ABSTRACT
Over the past four decades, our understanding of gender, race, and class processes and politics has matured in an extraordinary way. Neoliberalism is both an ideology and a practice. Neoliberal ideology asserts that only through governmental retreat from social program spending, the associated widespread privatization of public resources, and the abolition of regulations on business and trade can we experience economic growth and widespread prosperity. The 'rethinking public and private' impulse inspired an entire domestic domain literature and a rewriting of earlier Marxist work on 'the woman question'. In the 1960s, poor black Americans became newly visible and newly defined as a social problem in northern cities. Neighborhood deterioration, increased crime, and urban uprisings, combined with intensive political organizing, stimulated the establishment of highly visible federal Great Society programs. Central to the new construction of white ethnic community was the Madonna-like (in the older sense) image of the white ethnic woman.
