Fun with Feminism, 101...Back by Popular Demand!

Because tomorrow is June 1 -- the day I always remember as "school's out hit the beach" day -- and because I was that lone geek who got sad when school ended because I missed my teachers, I'm re-posting that pop quiz. For all you other geeks out there. You know who you are. Answers below.

THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT FEMINISM IN 2007? TEST YOUR GENERATIONAL IQ

1. Betty Friedan was:

A. A pin-up model from the 1940s
B. The mother of American cookbooks
C. A columnist for McCall’s
D. The founder of the National Organization for Women
E. Author of The Feminine Mystique

2. In 2007, for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns:

A. the same
B. 84 cents
C. 77 cents
D. 56 cents

3. During the Miss America Protest of 1968, radical feminists did all but which of the following:

A. Crowned a live sheep “Miss America”
B. Burned their bras
C. Threw aprons and high heels into a Freedom Trashcan
D. Sprayed Toni home permanent spray inside the convention hall

4. In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 3%
B. 14%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5. “Postfeminist” is:

A. A term coined in 1919 by a group of literary radicals in Greenwich Village who rejected the feminism of their mothers one year before women won the right to vote
B. A term used in the 1980s to describe an era in which feminism was deemed unhip and unnecessary
C. A media-hyped label that irritates third-wave feminists more than Adam Corolla
D. All of the above

6. The Real Hot 100 is:

A. A new reality tv show
B. A list of the hottest women according to Maxim magazine
C. A campaign to redefine hotness by refiguring the standards to honor guts and not just glam
D. Hot sauce

7. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in:

A. 1923
B. 1942
C. 1969
D. 1971

8. In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities are women?

A. 7%
B. 16%
C. 20%
D. 50%

9. Title IX is:

A. The name of Britney’s favorite club in NYC
B. A piece of pro-woman legislation passed in 1972 now under attack
C. The name of a secret feminist cult
D. The sister band of L7

10. In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

11. BUST is:

A. A girlie magazine for men
B. A grrly magazine “for women with something to get off their chest”
C. A boxing move popularized by Laila Ali
D. A West Coast rapper

ANSWERS:
1 - C, D, and E, 2 - C, 3 - B, 4 - B, 5 - D, 6 - C, 7 - A, 8 - C, 9 - B, 10 - A, 11 - B

SCORE YOURSELF
11-8 = Superstar!
7-4 = Semi-superstar
3-0 = Hit the books, my friend. You got catching up to do.

Based on Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (available from Palgrave, June 12, 2007)

This Week in Work/Life...

Is coverage of work/life getting slightly better out there, or am I hallucinating? Here's a sampling from this week alone:

Newsweek reports on the slew of new books on the subject in a piece called "Trying to Opt Back In"

Fortune covers Gen Y at work in "Attracting the Twentysomething Worker"

In case you haven't been there yet, highlights from HuffPo's New "Living Now" Section (I love what they've done to the place!):

When You Work For Yourself, is "Maternity Leave" Possible? by Laura Vanderkam

Withholding What's Needed Most by Marie Wilson

And an ole standby, just 'cause I can't resist:

Salon's Broadsheet sounds off on Tuesday's dippy Supreme Court ruling re pay discrimination

Catfight, She Wrote

This is a teaser for a longer post of mine that now appears under the same title over on HuffPo. An excerpt:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you write a feminist book, someone is going to disagree with you. And that that someone is just as likely to be a woman. We are women, hear us roar.

It used to be easy (and satisfying) to blame the media for trivializing feminist debate as a catfight. Today, we sisters do it, unapologetically, to ourselves. It's retro to think that women—who are as different from each other as they are from men—should agree. But in the struggle for power and parity, feminists have historically been, and continue to be, each other's easiest target. This is our greatest mistake....

Before I get righteous and start calling for sisters to unite around combating, say, domestic violence or poor work/life policy instead of each other, however, a confession: I've become unhealthily obsessed by this latest round of feminist warfare. I've become my own filtered Gawker, cataloguing slams and online sightings (Leslie Bennetts spotted defending her book sales against The New York Times! Jessica Valenti bravely accepting a Choice award in DC, looking like a hottie!). It's addictive and I'm not proud. I track these feminist celebs through Google alerts as if they were, oh I don't know, presidential candidates or Paris Hilton. And like a campaign manager or god forbid Paris' publicity rep, I scour alerts and follow lengthy comment threads, scanning for lessons....

Read the rest in the new Living Now section at HuffPo...!

An author's love

Check out this lovely graphic my marketing director at Palgrave made using the cool little graphics from the cover -- I love it!

Love Matters--and Young Women Writers ARE Being Feisty

On HuffPo today (where I'll soon be posting, too), Erica Jong calls for younger women writers to protest their ghettoization on the chick lit shelves:

Feminism didn't change deep-seated priorities about what -- or who -- matters. I see deeply diminished expectations in young women writers. They may grumble about the chick lit ghetto, but they dare not make a fuss for fear they won't be published at all. Their brashness is real enough, but they accept their packaging as the price of being published. My generation expected more. We did not always get it, but at least categorization outraged us. Where is the outrage now?

Feminists used to say the personal is political. I think we need to consider that message again now. We will never give peace a chance until we start paying as much attention to women as to war. Unless we value the bonds of love as much as male territoriality, we are goners.

I would like to see the talented new breed of American women writers -- my daughter's generation -- protest their ghettoization. We need a new wave of feminism to set things right. But we'd better find a new name for it because like all words evoking women, the term feminism has been debased and discarded. Let's celebrate our femaleness rather than fear it. And let's mock the old-fashioned critics who dismiss us for thinking love matters. It does.

But younger women ARE protesting, and publishing outside of chick lit too. A notable example of course is Elizabeth Merrick's anthology, This Is Not Chick Lit. And there are more like these in the works. They're coming, Erica! Keep faith.

(And check out Elizabeth's post on HuffPo back in April 2006, on her title.)

Happy 30th Anniversary, Star Wars

Coming off a long weekend, this one is for Mr M. And ok, waxing nostaglic on my part too, cuz I used to wear my hair in Princess Leia braids. Yep, I really did.

Latest on Boob-Flashing "Choice" Feminism

Since I use "Grrls Gone Wild" in my subtitle, I keep getting asked what I think about Girls (minus the rr, which has a whole 'nother meaning) Gone Wild. Here tis: To my mind, slinking around a pole or writing about it is not the pinnacle of real-world empowerment, but nor are the women who do so and feel empowered being duped. I have no doubt that the women who flash their boobs for the camera on GGW feel powerful. In many ways, they epitomize the dilemma of our (Gen X *and* Y) generation: caught between the hope of a world that no longer degrades women and the reality of a culture that is still degrading. It's confusing to be girl these days--or for that matter, a lady--in a world only half-transformed.

But for much more on the subject, check out this piece by Lisa Jervis on Girls Gone Wild as symptom of our culture’s stunted view of female sexuality. Jervis is responding to Garance Franke-Ruta's proposal to curb young women’s participation in these televised boob-flashing-fests. With characteristic savvy, Jervis writes:

The trick is to help young women navigate and respond to the barrage without patronizing, faux-feminist posturing; reinforcing outdated virgin-whore ideas about what kinds of girls lift their tops; sighing over the outlandish behavior of kids today; or discounting or denying girls’ behavior as simple false consciousness—all of which is happening way too much, both in feminist circles and elsewhere. If we can’t widen our analytic lens enough to see this, then we’re going to be stuck in Joe Francis’s world forever.

Work/Life Balance Fosters Better Workplace Ethics, Finds Deloitte

I LOVE this. According to the findings of the “2007 Deloitte & Touche USA LLP Ethics & Workplace” survey, work-life balance influences positive ethical behaviors at work. Check it:

According to the survey, 91 percent of all employed adults agreed that workers are more likely to behave ethically at work when they have a good work-life balance. A combined 44 percent of workers cite high levels of stress (28 percent), long hours (25 percent) and inflexible schedule (13 percent) as the causes of conflict between their work responsibilities and personal priorities, hence contributors to work-life imbalance.

Sixty percent of employed adults surveyed think that job dissatisfaction is a leading reason why people make unethical decisions at work, and more than half of workers (55 percent) ranked a flexible work schedule among the top three factors leading to job satisfaction, second only to compensation (63 percent).

“When you think about it,” says Sharon L. Allen, Chairman of the Board at Deloitte & Touche USA, “if someone invests all of their time and energy into their jobs, it may have the unintended consequence of making them dependent on their jobs for everything – including their sense of personal worth. This makes it even harder to make a good choice when faced with an ethical dilemma if they believe it will impact their professional success.”

Amen to that, Sharon Allen. And what a great new angle for pitching the work/life story. Better balance, better ethics, better karma - and not just better bottom line (though that's a good one too.)

The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive and released on April 16.

Linkety link link...

There's just too much bloggy goodness going on today around the blogosphere and elsewhere for this girl to take in. So here's my quick round-up of cheers, props, and commentary:

Cheers to Marc over at Feminist Dad for spreading the TRUTH about the opting-out (non)phenomenon. And props to Marco for his beautiful post (yes, I'm biased) over at Hokum today, which is part of MotherTalk's Dangerous Boy Friday - a blogging bonanza in which bloggers are posting in response to that #6-on-Amazon phenomenon, The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Academia still seems to be dangerous for grown up girls seeking tenure. Caryn McTighue Musil sounds off over at Ms. on the hurdles facing women in academe, including "The Baby Gap"(women with babies are 29 percent less likely than women without to enter a tenure-track position, and married women are 20 percent less likely than single women to do so), and The Today Show this morning actually had a nice little chirpy segment on how working mothers get screwed when returning to work, facing significant salary cuts over time. But finally, there are solid messages out there now about how companies can do better - check out Sylvia Hewlett's new book, Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, and Lisa Belkin's piece yesterday in the New York Times on the "opting back in" revolution, where she reports on corporate programs designed to recruit seasoned women with names like The Opt-In Program, as well as the new businesses cropping up to service this population, like HR Opt-In, MomCorps, and Flextime Lawyers.

Moving from work/life to writing/life, since I'm obsessed by the reception of books on feminism (personal interest, yeah, as well as professional and political yadda yadda), I've been following the coverage of feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism with baited breath -- and pretty much want to throw up. I'm sure I'll be in for it too. Some publicists say, no such thing as bad publicity. Maybe, but my heart goes out to Jess who I hope KNOWS that she has written a fantabulous book (which is doing well, thank you very much, as far as Amazon rankings are concerned - and I urge you to buy it! buy it!). Anyway, Jill Filipovic over at Feministe has posted a passionate defense of both Jessica and her book, which has spawned over 100 comments. Here's Jill:

Jessica wrote her book in a very particular way: She wrote it to make feminism accessible to women who might otherwise reject it. That is her purpose. Railing against capitalism and telling women that feminism is a movement which will not make your life any better doesn’t really seem to further that goal, does it? Neither does blathering on about how awesome high heels and pornography are. Jessica does neither....We need feminists like Jessica who do the very tough work of reaching out to women who are otherwise uninterested in feminism — feminists who are patient and generous, and who listen to the concerns and experiences of younger women without branding them stupid or not feminist enough.
What does Jessica get for doing that? She gets branded stupid and not feminist enough. She gets mocked by other feminists.

Amen, sister.

And to end this roundup on an up-note, if you happen to be in the Apple next week, be sure to check out:

A Reading with Girls Write Now
Thursday, May 24, 7pm
at 520 Eighth Avenue (b/w 36th & 37th sts.) on the 20th floor

Come out to hear girl writing mentors Pooja Makhijani, Maggie Pouncey, and Terry Selucky read their own fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus special mentee emcees Phantasia Johnson, Lindsey Romain, and Briana Wilson.

GWN is a fantastic organization that nurtures and nourishes a future generation of women writers by hooking them up with mentors. The org is run by a group of women in their 20s and 30s who are unstoppable. If you can't go to the reading, at least stop by their website and check them out. (Congrats GWN, on your new online home!)

My boy on Dangerous Boys

Marco's gorgeous review of The Dangerous Book for Boys is now up on his blog, Hokum. Here's an excerpt from his review, to whet your appetite:

Its contents have a distinctly Anglophile charm: segueing from stickball and rugby rules to Morse code to cloud formations to marbling paper and cutting italic nibs (!!), Dangerous seems intended for some unlikely jock-geek hybrid, equal parts introvert and extrovert. In fact, what with chapters on polar exploration, navigation, historic battles and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, some might argue that the Igguldens have compiled a kind of throwback primer for young male WASP imperialist-adventurers educated in the classics; indeed a great part of the books' appeal is its obstinately old-world presentation (the Seven Wonders are illustrated by what look like reproductions of Victorian postcards). The Age of Imperialism did coincide with the broader cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution, and so technology enabled not only global travel for the original tourist class, but also the wide dissemination of travel literature to a reading public, including the first generation of young armchair adventurers (boys and girls: remember lonely little Jane Eyre sitting cross-legged "like a Turk" on the window seat, browsing a natural history of the "bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland"). Some boys of that generation may have ended up becoming colonial administrators and big-game hunters, but other boys and girls of that generation became anthropologists and naturalists for the enlightenment of future generations.

Read more

(How much do I love him for referencing Jane Eyre?!)

