Women are over-represented among those living in poverty. In New Brunswick, 67% of women had an income of less than $20,000 a year in 2016. Many women therefore live in extremely precarious conditions or are in a situation of economic dependence. Poverty’s effects can be temporal as well as material. Many women may be deprived of time due to the number of chores they have to do for the household’s survival. In this context, how can CDPs help women to recognize their full potential?
Savoie, Albert, and Lanteigne addressed the realities of Francophone women living in poverty in rural New Brunswick. They collected life stories from 17 women in Kent and Gloucester counties, two coastal and rural Acadian regions. The aim of the study was to shed light on the stigma these women face and the invisible daily work they do to survive.
According to the authors, the dominant societal view regards poverty as an absence of exercising agency over one’s living conditions: i.e., the poor do not lift themselves out of their conditions. This perception results in a stigmatizing gaze towards people living in poverty. Poverty is blamed on the individual without considering their social and cultural contexts or the efforts made to overcome poverty.
The authors confronted this dominant notion with the participants’ life stories, drawing on the concept of “shift work.” This concept, developed in feminist literature, refers to the double work accomplished by women: paid work in the public sphere and domestic work in the private sphere. Domestic work is generally invisible, meaning that it is not socially recognized as constituting work in the same way as paid work. The study showed that women living in poverty perform two, or even three “shifts” a day. Indeed, in addition to their paid work, all the women interviewed performed domestic and subsistence work. Subsistence work includes, for example, spending part of their time finding resources, saving money, or justifying their claims for financial aid. In this way, we can see that the invisible work performed by the participants contrasts sharply with part of the societal conception that portrays them as passive, idle, and lazy.
To lessen the stigmatization of women in poverty, CDPs can help to challenge the dominant ideologies that undermine them. To this end, the authors propose three belief-changing approaches aimed at combating poverty:
- Deconstructing prejudices about the cause of poverty by recognizing how societal factors (such as the minimum wage amount and the gendered division of labour) tend to disadvantage poor women.
- Acknowledging women’s voices and experiences from a perspective of active listening, empathy, and recognition.
- Recognizing the capacity for action and resistance shown by women living in poverty.
More concretely, CDPs can highlight all the “shifts” their clients take on. This can help them to free themselves from the stigmatizing gaze, to become more aware of their strengths, and to support them in re-establishing a balance in their personal and professional lives.
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