Is that a bridge in your stimulus package, or are you just happy to see me

When I was studying women's history at UCLA, we used to talk a lot about how things could be gendered, sort of like Romance languages.  For example, In Italian you add an "a" to a feminine noun and an "o" to a male noun.  English does not have specifically gendered nouns, but it does have implicit ones.  Truck, for example, is implicitly gendered male.  So is construction worker, mass transit, freeway, investment bank, financial institution, commercial real estate, prison, infrastructure. It's not just that men predominate in the professions suggested by these words, it's that these word imply the kinds of power and control that we associate with definitions of masculinity.  

Of course, there are also implicitly gendered female words, like healthcare, library, elementary school teacher, arts institution, universal preschool.  Again, it's not just that many women work in fields suggested by these words.  These words themselves are engendered with female connotations about caregiving, service, collaboration and -- let's face it -- lack of profit.  

Now, I'm not an economist, but I know a gendered stimulus package when I see one, and it seems to me that, as the stimulus package is shaping up, it is becoming more and more male.  I'm all for safe roads and earthquake retrofitting, and apparently so are most policymakers.  These are the easy things to get people to agree to fund.  But just this morning I heard that family planning has been stripped from the stimulus package.  Yesterday, NPR did a report on how Republicans don't want to use stimulus money to support arts organizations, even though arts organizations provide jobs and make revenues that are often pumped directly back into local economies.  

It troubles me.  I worry that the privileging of institutions engendered male will weaken the already suspect cultural authority of institutions engendered female.  And I worry that that same privileging will hurt women because the fields in which they often predominate will be seen as unworthy of protection.  And, of course, when you hurt women you hurt children and families, and you even hurt men.  When even our institutions suggest to men that their work is the most worthy of protection, that their livelihoods are the most sacred to our society, we instill in men the kind of patriarchal thinking that can only lead to psychic damage and really bad things.  

On KPCC's Talk of the City, Patt Morrison spoke yesterday of the triggers of familicide.  This very uncommon yet horrific crime is almost entirely perpetrated by men deluded to believe that their success is so important to the family that the entire family would be better off dead than stuck with the humiliation of an inadequate male provider.  How scary is that?

Thus, as this nation tackles with this recession -- another 60,000 jobs lost just two ago -- and as it tries to negotiate its way out of this worrisome place, I can only hope that our representatives will hear the immortal words of Abigail Adams and, please, "Remember the ladies."  And not just the ladies, by their words.