Women And Austerity

Austerity has become the new principle for public policy in Europe and the US as the financial crisis of 2008 has been converted into a public debt crisis. However, current austerity measures risk losing past progress towards gender equality by undermining important employment and social welfare protections and putting gender equality policy onto the back burner. This volume constitutes the first attempt to identify how the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies are affecting women in Europe and the US, tracing the consequences for gender equality in employment and welfare systems in nine case studies from countries facing the most severe adjustment problems. The contributions adopt a common framework to analyse women in recession, which takes into account changes in women’s position and current austerity conditions. The findings demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, employment gaps between women and men declined — but due only to a deterioration in men’s employment position rather than any improvements for women. Tables are set to be turned by the austerity policies which are already having a more negative impact on demand for female labour and on access to services which support working mothers. Women are nevertheless reinforcing their commitment to paid work, even at this time of increasing demands on their unpaid domestic labour. Future prospects are bleak. Current policy is reinforcing the same failed mechanisms that caused the crisis in the first place and is stalling or even reversing the long term growth in social investment in support for care. This book makes the case for gender equality to be placed at the centre of any progressive plan for a route out of the crisis.

Austerity has become the new principle for public policy in Europe and the US as the financial crisis of 2008 has been converted into a public debt crisis. However, current austerity measures risk losing past progress towards gender equality by undermining important employment and social welfare protections and putting gender equality policy onto the back burner. This volume constitutes the first attempt to identify how the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies are affecting women in Europe and the US, tracing the consequences for gender equality in employment and welfare systems in nine case studies from countries facing the most severe adjustment problems. The contributions adopt a common framework to analyse women in recession, which takes into account changes in women’s position and current austerity conditions. The findings demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, employment gaps between women and men declined — but due only to a deterioration in men’s employment position rather than any improvements for women. Tables are set to be turned by the austerity policies which are already having a more negative impact on demand for female labour and on access to services which support working mothers. Women are nevertheless reinforcing their commitment to paid work, even at this time of increasing demands on their unpaid domestic labour. Future prospects are bleak. Current policy is reinforcing the same failed mechanisms that caused the crisis in the first place and is stalling or even reversing the long term growth in social investment in support for care. This book makes the case for gender equality to be placed at the centre of any progressive plan for a route out of the crisis.

As austerity measures continue throughout Europe, its effects are felt differently by different groups of citizens. This book looks at how minority women in France and Britain have coped with austerity. Crucially, it casts them not as passive victims, but as active agents finding ways to survive, using their race, class, gender, and legal status as resources for collective action at a moment when left-wing politics and non-governmental organizations have failed them. Making use of in-depth case studies, Minority Women and Austerity offers an unprecedented look at the changing relationship among the state, the market, and civil society, and the opportunities and dilemmas that creates for minority women.

Austerity has dominated the policy agenda in the past decade. Although it appeared to end with the COVID-19 pandemic, a return to harsh cutbacks in the future cannot be ruled out. In this incisive analysis, Diane Perrons shows that while austerity policies have devastating effects on people's lives, their gendered dynamics are particularly conspicuous: budget cuts have been overwhelmingly aimed at services used by women. She shows how the gender aspects of this economic and social catastrophe intersected with a range of other factors, making the experience of austerity very different for different groups - and highly unjust. Not only that, it undermined responses to COVID-19. She finishes by critiquing the justifications for austerity policies and asks whether there are compelling alternatives that can re-invigorate economies and societies after the pandemic, and avoid a return to austerity. This compelling book will be essential reading for activists, policymakers and students of feminist political economy everywhere.​

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, Dabrowski makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state’s legitimization of austerity and women’s everyday experiences, she reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, this book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity.

Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expos� of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.

In the first book of its kind, Bassel and Emejulu explore minority women’s experiences of and resistances to austerity measures in France and Britain. Minority women are often portrayed as passive victims. However, Minority women and austerity demonstrates how they use their race, class, gender and legal status as a resource for collective action in the face of the neoliberal colonisation of non-governmental organisations, the failures of left-wing politics and the patronising initiatives of policy-makers. Using in-depth case studies, this book explores the changing relations between the state, the market and civil society which create opportunities and dilemmas for minority women activists. Through an intersectional ‘politics of survival’ these women seek to subvert the dominant narratives of ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.

Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980-2020 focuses on the underrepresented relationship between austerity and Irish women's writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies, considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women's writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing through a multi-medium approach through four distinct lenses: Austerity, feminism, and conflict; Arts and Austerity; Race and Austerity; and Spaces of Austerity. This collection asks two questions; what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020 this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Twelve essays, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, ​and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and across form as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.