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to our society. We have programs that help integrate them and rightly so, into the work force. I think that our mothers have also served this Nation and should be entitled to some kind of a reentry program. I know that the benefits program was reserved for our wartime veterans, but I would like to submit that mothers with young children sometimes feel that they are in combat zones.

In concluding, I would like to share with you an interesting thought: In Chinese script, the concept of crisis is represented by two ideograms: The first symbol represents the word danger; the second, interestingly, the word opportunity. As we midlife women are experiencing a crisis, then we must turn the obstacles, the dangers that we face, into opportunities for ourselves and for the Nation. I would hope that this committee will carry this forum out into the countryside and not keep it here in Washington so that we can share this educational process with the news media and other institutions around the country.

Thank you.

[See appendix 2, p. 161 for Ms. Oberstar's prepared statement.] Mr. BURTON. Thank you.

Charlotte Conable?

STATEMENT OF CHARLOTTE W. CONABLE

Ms. CONABLE. Good morning, and I would like to say, as Jo did, that I am Charlotte Conable.

Mr. BURTON. I would again like to say that it was a woman who did that and not me.

Ms. CONABLE. Elizabeth Cady Stanton once wrote to Susan B. Anthony, her coworker in the 19th century campaign for women's rights, stating that, "We will not be in our prime before 50 and after that, we shall be good for 20 more years at least." She was right; both were productive well beyond the age of 80.

While it was unusual in the past to live as long as these women did, now the average lifespan of women is over 75 years, adding a period of 25 years or more after children are grown and homemaking responsibilities have decreased. This is a gift of time to be lived fully and productively.

In considering policy proposals for women at midlife, I start with the premise that to be a homemaker is to do vital and honorable work. As an occupation, however, homemaking has some particular occupational hazards that generally do not affect men in their work. Women at midlife who need to find employment to supplement family income or, in the case of displaced homemakers, to support themselves and their children, or who may wish to continue to play a productive role in society in an arena outside the home, are often handicapped by their limited view of themselves, their abilities, and their options. There are several sources of the internal constraints affecting women at midlife. First, from the time they are born, women are taught by families, schools, and other social institutions to be "good girls" to be dependent, passive, and nonassertive. Second, while the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker are honored with glowing rhetoric, and I should say, Mother's Day is coming Sunday, there are indeed few real measures of success.

Mr. BURTON. Thanks for reminding me.

Ms. CONABLE. There are no direct economic rewards for the homemaker. She receives no wages and her work carries no guarantee of future economic security related to her own efforts. Also, there are few intellectual rewards. Many of the functions previously performed by the woman at home that carried with them the possibility of personal satisfaction and status, have been taken over by others. Everyone from Dr. Spock to schoolteachers, physicians, and nutritionists are now the experts who possess the wisdom previously attributed to homemakers. Even television commercials foster feelings of failure in women who do not remove those rings from collars. Third, the homemaker works in isolation. While she may have considerable company from people who are 2 feet tall, she receives little positive feedback or psychological support from her peers. It should not be surprising that many homemakers approach midlife wondering who they are, what they have accomplished, and what they can do that is valued by anyone thereafter.

As my children grew older and I considered my future, I found that my greatest accomplishment up to that period in the late 1960's was the remarkable stamina and the nerves of steel I displayed regularly while transporting four children, a cat, a pet rat, and two parakeets in a station wagon between the Nation's Capital and upstate New York. There appeared at the time to be only limited demand for a highly skilled, middle-aged female chauffeur.

A newspaper article describing the continuing education for women program at George Washington University was challenging, but I kept that article for 2 years as I wondered whether I had any intelligence or talents worth testing or whether I was worth saving at all.

Deciding that I could only lose time and money, I enrolled-fearfully, I must admit. I found that I did have a working brain, some talents, and most important, I was not alone. There were many other women just like me and together we did find new directions for our lives. Since 1971, I have earned a master's degree, written one book and edited another, served as trustee of a large university, and am currently a staff member at the women's studies program at George Washington University.

To be a homemaker must remain an option for women. Consequently, continuing education programs are vital so that women at midlife can develop the confidence and skills necessary for productive living for at least 20 years, as Elizabeth Stanton suggested.

Other policies and programs are also essential:

1. Many laws have been passed to provide equal educational and employment opportunity for women. These laws must be enforced if women are to be encouraged from an early age to function as independent individuals, utilizing the full range of their intelligence and talents.

2. Through public policy, every effort must be made to acknowledge that homemaking is work valued by this society. The principle that marriage is a partnership in which the contributions of each partner are equally important, regardless of their real monetary value, must be protected by Federal and State laws affecting marital property, inheritance, and domestic relations.

3. The most significant policy issue is the equal rights amendment. For middle-aged, young, and elderly women, the equal rights amend

ment has very important legal, economic, and psychological implications. As a 49-year-old woman, a wife, a mother, a worker, a Republican, and a feminist, I believe it must be ratified.

Mr. BURTON. Margaret Reuss.

STATEMENT OF MARGARET REUSS

Ms. REUSS. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am an associate professor at the University of the District of Columbia and chairman of the economics department. I am 58 years old and have been working professionally for 16 years as an economist and 20 years before that as a housekeeper and mother of four.

It is difficult to imagine, as you have gathered, the uncertainties and ignorance of a woman like myself who enters the job market in midlife. I married a few months after I left college and consequently approached midlife with virtually no experience with job seeking or employment. Filling out résumés, filing taxes, applying for credit, were total mysteries. I doubted that a degree in economics fitted me for anything.

Friends of my husband wrote recommendations urging my acceptance for doctoral studies in the local university, and that little network of contacts was crucial in opening the way to years of challenge and excitement for me.

Difficulties arose. My children were barely on their own before my mother had a sequence of falls and what seemed like seizures. I found myself again fighting to divide up time which did not exist― time for her, for my husband, for my children's continuing needs, and for my work. My inability to care for my mother as I wished, to protect her from the indigities and suffering of undiagnosed pernicious anemia and other ailments, was a sorrow from which I'll never be free.

My needs in those years of struggling to work and then to juggle the claims of family and work fell into three areas: (1) The need for education or training which we have discussed; (2) the need for a network to provide information and assistance; and (3) the need for a support system, including day care, to help me care for my mother. I would like to comment on these three.

Women need access to continuing education, not so much for the training involved but in order to develop confidence that we have something to offer. We need colleagues with whom we can share an easy exchange of ideas. We need recently acquired training to compensate for the seeming vacuum of worldly experience on our résumés. We need the external discipline to learn how to manage our time and to produce at the behest of others. I hope that you can expand support for the urban universities and community colleges in their efforts to provide such training in continuing education-for-women

programs.

To benefit from such opportunities, women must have access to moderate-interest educational loans. My reeducation took 6 years and my doctoral thesis was virtually written in blood because I was working throughout as a teaching assistant. At 45 years of age, I couldn't face asking for money for further education. I was lucky in that my husband supported the family, but the majority of women need and deserve financial assistance. Those who have to support their own children are in an impossibly difficult situation.

Second, I think women need neighborhood structures to provide. them with information, resources, and sympathetic contacts close to where they are. It was not until we moved into Southwest Washington, with its neighborhood assembly and community newspaper,. that I realized what structure organization can give to a neighborhood. Men find the supportive structures they need in the workplaces. The woman in her home cell needs a similar supportive, consultative structure. An excellent model exists in the 36 neighborhood commissions established as a consequence of home rule in the District of Columbia. These commissions, the members of which are formally elected to represent approximately 1,000 households, receive a small share of general tax revenues to hire part-time staff and to pay for means of communicating with their constituents. That nonprofessional staff is a form of ombudsman through which a woman can have access to the professional services of government or to mutual self-help groups in the neighborhood. And the newspaper brings the kind of information we need about household repairs, babysitting and job. opportunities.

Tax dollars which enable such local structures to function, and to provide networks through which neighbors can aid each other, are far more effective than directly funded programs. That is not to say that funding for housing, day care, et cetra is not desparately needed but these programs will never be more than partially successful unless the Federal and State governments enable and support formal neighborhood organization which can contribute to bringing, not only to women, but to men, also, the kind of humaneness and support and stability in our neighborhoods that we need.

Finally, women need neighborhood centers for the aged. Women are usually those on whom the care of others devolves. Husbands are more likely to share in the responsibilities of child care than they are in responsibility for an aging parent or friend who needs help. Doctors delimit their role to evident medical needs. The women like myself who has taken on responsibility for someone who is old and frequently ill often has no idea where to turn. I had to learn about hearing aids, about walkers, commodes, injections, and drugs, and hardest of all, I had to learn those things by experimenting on someone who wanted above all else the emotional support I was almost too distraught to give. I needed day care for my mother to avoid the horrors of the nursing home experience and I needed a consultant, someone familiar with the services available for the aged and someone who could give me guidance when time after time I faced some crisis that I had no idea how to resolve.

I would like to see the CD block grant funds used to remodel surplus school space into day care for both young and old, and Federal funding for coordinators of services to the aged, who could work out of such centers. Like the neighborhood commissioners and their staffs, such coordinators of services to the aging could be paraprofessionals, the same midlife women who need to find jobs of responsibility and dignity in their communities.

Another local structure which offers a great support to women facing unusual problems is the cooperative. For 20 of the 37 years of our marriage, my husband and I have lived in cooperatives. I have seen them work to provide housing repair and child care services,

assistance to those facing crises, self-development groups, and channels for community participation. The National Consumer Cooperative Bank's self-help development fund is a great step to make cooperative living more accessible to low and moderate income families but the $25 million appropriated needs to be greatly expanded. Finally, in designing programs to assist women who are struggling with the transition from homemaking to other work, we must guard against the benefits going to the most vocal and sophisticated. It is the women of the poor and minority households who are most trapped by the circumstances of their lives. That is one of the reasons I stress neighborhood organization. These women can really only be reached by programs of self-help which emanate from their own neighborhoods. Thank you very much.

[See appendix 2, p. 163 for Ms. Reuss' prepared statement.] Mr. BURTON. Janet?

STATEMENT OF JANET STEIGER

Ms. STEIGER. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. I have been asked to testify today because I recently have been made a member of an unorganized and unfortunately nonexclusive group-the more than 12 million American women who are widows. Three out of every four wives in this country will eventually join us in this category, and they are going to remain there for an average of 10 years. I cannot even claim that widowhood at my relatively young age of 39 is exclusive. One out of every four of my companions is under the age of 44.

I do not presume to speak for this vast group. Nobody can, and many of them could state their needs far more eloquently than I, and the comprehensive study commissioned by this committee succinctly details the problems they face.

What I do understand is at least a part of their agony; an agony which statistics, however shocking, cannot totally reflect. Some women have time to prepare for widowhood-a dubious blessing: since it is usually time tragically spent in the care of a beloved dying partner. Others wake up one morning to find that the world has ended. In either case, the widow discovers that she is suddenly the head of a household. She may be one of the 21⁄2 million widows who are the sole support of children under the age of 18.

Her economic situation is often serious. The total average death benefits left by husbands to their widows is only $12,000, and that includes everything from life insurance to social security to veterans pensions. Fifty-two percent of all widows are going to have used up all their available insurance benefits within 18 months, and 25 percent have exhausted this resource within 2 short months.

The loss of a spouse too often leaves a widow near or below the national poverty level. Widows over 65 present the most desperate picture 50 percent of these women live on less than $2,000 a year.

How is the widow to provide for children if they remain in the home? How is she to provide for herself? If she is employed at the time of her husband's death, her earnings are not likely to be adequate to provide for a family, and barely adequate to provide for herself. According to an estimate of the National Commission on Working Women, 80 percent of all employed women are concentrated in a

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