“As the deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.” These words, which open Psalm 42, and which were sung beautifully by our choir just now, remind us that spiritual sustenance just as essential and refreshing to the soul as water is to our physical bodies. “As the deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.”
Though many elements of our society might have us believe that beauty, dignity, and fulfilment are of less importance than our material well-being, I’d like to challenge that assumption. Years ago, when I first heard Mimi Farina’s setting of “Bread and Roses”, I was floored by the bold nonduality of the lyrics, the seemingly-paradoxical demands of women workers for both bread and roses– “our lives will not be sweated from our birth until life closes, hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.”
“Hearts starve as well as bodies”… Curious about the origin of the song, I learned that the lyrics were based on a poem by James Oppenheim, written in 1911. The poem depicted the rallying cry of women factory workers demanding both fair pay and dignified working conditions with few enough hours to allow them some leisure time.
The poem, which has been set to music by several different composers over the years, was popularized in the wake of a large strike of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, many of whom were immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In early 1912, working in increasingly dangerous and demeaning conditions, but largely left out of the male-dominated labor unions, hundreds of women voted unanimously to walk off their textile mill jobs if their employers had reduced paychecks in response to the new state law which reduced their working hours from 56 to 54 hours per week.
They had, indeed, been shorted pay, and began a strike. Within a week, 25,000 other mill workers in the city, largely women and children, joined in. Over the next two months, the workers gained attention and sympathy for their cause in other cities around the country. The State Militia was brought in to control the strike, joining with local police to attempt to brutally suppress the movement. Many women were beaten, hundreds were drenched with firehoses in freezing temperatures, and two strike leaders, a man and a woman, were killed.
The workers responded by diversifying their tactics, including organizing some of the largest marches ever seen, and bringing singing, chanting, and artful banners into the protests. One journalist identified this unique part of the strike, reporting that “It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous. They are always marching and singing.” After two months, the strikers settled with the management, winning a 15% increase in wages as well as double overtime pay. The Lawrence Strike came to be known as the “Bread and Roses Strike”, for its particular emphasis on the humanity and spirit of the workers, rather than just the wages.
Later that year, Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish immigrant garment worker and women’s suffrage activist, expanded on this idea of humanity in her speeches by saying (p. 288) “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”
On first thought, this may seem like an obvious statement — that everyone values and enjoys beauty, and dignity. But the claim of “Bread and Roses” is not simply that we all enjoy those things but that they are part of our basic human needs, along with food, water, and shelter — that feeding our heart and soul is essential to maintaining humanity for people in ALL socioeconomic situations. That, in the words of Rose Schniederman, we have the “right to live, not simply to exist.”
More than a hundred years later, today low-wage workers continue to demand and strive for fair and decent pay and treatment. Teacher’s strikes across the country, in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Washington and California, have shed light on the poverty wages and crowded and crumbling classrooms that many public school teachers live with. The Fight for Fifteen campaign has successfully worked to incrementally raise the minimum wage in several states, particularly by organizing fast-food workers. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is a worker-run organization rallying for the “respect, recognition, and inclusion in labor protections for domestic workers” across the country.
And most recently, in the wake of their legal status changing from independent contractors to full employees, exotic dancers in Los Angeles are working to create a union to rectify demeaning treatment, garnered tips and wages, and illegal, unsafe, and unethical actions by the management and patrons of the strip clubs where they dance.
You’ll notice that all of these current examples I named — public school teachers, fast food workers, exotic dancers, and domestic workers (who include housekeepers, nannies, and elder care attendants) — they all have something in common with one another, as well as the textile workers a century ago. All of these are low-wage jobs in fields that are usually regarded as “women’s work”, with tasks traditionally associated with caregiving, food preparation, child-rearing and domesticity.
And let me just say now that in a few minutes I will delve more into deconstructing the gender binary. For now, though I’m going to use the shorthand of “men” and “women” to illustrate this gender disparity, though I know that gender-based discrimination is magnified for people of gender minorities, including trans and nonbinary people.
So, I’m sure many of you know about the intersectional issue of the persistent pay gap between men and women, occurring across most fields of work and levels of pay. This is evident in comparing men and women with similar training and job functions, but different titles. For example, a 2016 article noted that “Janitors, two-thirds of whom are men, make $12.13 per hour, while maids and housekeepers, nearly 9 in 10 of whom are women, make $9.94 per hour” despite similar job functions and requirements.
And, this differential is magnified by the types of work that are deemed to be “women’s” work or “mens work”. For example, the same article notes that, teacher assistants, 89 percent of whom are women and a quarter of whom have a bachelor’s or master’s degree, are paid a median wage of $11.43 per hour.
Meanwhile, “in the “men’s work” world, service station attendants are 91 percent male, have few if any educational credentials and earn $11.62 per hour,” 19 cents more per hour than the teacher assistants. Examples like this dispel the myth that differences in educational attainment account for the wage disparity between men and women.
And, low wage workers are overwhelmingly women. In honor of March being women’s history month, the most recent issue of the Speaking of Justice magazine published by our Social Justice council at church focuses on Women’s Justice. Among the many reflections offered on intersectional women’s justice both within our church and in the larger community, one notes that 69% of low wage workers are women.
And, evidence suggests that perhaps it is not even about the type of work that is coded as “women’s work” but the mere fact of women doing that work. What I mean is that, studies have shown that when the majority of a workforce in a given industry shifts from men to women, wages stagnate and fall. It’s not that the value of the work has changed, but that society seems to give more weight to work done by men than to work done by women. For example, as the fields of recreation, ticket sales, design, and biology have each shifted from male to female dominance, the wage value has dropped anywhere from 18-57%.
