As 2008 closes out, the nation experiences a moment of déjà vu: An economic crisis that shrinks prior downturns to minor inconveniences.  A Democratic President-elect speaking of change, a new deal in fact.  It seems that the Obama administration full well intends to tackle the economic crisis by borrowing ideas from FDR, spending money on giant public works projects that both relieve unemployment and invest in our country's infrastructure so that we're in a better situation to revive our economy.  Reviving the New Deal sounds like a great idea to everyone, but can a New Deal for the 21st century reflect 21st century values? 

2008 America would be hard for citizens of 1932 America to recognize, and not just because we've moved from a more rural to more urban society.  Even though marriage rates started to decline soon after the economic downturn of the Great Depression hit, people's ideas of the proper life for most women didn't vary much from what it had been in the past--women were meant to be married and supported by a husband.  Working women were viewed during the crisis as leeches who took up jobs that "belonged" to men.  In 2008, working women are the norm, and even the hard right that idealizes the iconic 1950s housewife admits that most women have to work, and that women may even like to work, outside of the home. 

Most importantly, women's dependence on men is no longer a given, much less an ideal.  Recently, the number of adult women living without a spouse in the U.S. outnumbered the number of women with one.  Even married women tend to have much more independence than they used to--most make their own money, and many have their own accounts and own property separately or jointly with their husbands. These changes present a huge problem for simply reviving the New Deal with New Deal values, because the old New Deal reflected much different views on gender.   

Work-family economics expert and Democratic consultant Karen Kornbluh has been repeatedly highlighting some of the problems with New Deal values for 21st century families.   

Kornbluh's central argument is that any "New New Deal" must address a critical flaw in our existing New Deal social programs: They are biased toward dual parent, single-earner families with children. Under our current system, a stay-at-home wife and mother who never worked a day in her life will get a larger share of Social Security than a working single mom. And as Kornbluh smartly put it, Social Security benefits "the Cleavers more than Roseanne and Dan." In other words, even among married couples, our system rewards single-earner marriages more than dual-earner ones, which are by far more common. 

The New Deal-era ideas we've inherited about what jobs "count" in a public works program reflects this outdated idea of female dependence. In her New York Times editorial on the subject, Linda Hirshman lamented the fact that most of the jobs that would be created under public works investments Obama is contemplating would draw on a mostly-male workforce, even though the ranks of the unemployed include women who need jobs just as much -- their homes need two incomes, or they belong to the 51% of women that don't have husbands.  Hirshman suggests that by focusing some of the job creation money on education, social work, libraries, and child care, women workers could benefit from a public works program as well as men.

Anti-poverty programs in developing countries around the world often focus on improving women's education and employment prospects, realizing that by lifting up the half of the adult population that suffers more from poverty, you get more return on your investment.  Women in the United States enjoy relatively more economic prospects and better status than do women in many developing countries, but that doesn't mean that the same principles of economic relief can't be adapted to the U.S.  Meeting women where they're at and giving them the tools to improve their and their families' economic prospects will help every public works project stretch further.   

But using federal funds to relieve women's child care concerns could be a great source of economic relief in itself.  Hirshman talked about expanding Head Start as a way to get more women working, but this is just one aspect of what a program like this could do. Better and less costly childcare would do more than employ women; it would free up mothers to work more hours, and it would free up money spent directly on child care now for other things, such as improved housing or even just the sort of consumer spending that we're told over and over is the engine of our economy.   

It could also free up working-class women to get job training for better, more skilled jobs.  Right now, one reason we have a pay gap between men and women is that men are more likely to have the skills necessary for high-paying jobs.  But there are plenty of female-heavy sectors of the economy that are desperate for employees, attractive to female workers, but are running dry because women don't have the time or money to pay for more extensive job training.  We could step in and help out, to everyone's collective benefit.  I'll examine one such sector of the economy in my next column, coming out at the beginning of 2009.