To Walker, "third wave" meant a feminism linked to her mother's, but different. It meant continuing and improving upon the best that second-wave feminism had to offer - grassroots activism and critique of the media, for instance - but still shaving your legs. It meant embracing multiculturalism, contradiction, and, if that’s what grooved you, proudly sporting a thong. Soon after Walker’s rallying cry, author/activists Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards published their book, ManifestA, which provided analysis and strategy for the young women now poised to carry the torch. This was a propitious moment.Just sayin. I did not want them to end with "shaving your legs" when there was so much more substance to the graf.
Originally placed [on top of the South Carolina State House dome] in 1962....[c]urrent state law prohibits the flag's removal from the State House grounds without additional legislation. Police were placed to guard the flag after several attempts by individuals to remove it....In 2005, two Western Carolina University researchers found that 74% of African-Americans polled favored removing the flag from the South Carolina State House altogether. The NAACP and other civil rights groups have attacked the flag's continued presence at the state capitol. The NAACP maintains an official boycott of South Carolina, citing its continued display of the battle flag on its State House grounds, despite an initial agreement to call off the boycott after it was removed from the State House dome.
[W]e just found a link to a blog post from the World's Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: "Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That's 12.782%." To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.
Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.EXAMPLE (w/o hypertext): Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.” If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.
"We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people's phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power.
"I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President."
"Sometimes it’s a relief to be a man. Watching, at a safe distance, the collapse of feminism is a bit like seeing a huge chunk of melting glacier falling into the sea. You know it’s a sign of something serious going on, but you’re glad not to be anywhere near when it happens."The commentors in the comments section are doing an excellent job setting ole Magnus straight. My favorite is from "PN," from London, who writes:
"This article is based purely on two feminist thinkers [Fay Weldon and Germaine Greer] who have made comments in the last week which have been jumped on and to some extent distorted by the media. Strangely enough, I don't think my only choices of feminist icon are Anne Hathaway or Diana purely because Germaine Greer happens to have said something about them.
There are things to be said in defense of both Weldon and Greer, but I think the more important point is that the opinions of these two people hardly constitute the collapse of feminism. Perhaps you need to get on the internet and investigate some of the blogs and comments on feminist sites which seem to have missed the newsflash that their movement has collapsed."
I can't help noting how little the story has to do with reality -- either with the situation of parents like me, who depend on nannies and babysitters to care for our children, or with the lives of most women who work as caregivers.She goes on to contrast reality (the feminization of migration) with the nanny fantasies that currently abound in pop culture -- not only The Nanny Diaries, but a slew of so-called reality tv shows and plays. I find Heather's op-ed an excellent example of accessible writing that surveys the latest theory and pop thinking on the subject and makes us all think. GO HEATHER!
There's an interesting trio of articles in the current issue of the New York Press: "By the Numbers" by David Crone, "Working Girls" by Marin Resnick, and "Who Needs Work?" by Gaije Kushner. I find the headline on the cover ("City's White Collar Women Shatter the Glass Ceiling) to be at odds with the emphases of the articles (glass ceiling not so shattered). I'm all for celebrating progress, but the cover message sends an inaccurate message, one that is debunked in the issue's very pages. What gives?
Now, I know the [Times] article is trying to make a point, but framing support for a spouse's job and chores at home as "wifely" duties is not exactly the best way to hold men (remember them?) accountable for their role in the domestic sphere.We need some new lingo. I tried to get past the old formulas in an article I wrote for July’s Psychology Today called “Two People, One Breadwinner.” After interviewing couples who could afford to have one parent staying at home with their kids while the other worked, and talking to a slew of couples counselors and psychologists for that piece, here’s what I surmised:
This year's Book Festival in Edinburgh seems to be inspiring a number of "dead feminism" articles in the UK press. There's one in The Herald (Thirty Years on from the Glory Days of Feminism: How Have We Changed?) and not one but two in The Scotsman ("Feminism is Dead for Most Women Today, Says Its High Priestess" and "We Gave Men a Hard Time"). I don't know about you, but that photo attached to the Festival's logo up there sure don't scream "postfeminism" to me...."There isn't a public feminism supporting women in the way there was, because feminism has become discredited as a sour-faced, curmudgeonly set of ideas. Young women don't want to be associated with it. I don't think the culture as a whole represents the strength and beauty of female friendships and how those relationships save you from going mad. Women are portrayed as sitting around giggling together in wine bars. I'm not saying that that's what young women are like, but that's what the culture is describing: you're allowed to have female comrades but only if you're discussing stilettos."These women have excellent points, but the emphasis of these articles is just so, well, predictable. Over and over, the death of feminism seems a juicier story than stories about its life. But don't people get tired reading the same ole story? Don't journalists get tired of writing them? For vibrant signs of life among our sisters across the sea and other tales yet to tell, of course, see The F-Word and the women's page of The Guardian.
