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!

Fearless Friday

The enterprising, fearless ladies over at MotherTalk have invited me, along with hundreds of other women, to blog today about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless. So here we go.

My father taught me if not to be fearless, then to die trying. He taught our golden retriever how to swim by throwing her off the pier, and he taught me how not to fear sailing by taking me out in a storm. I learned to love rain after my father dragged me outside to watch the lightning roll in over Lake Michigan and straight into our backyard. Together, we learned not to fear skiing by staying out during a mountain blizzard in Wyoming, yodeling fearlessly at the top of our lungs all the way down.

But none of this prepared me for the courage it took to leave a marriage at age thirty-five. I wanted kids of my own, and I knew that leaving the marriage -- corrupted as it was -- would postpone that dream, if not vanquish it. Up to that point, I had led a comfortable life. Leaving would leave me financially insecure. But I did it. I left. And I didn't die.

With that leave-taking began a new life -- one more thrilling than a sail in a storm, more charged than lightning, more exhilarating than a Wyoming blizzard. Leaving put me in touch with my truest instinct for self-preservation. And life will never be the same again.

Petition to Save Book Reviews

The National Book Critics Circle has started an online petition to protest the Atlanta Journal Constitution's decision to eliminate its book editor job (and with it Teresa Weaver). Oy. We NEED book reviews. This is BAD. But hopeful - forward the link! More commentary can be found here. (Thanks to Daph for sending it around.)

Other Girls with, Um, Pens...

The seminar on blogging last night was FANTASTIC and I learned a ton of shiny new tricks. But man it’s hard to focus when you’ve got your laptop in front of you and you’re online. (How do students do it these days? Oh wait…) So, during the two moments when I wasn’t RIVETED by Sree’s presentation, I checked out who else on the web is a “Girl with Pen” out there….

Imagine my surprise at finding Ladies of the Pen.

Ahem. But back to girls with pens and brains - and not just bods. Check out coverage of the new book on Sassy on NPR yesterday. I love that this kind of feminist material history is seeing the light of day -- and in popular book form, too. Those girls had some serious pens, I tell you.

Stuff on My Cat

Ooh nooo! I'm cat blogging!

Actually, I'm sitting in a blogging seminar (sitting next to Helaine Olen) at Columbia School of Journalism with Sree Sreenivasan (the tech guy on WNBC-TV) testing some new stuff out...Bear with me. And in the meantime, enjoy this shot of Amelia Bedelia, my semi-perma-foster cat.

Full Frontal, Big Boys, and "Mommy Book" Sales

Though I more often ponder the through-lines and continuities, the differences between feminisms of different generations sometimes just kinda hit you over the head. Note the difference in these titles:

There's feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (Be sure to check out Rebecca Traister's interview in Salon this week.)

And there's former 9-5 director Ellen Bravo's new book, Taking on the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation.

'Nuf said.

On other fronts, throwing a bone to those of us (ok, us writers) who are obsessed with the question of how other books actually sell, the New York Times reports today on sales figures for a number of recent "mommy books," including Leslie Bennetts'. (thank you, Laura!) Word on the street on how they sell? They don't.

Happy Pay Gap Day - I Mean, Oops, Equal Pay Day

A new study from the American Association of University Women finds that just a year after graduating from college, women earn just 80 percent of what men make. Ten years down the line, women make 69 percent of what men earn.

The finding comes at an interesting moment, given the popular argument that women earn less simply because of their lifestyle choices. Check out Broadsheet's trademark savvy reporting on the study for more.

And while we're on it, a few excerpts from a "pop quiz" I'm developing in conjunction with my book - because I'm always surprised at how often women ourselves overestimate how we, as a sex, are doing. Go on, take the little test. No one's looking. I'll post answers tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

In 2007, what percent of women are tenured professors?

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

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

A. 8%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

(Answers posted tomorrow!)

Courtney Martin, Jessica Valenti, Kara Jesella, and...Bjork

It's a hot week for feminism here in NYC, and particularly for two of my favorite under-30 feminist mentors:

Courtney Martin hits the road with Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, while personal hero and a founder of feministing.com Jessica Valenti goes offline this week with her first book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - a book she says she wished she had read as a teenager. Damn. Me too.

Excerpts of each are here:
Courtney on AlterNet
Jessica in The Guardian

For those of you not yet addicted to feministing.com, some classic, vintage words from Jess -- who gets an undue amount of public flack from conservative detractors and misogynist wackos -- may sway you to check it out:

Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn't a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there's nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn't want women to speak their minds.

Such words have got to sound familiar to "second-wave" veterans. I'll be eager to see what the response is from an older generation to these new, important voices. Jessica wrote her book because, among other things, she believes that "All women, especially younger women, deserve feminism in their lives - and most don't have access to the university courses or feminist mentors who might introduce them to it."

A third book out this week by another next-generation writer I have yet to meet but already admire: Kara Jesella's How Sassy Changed My Life. Publisher's Weekly calls it "a behind-the-scenes, warts-and-all look at the magazine's office culture, including sections on the glossy's coverage of feminism, celebrity and girl culture....[T]he book—written in a style reminiscent of the magazine itself—is a testament to a publication that changed the face of teen media." Sounds like a fun romp through the recent past at the very least.

And as if these three offerings weren't enough for one week, check out this tidbit from Bjork on feminism (courtesy of feministing.com)

Feminism dead my a**.

Closing out a Sad, Sad Week...

The fabulous journalist James Ridgeway has a really important piece in Mother Jones: "Mass Murderers and Women: What We're Still Not Getting About Virginia Tech."

And to counter all this week's horrible awfulness, the Spring issue of Ms. magazine (on newsstands April 24) has an article by Nikki Ayanna Stewart in their new Women's Studies Department on the uses of a women's studies degree. It's called "Transform the World." Nikki, you bring us hope.

Teach Ins NOT a Thing of the Past!

It may be cliche, but it's true. Gen Xers of a progressive bent are known to wax nostalgic. Born too late, we feel we somehow "missed out" on the good ole days of badass activism -- anti-war teach ins, Civil Rights sit-ins, feminist girlcotts, and the like. But today, when I read about a campus-wide Global Warming Teach In in the Boston Globe, my heart skipped a beat. Check it out - it's taking place at Framingham University, next week.

As the Globe tells it, students in a ceramics course will be developing concept pieces based on their reactions to a global warming film. Government students will discuss the ongoing political debate and ramifications for public policy. Philosophy students will consider the moral and ethical considerations of how humans treat the Earth. Mathematics students will study the statistical rationale supporting global warming. In sociology professor Virginia Rutter's class, students will analyze a recent report by the UN panel showing that impoverished nations, which have contributed the least to global warming, would potentially suffer the most from its consequences. Rutter will be asking students to answer the question, "What are reasonable burdens for people to take on?"

Rutter, one of the Teach In's organizers, tells the Globe:

"We're always looking for opportunities to connect the concepts and theories to things that are happening in the world, things that help people feel the vitality of things we're engaged in....[When it comes to global warming, we] don't have a horse in the race about what policies make sense...But we have an interest in putting it on the table so that as a community we can think about it."

Sorry, Pam, but Virginia Rutter just became my new favorite sociologist.

As a postscript, maybe yesterday's Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on so-called partial birth abortion -- an UTTER assault on women's reproductive health rights -- will finally be the prompt that wakes us all up? Sit-ins, teach-ins, girlcotts -- bring 'em on. We're in deep shit here. Be sure to check out Lynn Harris' coverage on the ruling Salon.

Happy Launch Day, Courtney! And a mea culpa...

Two quick updates from the reading/s front:

Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters goes on sale today! Check out Courtney's report from the front, on her blog. Great review by Holly Brubach in Sunday's Style magazine. Courtney's is one you don't want to miss.

Second, mea culpa - and to my relief. In spite of an effectively provocative but somewhat misleading title (The Feminine Mistake) that SAHMs have taken offense too, perhaps missing the Friedan reference, Leslie Bennetts is very GOOD on structure in numerous places. Check out, for starters, the chapters titled "Opting Out" and "Opting Back In," where she cites my new favorite sociologist, Pamela Stone, among others, extensively. And she incorporates some great structural zingers, like this one, from Sylvia Law: "This line about how women have to pick between having a family and having real work is sexist...When you say to women, and only women, 'You have to pick,' it's a way of keeping women in their place by saying, 'This is the way it is.' The Times likes to tell the story as if the structures are immovable and you have to accept them." Yeah, well, so do a lot of these books claiming to assuage women's angst. But I digress.

The question remains: In an era (and in a blogosphere) in which savvy authors KNOW people have no qualms voicing an opinion without reading the book, is it fair -- or disingenuous -- for us to rail against those who judge our books by their covers when our titles are, for better or worse, intended to provoke?

Fact-y Friday

So I'm doing research for some magazine articles I'm writing about cutting-edge couples in a (supposed) new era of equality and came across the following:

Based on a study of 120 in-depth interviews with young adults conducted between 1998-2003, NYU sociologist Kathleen Gerson reports that 3/4 of women said they plan to build a non-negotiable base of self-reliance and an independent identity in the world of paid work.

And according to other studies, there are fewer households with highly unequal divisions of family labor and more households with equal divisions than ever before -- both in the US and across Europe. Turns out, if egalitarian divisions aren't possible, what a husband wants and what a wife wants are often at odds. According to Gerson, "If a supportive, equal partnership is not possible, most women prefer individual autonomy over becoming dependent on a husband in a traditional marriage. Most men, however, if they can't have an equal balance between work and parenting, fall back on a neo-traditional arrangement that allows them to put their own work prospects first and rely on a partner for most caregiving."

So, um, what might this say about who's really calling shots in those couples featured by Leslie Bennetts where the wives are staying home? Just a thought...

(All info drawn from the special Council on Contemporary Families issue of The American Prospect last month)

Great gawking on Bennetts' recent talk

There's a savvy read of Leslie Bennett's NYPL LIVE event this week on Gawker, by the way, for those who missed it. (Thanks to Rachel Kramer Bussell for hipping me to it.)

Live, from economist Heather Boushey...

I'm taking the liberty of pasting Heather Boushey's comment on my previous post up here, in case folks don't venture into the comments down there. It is as I thought: evidence, not interpretation. Thank you, Heather, for inserting the nuance. Why doesn't this reality seem to get through the din???

Heather Boushey's comment:

Sure, I'll comment ... I've run hundreds of regressions by now trying to sort out whether there is or is not a trend of declining women's employment *because of children.* I haven't found any real evidence that points to women being more likely to leave employment today, compared to 25 years ago or 5 years ago, because they have children at home.

What we know is that employment rates for men and women (moms and non-moms) declined after 2000, and while women's employment rates have almost recovered to their 2000 levels, men's have not.

We also know that women lost more jobs during the recession of 2001 than they had in the prior two recessions. They did not lose more jobs than men, but compared to women in prior recessions, the 2001 recession was hard on women workers. I tend to think of this as women moving closer to equality to men in their vulnerability to the business cycle. (Typically, in prior recessions, men have seen greater employment losses than women during recessions.)

When we isolate the effect of children on women's employment, there is no increase. Does this mean that women are not leaving the workforce? No, but it does mean that we cannot identify children as the cause.

There is some evidence that husband's income may be having a slightly -- very slightly -- larger downward pull on women's employment in recent years. But, that's not about motherhood.

Economists and social scientists, help me out here...

As a researcher whose training is of the lit crit/historical persuasion (I am NOT nor have I ever been a social scientist, though there are times when I really wish I were!), I have a question for my friends of the economist/social scientist persuasion:

For those picking up this thread today, I've been blogging this week about Leslie Bennett's book, The Feminine Mistake, as I read it. Much as I may disagree on certain (key) points, Leslie Bennetts is GOOD. Every time I silently voice an objection, she addresses it on the next page. But I have a more general question about journalists interpreting data when it comes to research on women/girls/families -- and maybe experts from the Council on Contemporary Families crew can help us out here and set it straight.

Bennetts writes that "some feminists have challenged the very existence of a back-to-the-home trend on the grounds that more than two-thirds of all American mothers still participate in the labor force" (7) and that "[o]ther analysts have challenged the idea that we're witnessing a resurgence of stay-at-home motherhood by attacking the news stories describing this phenomenon" (8). She calls analyses like those put forth by Heather Boushey "arguments." I thought they were evidence. She calls them "denials" and invokes (critically, perhaps, but I think not) Linda Hirshman who refers to it all as the "it's not happening" defense.

Which is it? Is it happening? Or not? Is the reading of the early 2000s recession as the reason for women's labor-force dip interpretation -- or fact?

Live from the New York Public...

Last night's host at the New York Public Library event primed the audience for a fight. There was none, just good 'n lively convo. So I settled in and found myself listening to the exchange between Leslie Bennetts and Elissa Schappell with an ear for marketing. (I'm working on talking points for my own book and am obsessed with framing - can you tell?) Leslie Bennetts is a master, a natural -- I say that with genuine admiration.

Some highlights from the sound bite frontlines:

-ES on mommy wars: "It's mom-on-mom violence!"
-LB on SAHMs being left and being unable to reenter the workforce: "It's carnage out there."
-LB laughing at her own poor paraphrasing of an expert she talked to: "He who brings home the bacon controls the bacon."
-LB on structure: "What's keeping women from reentering the workforce is that no one is taking them back in."
-LB going counterintuitive: "Staying at home is high-risk behavior. I wouldn't put my child's welfare at risk that way." "Working women aren't validated as good mothers. No one ever says working women are being good moms, taking care of their kids, by working."
-LB on motive: "I did not think this was a book about mommy wars or feminism. Boy was I dumb." ES: "Dumb, dumb, dumb!"

