Social Security Is a Women's Issue.

Gloria Willich was only forty-three when her husband died in 1966. They had three kids and a house in Browns Mills, New Jersey, with a $70 monthly mortgage. "He always worried that we might lose the house if anything happened to him," Willich says.

Willich wasn't working then. The future looked rocky until she visited the Social Security office. She found that she and her two youngest children were each entitled to survivor benefits. Although she decided to go back to work and to give up her benefit, she collected Social Security for her children. "I would have lost my house if I hadn't gotten the benefits for my kids," she says.

If Social Security back then had been the privatized system now being touted by conservatives, Gloria Willich's story might have a different ending. A variety of proposals to remake Social Security have cropped up, but they all boil down to this: divert a portion of the Social Security payroll tax into individual accounts invested in the stock market.

Opponents calculate that privatization would put all future Social Security beneficiaries at risk of diminished payments. But for women, who comprise 60 percent of all beneficiaries, the privatization scheme would be disastrous. "Younger women should be very concerned about this," says Deborah Briceland-Betts, executive director of the Older Women's League. "It's not a generational debate. It's a gender debate."

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system in which today's workers are paying the benefits of current recipients. But the benefits reach more than just retirees. One third of the total forty-eight million recipients are widows, widowers, or disabled people. Seven million recipients are the spouses and children of deceased workers. For 25 percent of older women living alone, Social Security is their only source of income. And without that monthly check, half of all women older than sixty-five would be poor.

The first problem posed by privatization is the assumption that the stock market will continue its upward spiral and deliver higher returns for retirees than would the current Social Security system, says economist Catherine Hill, study director of the Social Security Project for the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C. A proposal floated by the libertarian Cato Institute projects a 6.2 percent return for personal investment accounts, while other proposals claim returns as high as 7 percent.

"A lot of economists say the stock market is already inflated," says Hill. "Women have less money, earn less than men, and need to take fewer risks."

Under privatization, women would have smaller investment accounts because they earn less. They would also get smaller yields and be more vulnerable to market fluctuations. And the new administrative costs--up to $50 per person per year by some estimates--would represent a bigger chunk of their accounts.

The Institute for Women's Policy Research compared benefits for a low-income single woman under a privatized system to current payments and found that investment accounts come up short. Using a realistic 4 percent rate of return on investment accounts, a woman earning $12,000 a year over thirty-five years ends up getting no more than 70 percent of the guaranteed Social Security benefit she is now entitled to. Social Security as structured may not be perfect, but it's a progressive system, replacing a greater percentage of earnings for low-income workers than for those with high incomes.

Many women leave the workforce to raise children or to care for elderly parents, so their own record of earnings is often low. But the system provides spousal benefits to women whose husbands had higher lifetime earnings, even if the marriage lasted just ten years. It's another component of Social Security that would be lost or diluted under a revamped system.

Privatization also threatens the disability and life insurance components of Social Security that women like Gloria Willich depend on. Women are 98 percent of the spouses or survivors receiving those benefits.

But under the Cato proposal, for example, they would have to purchase such coverage from private insurers, which would be costly and less extensive than Social Security's benefits. People with preexisting conditions might be denied coverage altogether.

Despite all the changes in women's workforce participation in the last three decades, millions of women will still depend on Social Security to keep afloat. Women who work full-time earn just 75 percent of men's income, and they'll live longer than men, making them more dependent on monthly benefits.

According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, poverty among older women will be just as high twenty years from now.

"Women think it's a problem for the past generation and that `I'll be OK because I work,'" says Hill. "But we're seeing a big increase in divorced and never-married women. So female poverty will be just as prominent but for different reasons."

With so much at stake, working women should be sending a "hands-off Social Security" message to Washington, but they're not. "We haven't found that women are opposed to the stock market idea," says Hill. "They're not as immediately cynical about Wall Street as I'd like them to be."

Focus groups and polling on the issue have shown that people like the privatization idea in theory--until they learn more about how benefits could shrink, Hill says. And with the economy still going strong, privatization appears to be a smart, even prudent investment for retirement. "Why are we even arguing about America's greatest social success? It's the boom of the stock market," says Briceland-Betts. "If the market took a dive, you'd have a totally different attitude."

But not all women have swallowed the privatization line. Gloria Willich has been an activist with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare for three years. She covers central New Jersey, distributing literature and telling about the government program that helped keep her family together. "I hear these young people say, `Oh, those seniors, they're always asking for something,' "Willich says. "What we're fighting for now isn't for us. I don't want to see my children behind the eight ball. I'm fighting for my grandkids."

Annette Fuentes is a New York-based writer.