A report in Variety suggested that the plot of the movie is likely to involve fathers who struggle to balance their instinctive need to protect and their offspring’s craving for adventure, even though the evidence mostly suggests that these days it is the sons who are risk averse, unwilling to unplug themselves from their iPods, and the parents who are eager for their offspring to go outside and have some old-fashioned fun.Anyone got other ideas for Disney and Rudin? Who should star? And while we're on the subject of sneak peaks, of course, don't forget to preorder your copy of the Daring Book for Girls, which, in an amazing act of daring speed on the part of our ladies of MotherTalk, comes out October 30!
[A]lthough women hold a quarter of all seats in state legislatures, "we've hit a plateau," says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, a public-policy institute at New Jersey's Rutgers University.The reason for the slowdown, according to the article? Simple. Women remain less likely to run for public office than men:
The bottom line: While women will cast about 53% of the votes in November 2008, based on the past two presidential elections, their share of elective offices seems to have leveled off at about one in six at the federal level, and one in four in the state capitals.
They first need to be recruited and assured of their qualifications, research shows. "Women tend to run because they're concerned about an issue; they don't wake up thinking they want to be governor the way men do," says Jeanne Shaheen, a former three-term governor of New Hampshire who is now the director of Harvard University's Institute of Politics.Regardless of what we think of Hillary Clinton, it's time to tackle the confidence gap, ladies, and take a page from Hill's book. But wait - does this mean the external obstacles are all cleared up? Inquiring minds want to know.
[Shalit] asks, "Why, in the year 2007, should women's focus be completely on pleasing young men?" (Is it?) And she wants us to take heart (and I do, I do) from the growing number of young women whom she describes as "rebellious good girls." These new avatars of girl power give abstinence talks to high-schoolers; they stage "Pure Fashion" shows in which fashion doesn't just mean flesh; they become "girlcotters" who lobby retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch to pull tee-shirts emblazoned with sexist slogans. They don't sleep with the first, or second, or third boy who comes along. They don't become "people-pleasing bad girls" who will do anything, anything, to get a boy's attention.
More power to them. Behind Shalit's celebration of such girls, however, is some very dubious sociology.
Wendy Shalit has made a career as the sort of journalist whose trend stories fall apart on closer examination. But no matter, because by the time closer examination occurs, the stories have frequently started quite useful conversations. Her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good, is a case in point. Unless one believes that the plural of anecdote is data, there is simply no evidence for a resurgence in modesty. But by the time a reader figures that out, he or she has skipped past the need for data, and leapt to the discussion of whether such a resurgence would be desireable. It is possible to regard Ms. Shalit simultaneously as a mediocre journalist and a useful contributor to contemporary conversation about morals.
I haven’t seen the full study, but I’d guess that NYC must have fewer of the highly paid (white?) men and more of the poorly paid men (Black and Hispanic?), relative to highly paid women of any race. Is this progress? If it’s because there are more young, low-wage men of color, I’m not so sure that this is a sign of college women’s progress....So, is this a story about women with college degrees moving to the big city and makin’ it or is it about a change in the demographics of cities, with more, very low wage men of color? It may be a bit of both, but while the article implies that this data show that women with college degrees are outperforming their male colleagues, there is nothing in the statistics presented that indicates this is the case.I'm guessing this counterview never makes it mainstream. Instead, how long do we think it will be before the backlashy chorus--women outpacing men!--chimes in? If that chorus shines the light on raising wages for urban low-wage men of color, terrific. But I'm not holding my breath.
The way the alpha women of Bloomsbury wrestled with their need for love while producing work of the highest quality should be an inspiration to a modern generation of women who, we keep being told, are more and more inclined to give up the struggle and abandon their aspirations.