It's interesting data to learn that many people seem not to be fully understanding "The Feminine Mistake" as a pun on "The Feminine Mystique," and instead think that Bennetts is calling SAHMs mistakes. (Jury's still out over here on that one - still on Chapter 1...)

Be sure to check out Rebecca Mead's New Yorker review of Bennetts. Good stuff, and balanced. (Thanks, Helaine, for that heads up!) Mead is generally laudatory (and man, talk about a gorgeously written review). Based on what I heard last night, I sense I'm going to agree with her critiques:

[Bennetts] is short on answers for women whose budgets do not stretch to hiring a well-chosen private surrogate. And she seems impatient with anyone who has failed to find, as she has, the thrill of work, particularly work that grants a certain degree of child-friendly flexibility.

Mead does a great historical tour of the title and offers a smart compare/contrast with Friedan. When I grow up, I want to be Rebecca Mead. (Don't we all?!).

Some Good Commentary on Bennetts

I 'fess up: I struggled with the tone in my post below, as my live-in editor Marco, who I made read it twice before I hit "publish" can attest. My ethics dictate that I try (at least) to take issue without trashing, cause really, who needs more trash in this world. On that note, some of the best, aka most balanced, posts and commentaries I've seen so far: Joan Walsh on Salon and Mojo Mom , and an interesting bit about a review Mojo submitted to Amazon which Amazon wouldn't publish.

PS. Leslie, if you are reading, I look forward to meeting you, and to engaging in conversation not only about the issues, but about reception -- an issue that intrigues me, politically and personally and professionally, to no end.

Please, Leslie Bennetts, Tell Me I'm Wrong...

Tonight I'm going to hear Leslie Bennetts interviewed by Elissa Schappell at the New York Public Library. Bennetts is also speaking at a salon I'm a part of, next week. So, to prepare for said events, I excitedly started reading her book, The Feminine Mistake -- how can anyone who has written about Betty Friedan pass up a book with such a title? But the prologue itself gives me pause. Not for the reasons expressed by the "stay at home brigade," as Bennetts calls them in her retort on HuffPost to the barrage of opening critiques she's received from SAHMs, but on behalf of my generation.

Well-intentioned and heartfelt, Bennett's writing nevertheless positions younger women as in need of cautionary tales. Some of us, no doubt, do, and Feminine Mistake is full of important information about what happens when opt-out wives get left. But many others of us clamor instead for tales of workplaces that have realized women (AND men) have families. Where are the cautionary tales aimed at corporations about how bottom lines suffer when they fail to retain their women? Or the cautionary tales aimed at young husbands about how miserable they'll be if they opt out of time at home with the kids?

Thumbing ahead, Bennetts writes about the difficulties of reentering the work force and the penalties women pay for their time out (and the need for crucial changes in the divorce laws). But the tone set early on (and Leslie, please tell me I'm off - I want to be - I'm still in the early chapters) seems to focus on personal decision-making, rather than much-needed structural (aka workplace) change.

Wait - I'm switching to second person, so let's go with it:

Leslie, you completely have me when you wrote that the real issues behind women's work/life predicaments have nothing to do with words like "choice" and "values." But then you write about the "willfully retrograde choice" of women who opt out on the very next page. If you ask me, the "feminine mistake" has been -- to borrow a phrase from my elders -- a focus on the personal at the expense of the political, the structural. I think you and I will both agree that words like "options" are meaningless until we are talking about viable workplace options -- not the "option" to work or not.

A personal postscript: Raised to be my own person and divorced at 35, I have never for a moment expected that a husband would support me for the duration. These young women who keep appearing in print are certainly not the majority. As I thought Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic Policy Research rather convincingly documented, the "opt out" phenomenon named by Lisa Belkin back in 2003 was not hard evidence of a generation bailing on work but rather a dip in women's labor market participation due to a recession. Why do young mothers, instead, keep getting castigated, warned, and blamed? (I'm thinking of other books here...more soon.)

Another forthcoming one: Mama, PhD

Attention heavily degreed women-with-babies: I love this. Caroline Grant, movie columnist for the blog Literary Mama, is coming out with a book called Mama, PhD, about, what else? Mamas with PhDs. Keep an eye out for more about it on MotherTalk.