You’d think that class would be distributed equally among the genders but it isn’t — why is this? Despite the early feminist aims of increasing freedom through work for women, why do we still see such inequality for women workers?
bell hooks, the noted intersectional feminist scholar, says, “Women have been in the workforce for a long time now. Whether we are paid well or receive low wages many women have not found work to be as meaningful as feminist utopian visions suggested. When women work to make money to consume more rather than to enhance the quality of our lives on all levels, work does not lead to economic self-sufficiency. More money does not mean more freedom if our finances are not used to facilitate well-being.”
In other words, not only are the wages themselves important, but also what we are able to do with them to make life more worth living. Not only the bread, but the roses. Dignity and beauty feed our hearts and souls. And not just women, but all people.
So why this sexism, this persistent devaluation of women? In a book published by Beacon Press, called “Sexism and God Talk”, Rosemary Radford Ruether connects the present-day patriarchal culture with early human understandings of gender roles. She explains that because of the deep-seated “assumption of the hierarchy of culture… over nature… Women are symbolized as “closer to nature” than men and thus fall in… between culture as the male sphere and uncontrolled nature.” (p.72) This hierarchy and domination that connects gender and nature may sound familiar to you who heard the Rev. Sofia Betancourt speak at Seminary for a Day in January, and I commend you to watch it online if you were not there.
Basically, the idea that Ruether goes on to expand is that because women were the ones with the biological capacity to grow new life, that they must be more like untamed, carnal earth and less like rational, cultural men. This forced biological differences into a binary of gender roles (which of course we know now to be a spectrum rather than a duality), and has led both to the devaluation of women and women’s spheres of work, as well as the violent enforcement of masculinity.
To oversimplify it, in traditional societies, for a girl to become a woman, all she had to do was to start bleeding and take on more of the tasks in the home sphere, where she had already spent much of her time. But for a boy to become a man, he had to be harshly separated from the domestic home world he had known as a child, and instead have part of himself cut off — spiritually, emotionally, and in some cases in ritual, physically — in order to be recognized by and welcomed into the men’s sphere.
To me, this idea of the spiritual and emotional cutoff that men continue to go through in our society, is heartbreaking. It is the other side of the coin of violence against women. In order to be a “masculine” man, boys are told, they must cease to be soft, to be loving, to be joyful, wondering beings. Those traits are coded as “feminine”, and to patriarchal society, they at best represent a childish approach to life for a self-respecting man who is supposed to be decisive, hardened, and strong.
At worst these traits are teased, bullied and beaten out of many boys and men, sometimes even to the point of death. So many of our boys learn that they must bury these parts of themselves to be safe and accepted. In order to fit into this prescribed gender role, which rests on shunning the world of women, beauty, and comfort, the so-called “feminine” traits must be eliminated from male self and male spheres.
This results in enforcing and digging in to a strong gender binary, because not just women’s bodies, but femininity itself is devalued. There is a constellation of traits that have been assigned masculine or feminine but which I believe are within each of us to varying degrees — kindness, decisiveness, gentleness, rationality, softness, creativity, nurturing, strength.
Given that all of these trains can be present for everyone, it’s no wonder to me that toxic masculinity so often results in violence against women and gender-non-conforming people, because to a person who has cut off the soft part of himself, for example, when he sees my softness, it becomes a reminder of the pain and grief of loss turned into something that must be either tightly controlled or eliminated.
I use she/her and also they/them pronouns because I identify with the experience and the power of womanhood, and I also feel like that my fullest humanity cannot be described solely within the gender role of “woman.” Women cannot be seen in our full expression of humanity until the definitions are expanded or even dissolved to include the full spectrum of human experience.
I may resonate with and embody many of the characteristics of womanhood, but while those supposedly “feminine” qualities are relegated to second-class, it’s hard for me to be seen as fully human. And nor can anyone assigned male who also demonstrates these traits of vulnerability and softness.
Intersectional justice is about recognizing and acting on the fact that all of our identities and social locations, as well as all oppression, are related to one another. The subjugation of women and gender-non-conforming people is related to class and labor struggles. It is the same logic of domination that has also led to racism, degradation of nature, shaming and shunning of non-conforming bodies and minds, and even hatred between religions, as we so tragically saw unfold in New Zealand this week.
Which brings me back to bread and roses. It is a rallying cry that, despite being over a hundred years old, is still radical today in its assertion that our full humanity — embodiment, spirit, dignity, beauty — is to be upheld and respected in the social systems we have created. Rather than our bodies and spirits being controlled by our employers, our gender expectations, or our faith, we must strive to lean in to web of multiplicity and nuance within each of us.
The call for “bread and roses” which started with low-wage women workers, is not just a tool to liberate one group, but taken to its furthest end, is a demand for the full humanity of all of us to be recognized and liberated from the binaries and oppressions that constrict us.
We must strive, in the words of trans UU leader Alex Kapitan, to “find release from our belief that all things must be either/or, this belief that walls us off from one another, ensnaring us in a battle of same versus different.” We must be ready to “open our minds, to deeply listen, and to truly know one another, finally glimpsing the kaleidoscopic beauty of the divine.”
“No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, but a sharing of life’s glories, bread and roses, bread and roses!”
Topics: Paradox