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January 19, 2001, Leaders of Today and Tomorrow: Women Making a Difference in Public Policy

College sophomores, juniors, and seniors from across the state of Minnesota come to the Humphrey School to have dinner with women and public policy graduate students and other women leaders, including: Jane Ransom, Minnesota Women’s Foundation (pictured); Diane Benjamin, Children’s Defense Fund; Anne Hunt, St. Paul Neighborhood Energy Consortium; Suzanne Peterson, PRIDE; Rebecca Kutty, WATCH; and Beverly Benson, Assistant Hennepin County Attorney.

Feminist Economics Series: Feminist Economics Traveling Seminar
Professor Deborah Levison, one of the four faculty participants who made possible a student-led Feminist Economics course in 1996-97, spearheaded an effort to bring a traveling course in Feminist Economics to the Humphrey School. The Traveling Seminar combined an innovative design with the latest thinking in feminist economics, organized by four of the leading scholars in the area: Diana Strassman, Lourdes Beneria, Julie Nelson, and Susan Feiner. The 4-credit course took place in Winter and Spring 1998. Eight visiting speakers were flown in to give a public lecture (attended by class participants) as well as teach during one class meeting. Other class meetings were led by the on-site coordinator, Deborah Levison, with Professor Delane Welsch (Applied Economics). The Feminist Economics Lecture Series topics and speakers are included in the 1997-98 Schedule of Events for the Center on Women and Public Policy.

The Humphrey School provided the first site for this Ph.D.-level course, which will be taught in subsequent years at other leading universities. The traveling course in Feminist Economics is funded by the Ford Foundation; it aims to develop institutional capacity to teach in this area by involving local faculty, as well as building student understanding of this emerging perspective on economic thinking. Following the traveling course, the Humphrey School added a Feminist Economics course to its regular curriculum.

With passage of national welfare reform legislation and its far-reaching implications for state-level policy decisions, the Center decided to focus its 1996-97 lecture series on welfare reform. Two nationally known scholars, an economist and an historian, presented their analyses of the issue to standing-room-only audiences of faculty members, students, social service providers, and community activists.

Nancy Folbre, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, gave a lecture entitled "Who Cares? Women, Welfare, and the Devaluation of Caring Labor," on January 22, 1997. Folbre's lecture focused on the welfare reform debate as an indicator of "how our society values -- or fails to value -- work done outside the marketplace." Her work is consistent with that of other feminist economists who are developing an economic analysis of caring labor--one that seeks to reconceptualize caring as neither motivated by individual self-interest or marketplace logic. She recommends a redistribution of caring labor rather than a reduction in the amount of caring labor, which she argues is the likely outcome of welfare reform.

Linda Gordon, Florence Kelley and Vilas Research Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, lectured on "How Welfare Became a Dirty Word," on January 29, 1997 to an electric audience that filled Cowles auditorium to capacity. Linda Gordon looked at the program most people call "welfare" -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) -- from an historical perspective. Gordon traced the history of AFDC since it's inception in 1935 as part of the New Deal. Gordon's analysis focused on the implications of AFDC's origins within traditional notions of charity as compared to other programs such as social security or workers compensation which were created as entitlements primarily for male wage earners. Gordon argued that the charitable origins of AFDC continue to define whom the program is intended to serve. For example, program participants have always been required to prove their need and good moral character, i.e. "the deserving poor." Gordon contrasted the rules governing AFDC with those applied to widows who receive supplementary social security benefits for children under 18. Gordon concluded that the vast changes in women's participation in work and family life over the past 60 years further underscore the program's gendered origins in charity and the resulting negative public perception of the program and the people it serves.

1995-96: Feminist Economics Student-led Course
During the winter quarter of 1996, five Humphrey students collaborated with four Humphrey faculty to develop a course on Feminist Economics. This course was innovative, not only in its subject matter, but in its format. Students led a weekly seminar, circulated their reactions to readings on e-mail, and presented detailed introductions and analyses of the assigned readings to their classmates. Twenty-five people participated in the ten-week course, which counted for graduate credit. Many students entered the class skeptical about what economics had to offer those interested in women and public policy. By carefully reading and analyzing the cutting-edge scholarship of feminist economists, however, students could observe economic methods deployed to illuminate issues they cared but which were free of abhorrent starting assumptions (such as if women are not engaged in paid labor they are "at leisure.") To their surprise, many became more interested in what the powerful tools of economic analysis could offer the field of public affairs.

Academic Research and Public Policy Formation
In 1995-96 with the support of a Ford Foundation grant to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship, the Center on Women and Public Policy coordinated a three-part series on the role of academic research in the policy formation process. Laura Flanders from Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) led a discussion of the role of the media in the dissemination of academic research. The second program featured a panel of Minnesota elected officials and key legislative staff members who analyzed the role of academic research in the state legislative process. And finally, Stanley Katz, President of the American Council of Learned Societies, presented a keynote address on "Scholarship and Public Policy: The Institutional Structure." Emmett Carson, Minneapolis Foundation, and Cheryl Dickson, Minnesota Humanities Commission, responded and elaborated on the role of foundations in the production and dissemination of academic research. The series was widely publicized within the University community and was co-sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund.