are men’s wages the best cure for women’s economic insecurity?
In the 2008 Democratic Party platform, the only provision with women in the title was one promising “Opportunity for Women.” The provision pledged “that our daughters should have the same opportunities as our sons,”1 confining measurement of women’s equality to our access to men’s jobs and men’s wages. The nomination, then election, of the first African-American presidential candidate portended and promised great change. But through its platform, the Democratic Party looked backwards to an equality agenda drawn by women’s exclusion from men’s world. This agenda finds singular and transformative power in direct comparisons between women’s and men’s status, earnings, and opportunities. But to focus only on such comparisons misses many of the persistent inequalities imposed on women. Certainly, women who enter men’s world encounter signal inequalities: Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Lilly Ledbetter’s unequal wages are just two high-profile examples. But women who do the work