Coming Soon: Men on Girl with Pen

Just a quick announcement that in time for Father's Day, my partner, Marco, and my colleague and friend, author Paul Raeburn, will be appearing here soon with thoughts on boyhood and fatherhood respectively. Stay tuned!

BUST reviewed my book! I heart BUST...

But first, a big slurpy THANKS to all you who took the quiz below and sent me feedback (and especially to Marc, who saved me on that tenure bit, and to Dara, always). I truly appreciate it.

Ok, so my generational stripes are coming out, but can I just say how excited I am that Bust reviewed my book! I was hooked when they launched and became one of their early subscribers. It's been fascinating--and fun--to watch them evolve.

So here's what the Busties say in their next issue (June/July):

"Betty Friedan versus Gloria Steinem, radical feminists against cultural feminists, even Ms. contra Bust--[Sisterhood, Interrupted] is a history of battles within and between the second and third waves of feminism. Siegel surveys many instances of 'feminist infighting' over the last 30-odd years--wherein much energy has been spent debating how to achieve feminist goals as opposed to actively fomenting change--and explores the disconnect between older and younger feminists....The book's singular focus on feuds presents an opportunity to revisit these happenings within the context of the movement--to see how the bickering often stalled forward progression and to learn from that." - Bust Magazine

Ok, they said some other things too. But I swear, in light of that nice little piece by Henry Alford about mis-blurbing that appeared at the back of the New York Times Book Review the other week, I promise that what I've extracted here is verbatim and nondoctored. No really, I swear!

Fun with Feminism: A Pop Quiz

Think You Know About Feminism in 2007? Test Your IQ

1. Betty Friedan was:

A. A pin-up model from the 1940s
B. The mother of American cookbooks
C. A columnist for McCall’s
D. The founder of the National Organization for Women
E. Author of The Feminine Mystique

2. In 2007, for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns:

A. the same
B. 84 cents
C. 77 cents
D. 56 cents

3. During the Miss America Protest of 1968, radical feminists did all but which of the following:

A. Crowned a live sheep “Miss America”
B. Burned their bras
C. Threw aprons and high heels into a Freedom Trashcan
D. Sprayed Toni home permanent spray inside the convention hall

4. In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 3%
B. 16%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5. “Postfeminist” is:

A. A term coined in 1919 by a group of literary radicals in Greenwich Village who rejected the feminism of their mothers one year before women won the right to vote
B. A term used in the 1980s to describe an era in which feminism was deemed unhip and unnecessary
C. A media-hyped label that irritates third-wave feminists more than Adam Corolla
D. All of the above

6. The Real Hot 100 is:

A. A new reality tv show
B. A list of the hottest women according to Maxim magazine
C. A campaign to redefine hotness by refiguring the standards to honor guts and not just glam
D. Hot sauce

7. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in:

A. 1923
B. 1942
C. 1969
D. 1971

8. In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities are women?

A. 7%
B. 16%
C. 20%
D. 50%

9. Title IX is:

A. The name of Britney’s favorite club in NYC
B. A piece of pro-woman legislation passed in 1972 now under attack
C. The name of a secret feminist cult
D. The sister band of L7

10. In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

11. BUST is:

A. A girlie magazine for men
B. A grrly magazine “for women with something to get off their chest”
C. A boxing move popularized by Laila Ali
D. A West Coast rapper

ANSWERS:
1 - C, D, and E, 2 - C, 3 - B, 4 - B, 5 - D, 6 - C, 7 - A, 8 - C, 9 - B, 10 - A, 11 - B

SCORE YOURSELF
11-8 = Superstar!
7-4 = Semi-superstar
3-0 = Hit the books, my friend. You got catching up to do.

Based on Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (available from Palgrave, June 12, 2007)

What Katie and Hillary Have in Common

Last week a reporter called me to talk about why Hillary is such a polarizing figure, especially among women. And now, turns out, Katie Couric is too - or at least, among viewers male and female, according to a New York Times article today:

[A] recent Gallup poll reinforced the notion that Ms. Couric had become a polarizing figure: 29 percent of respondents said that they did not like her, as opposed to 51 percent who said that they liked her. (Her competitors at ABC and NBC both had negative scores under 20 percent and positives around 60.)

Not surprising of course that Couric has endured exceptional personal scrutiny:

She was criticized for wearing too much makeup or too little....She was criticized for being too soft in her initial newscasts, and too hard in an interview with the presidential candidate John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, after they revealed that Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had returned.

