The Bootstrap Myth and Intersectional Reality
The bootstrap myth is a viewpoint that claims all people equal in their potential to succeed. This romantic and maximalist belief in the power of social mobility has been questioned and discussed over the course of many years. According to the theory, any individual, despite of origin, gender and other personal and cultural characteristics, has a potential to become successful economically, socially or politically with a right amount of hard work. The theory suggests that unsuccessful people just did not have put enough effort to achieve their goals or have some sort of disability. The theory, to some extent, encourages criticism and supports despising unsuccessful as inferior.
Indeed, such viewpoint has its own inspirational charm. However, stripped up of the entire emotional message, it implies that all the oppressions should be ignored. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the current social and economic realities. Even if the bootstrap theory was originally designed to emphasize equality and eliminate differences, its practical implementation in the real world only created a new level of oppression and discrimination and turned it into a myth.
First and main reason for bootstrap theory to be no more than an oversimplified and convenient myth is the fact that the mentioned differences (race, gender, age) still do affect the social status. Despite many years and decades of the fight for gender equality, there are still oppressions that women face on a daily basis. Many working class families still stick to gender roles. “The low level of women’s wages, and the lack of collective provision for childcare, make it extremely difficult for women […] to survive without a husband and a husband’s wage”, says Connell (268). The book written in 1987 is still true to the point: according to recent statistics, woman in every state of America experience a gender pay gap in almost every occupation. Moreover, the forecasts predict the pay gap to close no earlier than 2152 (Miller).
Another reason for the bootstrap myth to be just a myth is that the feministic movement in society, economics and culture is primarily based on fight against the gender oppression. In other words, the feministic concepts of today are sometimes very limited in the oppressions that refer to. However, there are multiple oppressions that women can experience on both micro and macro levels. Oppressions are built into a complex societal system: structural domain (inequality in societal structures, including education and employment), disciplinary domain (institutions that helps managing oppression, such as governmental funding), hegemonic domain (that works to justify oppression) and interpersonal domain (such as sexism or racism) (Schipper). All of these levels are embedded so firmly into our society that even if some of them cease to exist, there are many others to be taken into account.
These multiple levels of oppression are a cause of intersectionality. In current intersectional economic realities, all the different disadvantage factors are interconnected and should all be taken into account together. In these realities, bootstrap myth plays …