NEW! Trainings for Researchers, Scholars, Nonprofits

After a successful pilot with the National Women's Studies Association, Girl w/Pen is hitting the streets with a new training series: "Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade."

Here's the why:

Public debate lacks a sensitive discussion of the complex forces shaping the lives of women and girls. Researchers, nonprofit workers, and savvy writers everywhere have the opportunity to frame public debate about these issues. Too often, however, important work fails to reach an audience outside the academic and advocacy worlds. Writing a trade book is one way to join the debate. To sell a book in today’s competitive publishing climate, one must be able to write engaging, accessible prose that will appeal to a wide audience.

 These skills can be learned.

And the what:

5-WEEK TELESEMINAR
Girl w/Pen offers an interactive tele-seminar series designed to help researchers and others cross this bridge by learning about the key elements involved in writing a book for “trade.”

A “trade book”—one written the intelligent, general-interest reader and carried by bookstores—is different from an academic book sold primarily through university presses. Participants will learn from exchanges with New York City-based agents and editors why it’s essential to think about audience and market in a different way, and why you need a book proposal. We’ll explore the differences between popular and academic writing, why a dissertation or a monograph is not a trade book, and how to write an effective book proposal—meaning one that has the best chance of being sold.

Participants will be expected to read assigned material (including sample book proposals and a book, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction--and Get It Published), engage in an ongoing online exchange, and participate in a weekly session with the full class and instructor at an established time each week.

1/2-DAY, 1-DAY INTENSIVES
A tailored on-site version that condenses material covered in the teleseminar. Additional topics for consideration include writing articles for magazines, blogging, and op-eds.

UPCOMING SESSIONS:

May 5, 2007 - "Taking Research Public," Council on Contemporary Families Annual Conference, University of Chicago

June 2, 2007 - "Making It Pop: Trade Books, Popular Magazines, Blogs," National Council for Research on Women Conference, Spelman College

July 1, 2007 - "Publishing in Women’s Studies: Public Voice," National Women's Studies Association Annual Conference, St. Charles, IL

If you are an academic association or department or a nonprofit organization (or a member of said association, department, organization) and would like further information, please contact me directly at deborahsiege@gmail.com.

Sisterhood is...noisy

Just a quick one on this snowy Friday on the Upper West Side: HuffPost has an interesting post by Leslie Bennetts about the reception of her book, The Feminine Mistake, proving once again that sisterhood is noisy whenever one writes about women's choices and predicaments these days. As usual, I hope that Leslie's many important points make it through the din.

Two Forthcoming Books: "Perfect" Girls and "Opt Out" Wives

I've added a list (scroll down, it's on the left) of forthcoming books by savvy feminist scholars to watch out for - and will continue to try to list em as I see em going forth.

Did you catch that front page story in Sunday's New York Times on "amazing girls"? My gal Courtney Martin has a whole book on the topic (and much more) coming out April 17. It's called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. (Courtney and I are teaming up to do some joint speaking this summer about feminism's daughters. Stay tuned...) For a great counterpoint to the article, though, check out Courtney's post on feministing.com and Patti Binder on What's Good for Girls.

The other book I've listed comes out around Mother's Day and promises to clear up a lot of the annoying myths about "opting out." Penned by sociologist Pamela Stone, it's called Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Publisher's Weekly writes, "Stone's revealing study adds an important counterpoint to Leslie Bennetts's forthcoming The Feminine Mistake." I'm not sure yet how it's a "counterpoint" (I need to read it!), but I urge people to check it out. It looks at what really happens to women who opt out of the workplace and their careers for the sake of their families and sheds light on new research about the American workplace. (Hint: The dirty little secret of today's work world is that it is not providing work-committed women with the support they need to keep working once they become mothers.)

On a related note, and in case anyone missed it, a special March issue of The American Prospect grew out of an October 2006 work/family research conference sponsored by the Council on Contemporary Families and looks at "Why Can't America Have a Family-Friendly Workplace." The issue includes articles by the creme de la creme on this topic: Joan Williams, Kathleen Gerson, Heather Bousey, Janet Gornick, Scott Coltrane, Tamara Draut, Jodie Levin-Epstein, Ellen Bravo, Ann Friedman. These people are all doing amazing work and, like Pamela Stone, merit increased visibility for their solid and grounded research.

In Response to Memoir Week on Slate...

The other week, Slate hosted “Memoir Week”, assessing the state of the modern memoir and posing the following question to a group of memoir writers:

How do you, as memoirists, choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them—or do you not alert them at all? If you do, do you discuss the book with family members and friends while the work is in progress? How do you deal with complaints from people who may remember events differently than you?