So here comes CBS president Sean McManus, weighing in:

“Maybe we underestimate the huge shift this represented,” Mr. McManus said. “It was almost a watershed event to have a woman in that chair.” He added, “There is a percentage of people out there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman.”

Watershed indeed. And maybe if there were MORE women delivering hard news across the networks and on the air, Katie wouldn't have to represent everything to everyone. Kind of like Hillary, you might say.

PS. On a generational sidenote, Couric's ratings, while still usually third after ABC and NBC, are most competitive among younger women. Guess we're ready to get our news from a girl.

Aha- the REAL story revealed! No OPTING without OPTIONS, says Pamela Stone

According to my lame but stalwart built-in thesaurus, OPT (v) means "to choose something or choose to do something, usually in preference to other available alternatives." Pamela Stone's Opting Out? Why Women Really Quite Careers and Head Home is the book I've been waiting for.

Instead of focusing reductively on women's "choices" (who has choices when alternatives are limited?), Stone charts the institutional obstacles and cultural pressures that leave even the most advantaged women feeling pushed out. Stone writes as a sociologist, a scholar of women's careers, and a mother. But here's why I love this book: Instead of blaming women, imploring us to "get back to work" (a la Linda Hirschman) or warning us (Leslie Bennetts-style) that we're all making a dastardly mistake, her message is one that, as a Gen Xer staring into the crosshairs of burgeoning career and potential motherhood, is far more palatable to hear.

Stone lets her subjects -- mothers in their 30s and 40s who "time out" from professional careers -- describe their trajectories in unstructured interviews, giving voice to a group we have heard much about but have not heard. She lambasts the media for sensationalizing our so-called mass exodus -- which, in truth, is not so massive and reflects neither a sea-change in values among feminism's daughters nor the modernization of the feminine mystique.

Opting Out? fills a void -- virtually no real research has been done before on women leaving careers -- and it's the question mark in the title that propels the book. Stone looks at who these women are who leave and head home (whether permanently or temporarily), why they walk away from years of training and accomplishment to take on "full-time" motherhood, and what happens after they do. She looks at the implications of their leaving for the workplaces they leave behind, and the impact their decisions have on other women -- female coworkers and, especially, younger women embarking on careers. Loaded with facts and real data, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book.

Stone found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision is "a kind of silent strike" and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: "These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos." Stone emphasizes that these women's stories are not over, that most are still in the process of re-invention -- but leaves us wondering, how will the next chapter unfold?

Anyone acquainted with the research knows that younger women and girls aspire to professional achievement. It's made headline news. As a recent New York Times story and books like Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters make perfectly clear, Millennial strivers are ambitious to the point of extremes. Daughters of a half-finished revolution, this generation (as well as my own) lives suspended between the expectation of a world ready to open its arms to us and the reality of a world not yet fully transformed. Books like Stone's have the potential to rally without blaming, and incite without fear. Let's hope it finds its audience -- working women present and future pondering their limited options and the workplaces that, drained of such women's talent, should have no choice but to change and offer us alternatives to heading home.

Dynamic Duo: Courtney Martin and Girls Incorporated

I love that, along with her own original and beautifully rendered work, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, author Courtney Martin is also bringing renewed visibility to a 2006 study, The Supergirl Dilemma, from Girls Inc, the organization that empowers girls to be strong, smart, and bold. Courtney even did a Q&A on the Girls Inc website.

Jenn Pozner on WIMNs Voices Blog links to Courtney's appearances on The Today Show, MSNBC, and Fox News and in Newsweek and Glamour. And check out in particular this piece by Lakshmi Chaudry in The Nation. Now how's that for strong, smart, and bold.

(Women's research/org strategy ALERT: Want mainstream coverage? Cultivate relationships with sensitive, brilliant popular writers like Courtney who get it. Run! Don't walk!)

Republicans Raiding Social Science

O.M.G. Check this out from Inside Higher Education, a nifty little update that comes to my Inbox but rarely gets read. (Guess I'll start reading it more.)

With no advance warning and no calls to her, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations at UC-Berkeley’s business school, found her research being discussed on the House floor last week. Republican lawmakers wanted to bar the National Science Foundation from continuing a grant to support it. Why? They thought its title was, well, silly. Here's the scoop:

Rep. John Campbell, a California Republican, cited the budget deficit in going after the social science research, including Elfenbein’s work as well as studies on bison hunting and on sexual politics in Dakar.

