Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors : Women, Work, and the Global Economy

Drawing on Catholic social thought, social science, and gender studies, Christine Firer Hinze builds on data concerning women s market and household work to argue that twenty-first-century economies must pursue, as their overriding aim, sustainable sufficiency for every household and for the world house.(Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality Series) Today's marker economy depends upon, yet undervalues, the essential contributions of households to the care work that makes all other work possible. As designated tenders of the care economy, women lake daily, costly responsibility for a fundamental fact that mainstream economics underplays or conceals, market economy depends continuously on another economy, wherein our embodied vulnerabilities arc respected and addressed by way of caring labor and relationships. In this compelling expose on the (in)justice of women's work, Christine Firer Hinze argues for re prioritizing the holistic understanding of economy as oikonomia-literally, the management of a household in order to sustainably provide for all members-assumed in traditional classical, and contemporary political economics. This oikos-focuscd paradigm addresses global work-family struggles at their roots by shifting the axis of oar economic imaginations, values, and policy making from a marketized-competitive model to one that prioritizes economy's inclusive, provisioning purposes. Following several years of working in inner-dry ministry and teaching high school in Detroit, Christine Firer Hinze received a PhD in Christian social ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research and teaching focus on Catholic social and economic ethics, women and work, and power and social transformation Drawing on Catholic social thought, social science, and gender studies, the lecture builds on data concerning women's market and household work to argue that twenty-first-century economies must pursue, as their overriding aim, sustainable sufficiency for every household and for the “world house.”