Page 73 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

it also to the poorest among us, the women who labor without adequate pay and struggle to feed and house themselves and their loved ones . Women’s equality demands the end of women’s poverty . It is a struggle we can advance just as we have advanced the rights of women with more opportunity and affluence .
Legal aid work on behalf of women must be comprehensive . We must assist the many women who need help with their individual problems, be it accessing income, avoiding discrimination or obtaining essential housing and health care . And we must also do work to challenge the systems and policies which keep women in their economically disadvantaged position . Women’s roles have evolved, and legal aid advocacy can help redesign laws and policies to provide for women’s equal treatment and economic stability in the modern world .
Many pieces of our current unemployment compensation, Social Security, education, employment and childcare systems were designed in an era where most women did not work, especially those with children, and where women were dependent on the income of men, typically men employed full time . As a result, school days end in the middle of the workday, Social Security and unemployment compensation programs reward full time year round employment, and traditional women’s work earns less than that of men (who historically were seen as needing more wages to support families) .
Legal aid advocates can assist their clients by flagging these inequities and working to change them, to raise women out of poverty that is too closely related to their gender and expected gender roles . We need to start looking at poverty and its relationship to gender in new ways and labelling it unacceptable . Poverty is not gender-neutral, just as it is not race-neutral . Historical oppression and traditional roles have put women and minorities in their current subordinate positions and we must push for remedies .
The women’s movement has made tremendous and powerful progress . Let us lawyers who have witnessed women in poverty join forces with the struggle for women’s equality and recognize how the two problems interrelate . We can speak out on behalf of women who have the least and struggle the most . We can recognize the particular challenges that women face, we can identify the societal and cultural factors that make women bear the brunt of poverty, and we can develop strategies to push for change . •
Specific Areas for Reform: Women’s Rights
71