Responding Post: Eang & Mink

I smiled reading Eang’s piece. I smiled when she reminded me of times when I too sat with my family of 7 or 9 learning English through Wheel of Fortune. I smiled when she found happiness and change through education. If feminism truly means what Mink suggests, that it’s “fundamentally about winning choices for women,” then Eang’s hit it. She’s found herself the choice to pursue a medical career over the blueberry farm.

But there were also parts that I didn’t smile, couldn’t smile and had to stop. Those were the parts where she described her mother. Her mother that was able to become a warrior within the confines of feminine subservience. Her mother that I’m convinced has bones and sinews saturated with the struggles and suppression of personal dreams that she had endured in the name of duty and mere survival. This I see as not only a portrait of Eang’s mother alone, but as a portrait of many Asian immigrant women struggling to bring up their children uneducated, disadvantaged, and invisible.

This leads right into Mink’s discussion over welfare reform and how it further punishes women that are already struggling. Our meritocratic way of thinking has influenced to believe that negative reinforcements such as the withdrawal of welfare funds for the needy are necessary to motivate these “lazy” people. To challenge this, Mink asks us to discard our economic mindset for thinking about welfare and instead to look at it from a moral standpoint. It is the current trend to see people as dollar bills. Those that have the most cultural and social capital have the highest potential in generating dollar bills. Those that are at the bottom are seen as leeches. This is how we have come to understand welfare – more specifically welfare to benefit citizens who actually need it. What we overlook that I will not spend much time elaborating on is corporate welfare. Why is corporate welfare not seen as supersized leeches, I cannot tell you.



But I like Mink’s perception of welfare a lot more than the one we have now. Welfare should be seen instead as money owed to the people, especially to the women who need it to raise our future democratic citizens.

This discussion is very interesting to me because I didn’t think welfare would even be discussed after reading about how un-unified the groups of feminists were in the second wave. It was upper-middle to upper class women that dominated and thus their issues were the ones dealt with. It’s very promising to read from Mink that the “war against poor women is a war against all women,” (56). If this is truly the direction that the feminist movement is going for – to help bring up the “weakest link” which happens to be a huge population of women – then the third wave might be the last big wave.