This paper explores the relationship between gender, feminism, and austerity in the 1970s. In the midst of inflation, rising unemployment, and lagging productivity, policymakers and economists called for greater fiscal austerity, contending that the economic downturn was caused by a public sector that had grown wasteful and bloated. My paper traces the ways that “austerity talk” clashed with feminist politics. Both challenged the classical liberal distinction between public and private spheres. While advocates of austerity sought to increase the role of the private sector in the political and economic life of the nation, feminists were demanding that issues once construed as private be recognized as politically determined and thus be open to public contestation.
My paper argues that the politics of austerity proved damaging to women in two ways. First, the public sector was a crucial source of women’s employment; indeed, the expansion of the public sector had occurred in tandem with women entering the paid labor force. An attack on the public sector was simultaneously an attack on an increasingly feminized workforce. Second, the politics of austerity undermined the feminist project of making “care work”—care for the sick, the elderly, and the young--a collective, remunerated social responsibility. Calls for austerity moved in the opposite direction by shifting care work back to private households and the informal economy. Given that attacks on the public sector have proved so damaging to women, one might assume that responding to such attacks would be central to contemporary feminist politics. But ironically, recent feminist politics has abetted rather than undermined both “austerity politics” and the larger neo-liberal project of which it is a part.