These are questions I get asked a lot as I travel around talking about our book, Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. When Daphne and I were inviting writers to contribute to our anthology, some told us they wouldn’t be able to write anything about their parents until they were safely 6 feet under. But not me. In fact, the things I wrote about my mother in my essay for the book were things I had already told her. Or rather, wrote to her. I started writing her letters when I was still living under her roof, at age 16. They were love letters with an ultimatum: “If you want to continue to have a relationship with me, pay attention,” they’d generally begin. My mother still has these letters tucked away somewhere in her nightstand drawer.

But still, people who read my essay in Only Child generally to want to know how my mother “took” my essay. And then there’s that other question: “What did your ex-husband think?”

In answer to both: As I finished writing the piece, I decided that ongoing relationships with both Mom and ex were more important to me than any piece of writing. So I made the decision to show them both the draft and give them the opportunity to ask me to make changes before I went to print. Writer friends thought I was nuts to open up my draft to editorial input from the leading characters in my drama. Granted, I was not prepared to completely revise, nor was I willing to let certain details or particular turns of phrases go. But each (Mom and ex) asked for one or two emendations around details that were important to them to mask. I honored their requests.

My mother—like Sean Wilsey’s—agreed that I had the right to tell the truth, and she actually, bravely, agreed with my version of truth when it came to my characterization of her, and of our earlier and often painful dynamic. My ex, for whom wounds were perhaps more fresh, may have told the story a different way, but he, too, told me he saw the veracity in my account. I give these two characters in my drama extreme kudos. They each proved big enough to let me own my experience, my tale. Mom remains my biggest fan (love ya!), and yes, to many people’s surprise, my ex and I wish each other nothing but deep happiness and are still, if at a remove, in touch.

I'd be eager to hear how other contributors to our book have experienced the aftermath of writing about their families -- or how anyone who writes personally has dealt with these particular challenges.

Happy April (and a Belated Women's History Month Post!)

Well, March came and went, but hey, it's never too late for a Women's History Month post, right?

So first, my congrats to the 2007 honorees of National Women's History Month. Very cool, I thought, that the theme was "Generations of Women Moving History Forward," and that Third Wave Foundation's Executive Director Monique Mehta was among the honorees.

And speaking of history, last week I contacted the scholars behind this terrific online resource called "The Second Wave and Beyond." Check it out. It's still under development. Lookin forward to seeing it grow.

Op-Ed panel next week in NYC...

Point blank, women need to write more op-eds. So if you're in NYC, check it out!:

"Voicing Your Opinion"

Op-Ed pages are a powerful forum for public discourse, and a well-written piece can affect social change. But with limited page space, editors tend to favor the powers-that-be. Enter the Blogo-sphere and on-line citizen journalism, opening the field to a broader range of voices. Media opinion-makers explore the impact of this new phenomenon.

Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Tunku Varadarajan, Editorial Features Editor, Wall Street Journal
Matt Stoller, political activist/blogger
Sheryl McCarthy, Columnist, Newsday; Board of Contributors, USA Today
Andrzej Rapaczynski, Editor and Director, Project Syndicate
Catherine Orenstein, contributor, New York Times, Washington Post (moderator)

When: Wednesday, April 4, 200706:30 PM - 08:00 PM
Where: NYU Steinhardt Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, at 10th Street)
Go to http://www.cencom.org/ to register. The event is free.

My next one...

Friends have started to ask me what I'm working on next. I'm thinking of working on a book with the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership. As such, I've been scouring the shelves for books on women and leadership. (If you know of any good ones, please send me a post!)

As far as I can tell so far, the few books on leadership aimed at women seem to focus on ambition, promise power, and encourage readers to cultivate a “bad girl” attitude in order to achieve it. Their titles are telling: Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do, by Kate White. Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess by Susan Jane Gilman. And most recently, Am-BITCH-ous: Learn to Be Her Now by Debra Condren. I have to say, I love absorbing these books and more or less laud their bad-ass bad-girlness. But I have two qualms with this general approach:

1) Teaching women to be smartmouthed goddesses or gutsy and amBITCHous can't take place in a vaccuum. It's not just inner change, but external change that's needed (the personal is STILL political, no?)

2) These titles leave me wondering, is it possible to claim ambition as a virtue for women without having to claim ourselves as "bitches"?

I welcome any thoughts.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Sing It!

Continuing the thread on women academics writing "crossover" books, George Washington University English professor Gayle Wald recently came out with what looks like a fantastic biography, Shout, Sister, Shout: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and to great critical acclaim. Since Marco and I just rented Walk the Line, I'm goin' straight out to buy some Sister Rosetta as a supplement! Looking forward, too of course, to the book. (Kudos, Gayle!)

