
THE WORKPLACE,
A Woman's Place Is in the Middle Class,
By Heather Boushey,
ESSAYS,
The Gender Wage Gap: A Civil Rights Issue for Our Time By Maya Harris,
Making the Care Economy a Caring Economy By Ai-jen Poo,
Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Broke By Danielle Moodie-Mills,
The Changing Face of American Women By Angela Glover Blackwell,
Empowering Latinas By Eva Longoria,
THE FAMILY,
Marriage, Motherhood, and Men By Ann O'Leary,
ESSAYS,
America's Working Single Mothers: An Appreciation By LeBron James,
To the Brink and Back By Catherine Emmanuelle,
Marriage and Children: Another View By Ron Haskins,
What About the Fathers? By Dr. Kathryn Edin,
A Call to Men: Ending Men's Violence Against Women By Tony Porter,
Women and Poverty: The Role of Lawyers and Family Law By John Bouman and Wendy Pollack,
Evolution of the Modern American Family By Stephanie Coontz,
EDUCATION,
Get Smart: A 21st-Century Education for All Women By Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale and Dr. Nicole Smith,
ESSAYS,
Turning Poverty Around: Training Parents to Help Their Kids By Jennifer Garner,
Living the Head Start Dream By Almeta Keys,
Preschool for All: The Path to America's Middle-Class Promise By Secretary Arne Duncan and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius,
Afterschool Programs: Investing in Our Cities by Investing in Our Kids By Mayor Betsy Price,
Higher Education: Interrupting the Cycle of Poverty By Eduardo J. Padrón, Ph.D.,
Nikki's Story,
PART II: WHY WE MUST PUSH BACK,
The Consequences of Living on the Brink,
ESSAYS,
The Chronic Stress of Poverty: Toxic to Children By Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, M.D.,
The Trap: Mental Illness and Women in Poverty By Ron Manderscheid, Ph.D.,
Armed and Vulnerable: Women in the U.S. Military By Sonya Borrero, M.D.,
Human Trafficking and Slavery in the United States: 'You Don't See the Chains' By Jada,
Pinkett Smith,
Britani's Story,
PART III: THE NATION REIMAGINED,
A New America that Cares,
By Anne-Marie Slaughter,
ESSAYS,
America's Promise, One Woman at a Time By Marianne Cooper, Ph.D.,
PUBLIC SOLUTIONS,
Putting Women at the Center of Policymaking By Melissa Boteach and Shawn Fremstad, and introducing the Shriver Corps,
ESSAYS,
We Have Blown a Huge Hole in Our Safety Net By Peter Edelman,
The Circle of Protection: Balancing the Budget Does Not Require Burdening the Poor By Leith Anderson,
From VISTA Corps to Shriver Corps: Providing Solutions for 50 Years By Shirley Sagawa,
A Hand Up, Not a Handout Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter,
On the Brink with a Disabled Child By Katie Bentley,
PRIVATE SOLUTIONS,
What If Employers Put Women at the Center of Their Workplace Policies? By Ellen Galinsky, James T. Bond, and Eve Tahmincioglu, and introducing the Thrive Index,
ESSAYS,
Smart Business: Reviving the American Dream By Howard Schultz,
Empower Women and You Recharge the World By Muhtar Kent,
Microfinancing Women: Great Return on Investment By Tory Burch,
PERSONAL SOLUTIONS,
Personal Action, Collective Impact By Anne Mosle and introducing Life Ed,
ESSAYS,
When Working Women Thrive, Our Nation Thrives By Sheryl Sandberg,
When Women Achieve Their Full Potential, So Will America By Senator Kirsten Gillibrand,
PART IV: IT'S TIME TO PUSH BACK,
Where Do We Go from Here? By Olivia Morgan and Karen Skelton,
10 Things You Can Do to Power A Woman's Nation,
Increasing Economic Opportunities for Women: The Right Thing to Do and the Smart Thing to Do By Hillary Rodham Clinton,
Failure to Adapt to Changing Families Leaves Women Economically Vulnerable By Anna Greenberg, David Walker, Alex Lundry, and Alicia Downs,
Acknowledgments,
About the Contributors,