“I am sure that some believe that these are very fine academic studies. That’s excellent. Within the realms of academic halls, they may think a number of things are fine academic studies. That’s not the question,” Campbell said on the House floor. “The question before us is, do these things rise to the standard of requiring expenditures of taxpayer funds in a time of deficits, proposed tax increases and raiding Social Security funds?”

Nu? So what is this silly and questionable research project, you ask? It's an investigation of “Accuracy in the Cross-Cultural Understanding of Others’ Emotions.” And here's the best part: Elfenbein's research had recently been praised by Army officials as potentially providing insights that would be useful to U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Not only that, this kind of research can benefit American businesses.

But wait! Former psych professor-turned-representative to the rescue:

Leading the opposition to Campbell was Rep. Brian Baird, a Washington State Democrat who formerly was a psychology professor at Pacific Lutheran University. He stressed the role of peer review and the necessity of actually knowing about the research grants being discussed.

Um, yes.

Feminism: Young, Hot, and Restless

I'm finally catching up with the books on my Feminist Reading Shelf and wanted to belatedly comment on Jennifer Baumgardner's very thoughtful Look Both Ways.

Part personal, part political, and always poignant, Jennifer writes about coming into her own bisexuality when (oops!) she unexpectedly falls in love with a fellow intern at Ms. shortly after college. With her usual intergenerational flair and contextual savvy, she includes a chapter on "The Woman-Identified Woman" - icon and theory of "second-wave" feminism - and puts her "third-wave" embrace of a more fluid sexuality in the context of feminism's evolution. It's interesting to juxtapose this far more nuanced account of girl-on-girl dynamics with the current conversation about GGW (Girls Gone Wild, for those not yet in the know), where girls get it on for the boys. The book goes way beyond the superficiality of the Madonna-Britney kiss (Madonna: what were you thinking?!), past the reductive stereotype of third-wave sexuality (my lipstick is political), and boldly explores the non-PC world of desire in an era of sexual complexity. If you haven't already, I urge folks to get past the annoyingly snarky review that appeared a while ago in the Times and give Both Ways a fresh look. Go. Go now. Read this book. Well worth the journey. It changed the way I think about bisexuality and Jennifer is a gorgeous writer. (She's gorgeous, too, but that's not why you should read the book! Though I must say, those eyes on the cover certainly draw you in.)

(For less battle-axe coverage, see the interview on Feministing.com, a bit in Mother Jones, and a more mixed review in Salon.)

Today Show to Air "Opt Out" Convo with Bennetts, Belkin, Hirshman...and MojoMom

On Saturday, May 12, The Today Show will air a discussion about "Women Who Opt Out" of the workforce and what happens next with MojoMom, Leslie Bennetts, Lisa Belkin, Linda Hirshman, and Gail Saltz. Mojo will be the youngest of the bunch (Gen X), and adds a fresh perspective to the debate. Promises to provide good fodder for some much-needed intergenerational conversation and, perhaps, I hope, myth-busting...Stay tuned.

Happy 10th Anniversary, CCF!

I had a blast at the Council on Contemporary Families conference this past weekend. Many of the members of that group -- now celebrating its 10th year - are personal heroes. True models of engaged scholarship. And incredibly nice people to boot. Kudos to Stephanie Coontz, Steve Mintz, Josh Coleman, Waldo Johnson, Virginia Rutter, Ashton Applewhite, Barbara Risman, Phil and Carolyn Cowan, and others for making it all come true. (Coverage of the conference - well, sort of - here: in The Washington Times.)

At the conference, CCF released a great new "product", called "Unconventional Wisdom: New Data, Trends, and Clinical Observations about American Families". Look past the lengthy title and delve into over 75 well-delivered, highly relevant findings that provide a snapshot of what some of the nation's leading authorities are thinking about how marriages, families, parenting, and intimate relationships succeed or fail. To wit:

AND BABY MAKES THREE
In a study of 130 couples from wedding until their first babies were three years old, John and Julie Gottman found that 67% of couples had a big drop in relationship happiness and a big increase in hostility in the first 3 years of the baby's life. In addition, the parents' hostility during pregnancy was associated with baby's responsiveness at three months. Based on this, they designed and tested an intervention to help new parents: the workshop reversed the drop in couple happiness and the increasing hostility. They also found a reduction in postpartum depression. At three years old, the babies whose parents had been to a workshop were more advanced in terms of emotional and language development. Part of this was due to father's involvement: the workshops improved father's involvement.