Meanwhile, down in South Carolina...

Of course, not only are the girls in NYC going public and making noise this week. Check out my friend and colleague Alison Piepmeier, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the College of Charleston, in an ABC news interview about the anti-abortion legislation passed this week in her state.

Read more about the scary legislation here.

Generative Women, Exciting New Ventures

What a generative few weeks it's been for the girls here in NYC! Just bursting to share news of my friend Rebecca Segall's new venture here on the Upper West Side:

Writopia is a new afterschool writing center offering community and creative writing workshops for young writers, ages 12-18. Rebecca (left) -- who is herself a brilliant writer and from whom I've learned a great deal about writing nonacademically -- launched the site last week, and if you know people with kids who are into writing, please please pass it on. My Marco designed the cool logo.

And attention women writing books about women's lives: I may be a bit late in the discovery, but because I just learned about this, I just have to pass it on:

MotherTalk is a place where readers and writers connect through literary salons, blog tours, podcasts, radio, writer's community, and more. What an ingenuous idea. I already adore these people and hope to learn more later today.

Women’s Studies Work Outside the Ivory Tower…?

Last night I finished teaching a 5-week online seminar for scholars in women’s studies on translating their ideas into book proposals for a trade (aka nonacademic) market. A shout out to all you fabulous participants! This group was great, and some book contracts are certain to follow.

One question a friend taking the course asked me toward the end was how I decided to bypass the traditional academic path and whether I’d recommend the path I’ve chosen instead to others currently situated in the academy.

I’ve never regretted my decision to bail on the academic job market as soon as I finished my PhD. It was tough telling my beloved dissertation advisor--though believe me, she was relieved when I eventually got the words out because I went through half a box of Kleenex before I could even speak so she must have thought I was about to reveal that I had some fatal disease. “Let a thousand flowers bloom” was her response, much to my relief. I imagine not all of them are like that.

After the degree, I spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan, then as a Research Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. I knew I wanted to write for a popular audience—that was why I’d left academe. I’d grown weary of writing prose that came to feel like a straight-jacket on me and was anxious to join the fray of young women then writing about feminism. Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After, you could say, was my motivation. I wanted to take her and others on in print, and in a way that I, too, could be heard.

So I tried to become a freelance writer. I was in the ridiculously lucky position of having funding to do this (not something I would encourage anyone to count on – long story). Though it may sound idyllic, I hated it. Lack of structure, lack of accountability (I didn’t have an agent or a publisher yet), and lack of a community doing the same thing I was doing (I was new to NYC at the time) made me feel extremely isolated and I sunk. When you start out freelancing for magazines, you spend 90 percent of your time pitching editors and 10 percent writing actual articles. Launching the web-journal The Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard during this time saved me. But I did manage to write an article for Psychology Today that got me the attention of an agent, and ultimately, that connection changed my life.

Two books later and with the support of an incredible writers' group, the Invisible Institute, behind me, I'm still not writing full-time, nor would I choose to be. I need structure and colleagues like I need oxygen. I learned this when I went to work as a projects director at the National Council for Research on Women, after my Barnard gig was up. I worked for NCRW 4 days a week and wrote on the 5th. I wrote early mornings before work and weekends. This carried me through the completion of my first book (a co-edited anthology) and a draft of my second (Sisterhood, Interrupted). I left my staff position at NCRW in July, because I was ready to shift the balance.

Writing now makes up about 50 percent of my week. The other 50 percent I spend consulting and working on special projects for women’s research and policy centers. I’m freelance again, but this time, it works because I’m working with organizations and I get to go to office places. Believe me, this makes a huge difference. After having suffered the isolation of writing a dissertation and then some painful years trying to write freelance full-time, I still get turned on by things like staff meetings and supply closets.

Would I recommend the path I’ve taken? I admire and have huge respect for my friends pursuing academic careers and would never say one route is better than another. It’s more a matter of what perch you want to offer your contribution from, and in what voice. And, most importantly, your tolerance or capacity for risk. Leaving a stable job with benefits is risky and not for the faint of heart. I personally couldn’t have done it without support from family and, for a while, a husband.

