I would like the subject to be Single women in the work force please. I Include an article with the assignment. It also must please have 4academic/scholarly sources.
Student will pick one specific topic from the selected course materials (readings and videos, posted in Canvas) to write on. Drafts will be submitted for written feedback such that revisions will be made prior to final paper submission. For this paper you should be selecting one topic from one of the readings/video assigned for Seven, Eight, and Nine to further research and discuss. You may select any element of the topic to research (example: if you selected representations of sexuality in the media you might then choose to analyze one or two pieces of media wherein sexuality has a major impact within the plot). This draft should be as complete as possible, including source citations. Once your draft has been submitted you will work with the writing tutor to make revisions and resubmit the Final paper by the due date. As always please contact me with questions (
[email protected]). · · To receive an “A” the essay should show depth of thought, clarity of writing, use of readings and concepts discussed in class. · Three to five pages, typed, double-spaced · APA or MLA format · Minimum of 5 academic sources* (unlimited popular press sources): no more than 3 of the 5 sources can come from course materials * Here are two guides that address academic/scholarly sources. Please verify that you are meeting the minimum for academic sources. Remember that not all of our class readings will come from academic sources, and it is up to you to determine which sources will apply to the minimum. University of Southern California library guide (Links to an external site.) University of Illinois library guide Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political Force Photo: Bobby Doherty C U T C O V E R S T O R Y F E B . 2 1 , 2 0 1 6 By Rebecca Traister Single Women Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America B y the time I walked down the aisle — or rather, into a judge’s chambers — in 2010, at the age of 35, I had lived 14 independent, early-adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. Single Women Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America 119 Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political Force https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/political-power-single-women-c-v... 1 of 12 12/30/18, 4:12 PM I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone. In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans ages 18–29 are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960 It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry. This reorganization of our citizenry, unlike the social movements that preceded it and made it possible — from abolition and suffrage and labor fights of the 19th and early-20th centuries to the civil-rights, women’s, and gay-rights movements of the mid-20th century — is not a self- consciously politicized event. Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life. I am not arguing that singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. Many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry — or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, and many of them do, partnering or cohabiting without actually marrying. Still, the rise of the single woman is an exciting turn of historical events because it entails a complete rethinking of who women are and what family is and who holds dominion within it — and outside it. (It might seem as though the journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians is at odds with this trend, but it is part of the same dismantlement of the power structure on which the traditional institution was built.) Beyond whether you regard this shift as dangerous or thrilling, it is having a profound effect on our politics. While they are not often credited for it, single women’s changed circumstances are what’s Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political Force https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/political-power-single-women-c-v... 2 of 12 12/30/18, 4:12 PM driving a political agenda that seems to become more progressive every day. The practicalities of female life independent of marriage give rise to demands for pay equity, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, lowered college costs, more affordable health care, and broadly accessible reproductive rights; many of these are issues that have, for years, been considered too risky to be central to mainstream Democratic conversation, yet they are policies today supported by both Democratic candidates for president. Single women are also becoming more and more powerful as a voting demographic. In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes in the last presidential election were cast by women without spouses, up three points from just four years earlier. According to Page Gardner, founder of the Voter Participation Center, in the 2012 presidential election, unmarried women drove turnout in practically every demographic, making up “almost 40 percent of the African-American population, close to 30 percent of the Latino population, and about a third of all young voters.” Perhaps more dramatically than any other voting block, unmarried women — comprising as they do other liberal-voting groups including young women and women of color — lean left. Way left. Single women voted for Barack Obama by a wide margin in 2012 — 67 to 31 percent — while married women (who tend to be older and whiter) voted for Romney. And unmarried women’s political leanings are not, as has been surmised in some quarters, attributable solely to racial diversity. According to polling firm Lake Research Partners, while white women as a whole voted for Romney over Obama, unmarried white women chose Obama over Romney by a margin of 49.4 percent to 38.9 percent. In 2013, columnist Jonathan Last wrote about a study of how women ages 25 to 30 voted in the 2000 election. “It turned out,” Last wrote in The Weekly Standard, “that the marriage rate for these women was a greater influence on vote choice than any other variable.” All of this prompts the question of how marital status might affect women’s voting patterns in 2016. This would have been a critically important election for this constituency even without a Supreme Court seat potentially hanging in the balance, but the sudden death of Antonin Scalia puts an even finer point on it. The cases brought before the court, and the decisions rendered, will be tightly wound up with questions of women’s independence in America: women’s ability to control their reproduction, to seek redress from workplace discrimination and benefit from programs like affirmative action that bolster their ability to pursue equal opportunities; the rights of poor women and women of color to vote easily—these are the issues that will be decided by the court in the coming decades, and thus at some level by this election. So far, any affinity single women may feel with Hillary Clinton is being trumped by the aspirationally progressive vision of Bernie Sanders. Young women — young single women, at least the predominantly white ones who have so far cast their votes — have broken for him in startling numbers in both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. In New Hampshire, according to exit polls, Sanders beat Clinton by 11 points with women and by 26 points with single women. Some of this is attributable to the disheveled charm and righteous anger of the socialist senator, and some Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political Force https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/political-power-single-women-c-v... 3 of 12 12/30/18, 4:12 PM to Clinton’s difficulty running an inspiring campaign. But much of it may also have to do with the fact that single women — living their lives outside of the institution around which tax, housing, and social policies were designed — have a set of needs that has yet to be met by government. Ironically, Clinton has been in the weeds on some of these issues — health-care reform, children’s health insurance, early-childhood education — for much of her career. But perhaps because of that, she can seem less optimistic than her opponent: “I don’t think, politically, we could get it now,” said Clinton of paid leave just two years ago, a sign both of how improbable these policy changes have seemed until very recently and of her battle-scarred pragmatism. The question, in this year of the single woman, is whether the first truly plausible female presidential candidate can recognize how much her constituency has changed and capitalize on these changes, or if she will get overtaken by this growing group of independent women