John Gottman and Julie Gottman, Co-Directors, The Gottman Institute (Seattle, WA). Contact: johng@gottman.com

WHEN COUPLES DISSOLVE: HOW THEY FARE
What happens when couples dissolve their relationship? Both men and women experience income losses, but women experience a sharper drop. Married men whose relationships dissolve see an average decline of 22.3 percent in their household incomes, while married women see an average decline of 58.3 percent. The income loss for men and women in cohabiting relationships is less -- 10 percent for men and 33.1 percent for women. But because cohabitors have lower incomes in the first place, their income losses are especially likely to leave them in precarious economic circumstances. Only 9 percent of formerly married men are poor after dissolution, while nearly 20% of cohabiting men are living in poverty after their break-ups. And most vulnerable of all are cohabiting African-American and Hispanic women whose relationships dissolve.

Pamela J. Smock, Associate Vice President for Research - Social Sciences & Humanities, Professor of Sociology & Women's Studies, and Research Professor, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. pjsmock@umich.edu; Phone: 734.763.2264

GOOD REASONS FOR MEN TO DO HOUSEWORK: HAPPIER MARRIAGES, BETTER KIDS
Numerous studies reveal the benefits to a relationship and family when a father participates in housework. Women are more prone to depression and to fantasize about divorce when they do a disproportionate share of the housework. Wives are more sexually interested in husbands who do more housework. And children appear to be better socially adjusted when they regularly participate in doing chores with Dad. In my clinical experience, men do more in homes when they have stronger egalitarian attitudes, and when their wives are willing to negotiate standards, act assertively, prioritize the marital friendship, and avoid gatekeeping.

Joshua Coleman, Author, Psychologist, Training Faculty San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group. www.drjoshuacoleman.com; 510-547-6500

DO MOTHERS STAY HOME WHEN THEIR HUSBANDS EARN GOOD MONEY?
People often think that women whose husbands make “good money” stay home when they have children. But it takes being married to men in the top 5th percentile (men earning more than $120,000 a year) to seriously reduce women’s employment -- only 54 percent of mothers with husbands with these top earnings worked for pay. Among married women whose husbands were in the top 25 to 5 percent of all earners (making salaries ranging from about $60,000 to $120,000), 72 percent of mothers worked outside the home, almost identical to the 71 percent work participation figures among married moms whose husbands' earnings were in the lowest 25 percent of men’s wages. Women’s own education has a much bigger effect on her likelihood of working than her husband’s earnings; highly-educated women who can earn a lot typically don’t become stay-at-home mothers.

Paula England, Professor of Sociology, StanfordUniversity. 650-723-4912; pengland@stanford.edu

RAUNCH CULTURE ENTERS THE THERAPY OFFICE
Since 2000, my clinical practice has seen a dramatic rise in the number of girls and young women (aged 13 to 21) who've found themselves in the midst of some kind of overwhelming sexual experience, usually involving some kind of exhibitionism or trading sex for favors/social standing. The transition in this country towards "porn sex" as normative sexuality is causing intense confusion among many middle-and high-school girls about whether sexiness and sexual pleasure have anything to do with each other, or with the notion of personal choice.

Michael Simon, MFT, Director of Counseling & Student Support, BentleySchool, Lafayette, California. 510-433-295; Michael@PracticalHelpForParents.com

DOES DIVORCE MAKE YOU HAPPY?
Our research shows that it can make you less depressed—if you are in a distressed marriage. When we compare men and women in distressed marriages with men and women who have divorced and left their distressed marriages, it turns out that the people who stay are more likely to be depressed than those who leave in the short run. Over time, some of the relief from divorcing from a distressed marriage wears off, perhaps due to the challenges of being single and taking care of a family. Still, even after the passage of time, people who leave are a little less likely to be depressed than people who stay in a distressed marriage.

Virginia Rutter, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Framingham State College.
vrutter@gmail.com; 508-626-4863

And, of course,

THE ONLY CHILD DISCONNECT
Single-child families are the fastest-growing families in this country and in most industrialized Western European countries as well. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of women nationwide who have one child has more than doubled, from 10% to 23%. In 2003, single-child families in the U.S. outnumbered two-child families – 20% vs. 18%.

Still, according to a 2004 Gallup poll, only 3% of Americans think a single-child family is the ideal family size. There’s a real disconnect between the perception of the ideal and the reality of what people are doing.

