The clients being served by ACTEW's twenty-five member programs include immigrants, refugees, members of visible minorities, and women who are socially, economically, and often physically disadvantaged. They need life skills, upgrading, and technical and social training, to help them get off unemployment insurance, or get back into the work force after a lengthy dependency on social assistance, or get out of dead-end, low-skill job ghettos. Clients also include women over thirty-five who are recently separated, divorced or widowed, and are seeking guidance to community resources and help in. sorting out a life in transition. Most of these women are very poor. Some were formerly middle-class but are sinking fast. A high percentage are solesupport mothers. All of ACTEW's clients need community- based educational programs because, for a variety of reasons, institutional and corporate training is unworkable for them.

BARRIERS FOR SOLE
SUPPORT MOTHER

Discussion around the ACTEW conference table centered on persuading government representatives that women have some very basic needs that deserve real attention. Current government insistence on three years of unemployment before a woman can qualify for Re-entry assistance is rigid and punitive. The training allowance is insufficient to meet women's needs, and a waiting period of up to six weeks for the allowance sometimes means women go without food, shelter and clothing. A woman could be expected to question whether training for a better future is worth the hard-ships of today. If she is a sole-support mother she will endure additional hardships. Each step outside her house, for any reason, means finding child care. The lucky one has some extended family to relieve her. For many there is no such support. They are fully responsible for their children, for twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

susan Barcel '85

Ironically, under the new Jobs Strategies program, sole support mothers are no longer targeted for special consideration. In order to qualify for training they must also be experiencing one of an array of additional problems, such as having being unemployed twenty-four of the last thirty weeks, or having been on social assistance for the last three years. If a women is an ex-offender or a recovering addict/alcoholic, or has suffered prolonged institutionalization, is experiencing low self-esteem and poor motivation, she will be eligible for Federal assistance toward improving her life. One has to wonder how a society deems her capable of responsible parenting while suffering all these additional handicaps.

" There is an extravagant fraudulence in the easy reconciliation made between the common attitude of contempt for women and the respect shown for mothers. It is outrageously paradoxical to deny woman all activity in public affairs, to shut her out of masculine careers, to assert her incapacity in all fields of effort, and then to entrust to her the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all: the molding of a human being..." (Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex.)

Representatives of ACTEW member groups described some of the daunting obstacles faced by their clients.