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Try out your newly honed skills in website evaluation - examine the following site found by a search engine:

screen capture, Google entry for "The Ruthless Global War Against Women" ... In Mexico, two-thirds of maquiladora workers are women. For a few dollars a day, they toil long hours in export sweatshops owned by multinational corporations ... www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol17no4/waronwom.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages [More results from www. socialism.com]

Take a look at the actual site to see if your perceptions are correct.

screen capture, "The Ruthless Global War Against Women" by Linda Averill. IN THE U.S., the number of single-parent households on welfare has tripled since the 1960s, with most of them headed by women. Congress rightly calls this a national crisis. But the problem, say these legislative patriarchs, isn't an economy that deprives women of childcare and a living wage. It's out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families. Their solution: deny public aid to these unvalued families. In Afghanistan, when Islamic fundamentalists seized Kabul in September, they yanked girls and women from schools and work and sent them home. Women who appeared in public without being covered from head to toe were beaten in the streets. The Taliban are cut from the same political cloth as the mujahideen, the U.S.-supported guerrillas who fought Afghanistan's Soviet-backed government in the 1980s. In Mexico, two-thirds of maquiladora workers are women. For a few dollars a day, they toil long hours in export sweatshops owned by multi-national corporations like Sony. Miscarriages and injuries are common because environmental and job safety laws are non-existent -- and will remain so, thanks to NAFTA.

This short article has a definite point of view. Like Human Rights Watch, it deplores conditions for women workers in maquiladoras and elsewhere, but it goes further in assessing blame and offering a corrective vision.

screen capture, "The Ruthless Global War Against Women" by Linda Averill, continued ... The female underclass. The profit systemis hopelessly addicted to women's underpaid labor on the job and unpaid labor at home. In the U.S., the average employed woman earns 74 cents to a man's dollar, and then returns home to put in an additional shift for free. For many women, the situation is even more grim, often desperate. Seventy percent of the world's poor are female. And when women are destitute, children are destitute. Among industrialized nations, the richest has the highest percentage of needy children: 22 percent of U.S. children live in poverty. Coming in second is Australia, with 14 percent. And as the global captains of industry strain to keep their profits aloft by laying workers off and dismantling social benefits, they case all the more suffering for women and children. Blamed for every problem. Like any war, the war on women needs a propaganda effort. Women are bombarded with contradictory demands. Television and glossy magazines show "real" women bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan, and staying sexy through it all. When women fall short of this fantasy standard, they are blamed by the media, politicians of all varieties, religious tyrants, and the right wing. Moreover, both the blame and the repercussions fall most heavily on the women most unable to meet the standard in the first ...

Unlike Human Rights Watch, which wants existing laws to be enforced, here the author attributes the conditions of women workers around the world to the failure of capitalism.

screen capture, "The Ruthless Global War Against Women" by Linda Averill, continued ... But the war isn't lost, either in the former Soviet Union or around the world. Capitalism has made women victims, true -- the most oppressed of every oppressed group. But by this act, it has also tuned them into warriors -- not just for gender equality, but for an end to every type of mistreatment and every instance of injustice. This is the secret that threatens the bosses th most. Feminism and the demand for the radical transformation of society, from the gound up, go hand in hand. And this is why every newly installed reactionary regime begins its reign of terror by executing communists and veiling women, or in some other way making them invisible. It is no accident that it was women textile workers who sparked the Russian Revolution -- just as it is no accident that it is women who are in the forefront of the efforts to unionize the export mills of Latin America today. As lifelong feminist and Marxist Gloria Martin said, "The slaves of the ages are in revolt." And when women workers rise up, a new and infinitely better civilization can not be far behind. [links to:] Return to Index page for this issue, Return to Freedom Socialist newspaper main page, Return to FSP homepage

After examing this article, which of these terms would NOT be used to describe the point of view of the article and the publication in which it appears?
Feminist
 Socialist
 Capitalist
 Marxist

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