Barbara Bergmann: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellow

"Let me fast forward to 1995, when I was writing the fifteenth draft of my book on affirmative action. I realized that I had to come clean and admit that affirmative action was indeed about quotas, and that without quotas little progress would be made. I had denied this, even to myself, for the first fourteen drafts. What I came to understand was that it is best if at least some of those of us on the left who work in the field of social policy—and the politicians who represent our point of view—come clean and admit what we are aiming for and what the costs of achieving it might be. Otherwise the dishonesty of our position is obvious and that impedes the adoption of our point of view. We're in a situation now where those on the right have pretty much come clean about what they are aiming for. They aim for a society with maximum independence for individuals, where government does virtually nothing to ameliorate the casualties that arise because of weak character or those that arise because of caprices of the marketplace. We on the left, both social policy analysts and politicians, are afraid to come clean about what we really advocate—making our country into another Sweden and continuing the gender revolution, which ranks right up there with the French Revolution and abolition of slavery as a landmark of human progress. The politicians on the left are afraid the public won't buy it, and prefer to make progress by advocating only very small steps. But at least some of us in the social policy field should be admitting that we aim for a more radical transformation or we will never get very far."

In Defense of Affirmative Action, by Barbara Bergmann (Basic Books, 1996)

The Economic Emergence of Women, Second Edition, by Barbara Bergmann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.)

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The views expressed herein are solely the opinions of the individuals and not those of the Academy.