Deborah Siegel, Ph.D., Author / Consultant, Fellow, Woodhull Institute.
www.deborahsiegel.net

Mother's Day Around the Bend

Not sure how I missed this one but Katha Pollitt did a nice piece on Alternet after Sharon Lerner's "The Motherhood Experiment" ran last month in the New York Times, linking low fertility rates (more only children!) to governments waking up and smelling work/life conflict as a cause.
Writes Katha, invoking Lerner,

[F]ertility rates -- the average number of children per woman -- have fallen below replacement level in ninety countries, including such Catholic stalwarts as Ireland (1.9), Spain (1.3), Italy (1.3) and Portugal (1.4). Even the much-trumpeted increasing US population is mostly a product of immigration (the actual fertility rate is 2.0). While politicians in Japan (1.3) seem fatally drawn to chastising women as recalcitrant "baby-making machines," European governments have started asking if making life easier for working mothers might do the trick....[It wouldn't] be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason.

Population implosion leading to paid parental leave? Hey, we'll take it. Happy Mother's Day, all you (paid and unpaid) Moms!

Shameless

(That's "shameless" as in "shameless self-promotion." Please feel warned.)

The first review is in for Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women and Grrls Gone Wild -- and it's a starred one. I'm here in Chicago, at my parents' house, repressing an urge to jump up and down on their bed.

Composure, Deb, composure.

Generational Collision in the Workplace

Yesterday I went to a panel on working across generations, sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women's Corporate Circle. Entering Weil Gotshal's shiny headquarters at the bottom of Central Park, I had one of those moments where I wonder why I went academic instead of corporate. The lunches (seared tuna and roasted vegetables)! The fact that some of these firms are even talking about generational differences and have programs like "Reverse Mentoring"! (That would be Merrill Lynch.) The fact that some are genuinely trying to reframe workplace flexibility from employee benefit to something that managers can't afford not to have. If all of corporate America looked like this particular panel, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat and come join their team. In fact, hmmm...But I digress.

Ellen Galinsky of Families & Work Institute was on the panel and served up a number of interesting tidbits from an earlier study called Generation and Gender in the Workplace, such as:

-Boomers are more likely to be work-centric than other generations, and Gens X and Y more dual-centric (meaning, they place the same priority on their job and family) or family-centric
-younger men are spending more time with their children
-men report more work/life conflict than in the past
-dual-centric and family-centric workers are actually LESS stressed than work-centric worker bees

And my personal favorite:

-if there are tensions in the workplace, they're NOT primarily between women with kids and women without, as the media loves to overblow; the REAL tensions are between people in high-status jobs vs. those in low-status jobs - which means, I take it, that the real collisions have to do class and generation

And speaking of, I came across an interesting book the other day: When Generations Collide: Who They Are, Why They Clash, and How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work. Along with Kara Jesella's Sassy book, this should be great airplane reading for tomorrow. I'm off to sweet home Chicago for the Council on Contemporary Families Anniversary conference, where I'm on a panel with the divine Miss Virginia Rutter. We'll be talking to researchers and clinicians about pitching and translating research. Off to make my handouts...

Blogging Feminism

So much to write about today I don't know where to begin!

First, a launch near and dear to my heart: The Scholar & Feminist Online goes live today with an issue called Blogging Feminism. The issue is edited by Gwendolyn Beetham (a founder of the Real Hot 100) and Jessica Valenti (see posts below for scoop on Jessica's smokin new book) and features essays by feminist academics and some of today's most popular bloggers -- including Samhita of feministing.com, Bitch PhD, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, Clancy Ratliff of CultureCat, Morgaine, and Chris Nolan of Spot-on.com -- sandwiched by a foreword from Salon's Rebecca Traister, and an afterword from yours truly. This is SO the issue we envisioned when we started SFO -- interactive, crossovery, and on the mark. Can't wait to see it go live later today.

The accompanying group blog can be accessed here:
http://bloggingfeminism.blogspot.com/

For one week after the edition launches, the blog portion of the
edition will be live, giving both the contributors and the readers a
chance to discuss the issues online. Add it to your blogroll! Come leave comments! I'll see you there.

Only Child in the Country

Just back from a reading of Only Child upstate. Daph and I spoke to a group of 40 women in Chester, New York - the sisterhood of a synagogue out there on Sunday (thank you, Paula!). They were an incredibly warm and responsive audience. I kept looking out and seeing my mother, who, actually, was thousands of miles away in Istanbul that day. After reading out loud the part from my essay that paints her in a, well, somewhat critical light, I felt this overwhelming need to tell the sisters "I love my mother! I love my mother!"

Talk about Jewish guilt.

If in Philly this Thursday...

Be sure to check this out: an armchair discussion between Ellie Smeal and Rebecca Walker, hosted by Women's Way. And if you go, send me a comment or email and let me know how it was!