But now here’s my plug: Feminist thinkers trained in the academy are so often experts at producing trenchant cultural analysis. We need this, and we need this stuff in public venues. The under-representation of women’s voices and the lack of women- and girl-centered topics in mainstream media coverage is nothing short of appalling. Feminist scholars have this incredible opportunity to frame popular debate. Can they do it from academic perches? Possible. But not easy. Which is why the National Women's Studies Association and I created this course (“Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade”)—to help those who have committed themselves to academic careers and academic contributions also consider crossing over and learn to write for trade. The Woodhull Institute is another organization helping, and encouraging, women scholars to write for popular audiences. They offer amazing writers' retreats, which I highly recommend. And then there's Katie Orenstein (see previous post!), out there teaching women experts of all stripes and fields to write op-eds.

It's a propitious time to be thinking about popularizing your thoughts and your writing if you are a feminist scholar because of these resources and trainings that have recently emerged. Stay tuned for more from me, too....The NWSA course may be just the beginning.

Our girl Katie!

Be sure to check out Thursday's New York Times article about my good friend Katie Orenstein's forward-looking efforts to get more women--across generations--to pour their passion into writing op-eds. Go, Katie. You give me hope.

Sisterhood Interrupted....Continued

Previous post aside, I find that I can't help but somehow join the fray--though I offer these thoughts in the hope of increasing understanding on both sides. In response to the TMC thread, where commentors ask why do young feminists want to be included by established organizations / movements to begin with:

Of COURSE rejection is disappointing to younger women who want in to older women’s clubhouse—and why wouldn’t they want in? These are good jobs, with good benefits, for the most part, in organizations that younger feminists believe in. Something missing from the TMC convo is the fact that what goes on in some feminist organizations goes on in the workplace more generally; lack of mentoring among women is not a problem among feminists alone. Men have been pulling each other up the ladder for centuries; women are newer at it, and perhaps, in an economy of scarcity where there’s still the perception that only so many women can hold top positions in corporations or have their own break-even nonprofit, women have not yet mastered the art of sharing power. I absolutely salute the younger women who are forming clubhouses of their own, but I agree with Patti Binder, who comments:

But is that really the best and most effective message larger organizations have to give younger women? Don't feel welcome here so go elsewhere and do your own thing?

Again, the feeling of rejection is mutual. WomansSpace, a self-identifed second-waver, comments:

It never occurred to me that your generation wouldn’t even bother to read second wave literature. That is a painful rejection when I can so clearly remember, in a zen sense, thinking about your face, long before it existed....I do not own feminism. I was but a tiny cog and was part of its creation and Ms. Valenti's understanding and mine are so different and they are different in places where I hurt. I want to see continuity in what I helped start and instead of continuity.... well I see naked, anorexic, long haired women on trapezes.

Ouch. But there IS continuity. It's just hard to see it amidst all the emotion and commotion--as I write about in my book. I look forward to the day when we stop fighting each other and see our way through to the larger issues that threaten all women’s integrity and well-being.

From Onlydom to Sisterhood....Interrupted

Time to turn my attention from only-childhood to sisterhood.

I’ve been following the thread on TPC in response to Jessica Valenti’s “Feminist Sorority” and am struck once again by the way feminists are repeating the personal, political, ideological infighting of the past—only this time, with a generational veneer.

I salute Jessica for raising these issues, and I can’t wait for the release of her book (I’m with those who think the cover is savvy, though I understand the critique). It’s the response to her article that concerns me more than the article itself. So much pain, accusation, and hurt—on both sides. Where is this taking us?

Coming back from a talk I gave at Rowan University last week to kick off Women's History Month, where the audience was part NOW founders, part undergraduates, and part faculty/staff, I’ve been thinking a lot about how young(er) women and veteran feminists can speak to each other in tones that enable their message to be heard. And the need for media-savvy feminists to forge bridges that steer the conversation away from intergenerational catfight and back to the issues we care about in common. I sincerely believe we have more in common than contradiction. And that the ever-widening age gap has the potential to diminish us all.

Only Child Goes Global

On March 22, the International Center in New York (a place where 2,500 newcomers to NYC come to each year to learn and practice English and become more familiar with American culture) is hosting a reading of Only Child. After the reading, Daphne and I and contributors Alysia Abbott and Alissa Quart will lead a discussion about growing up as an only child in America. The audience will be invited to share both their personal experiences and the cultural context of growing up as an only child here or in other parts of the world. Come one, come all!

Where: 50 West 23rd Street 7th Floor, ICNY Lounge
When: 7pm
(It's free!)

Hear Us, in a click...

Check out our nationally syndicated radio broadcast, Viewpoints

Daphne and I also did a podcast with Deborah Harper for PsychJourney - will post soon!

Only Childom Issues in the News

Two interesting pieces in the news last week pertaining to onlydom:

One on China:
China: Reining in the Rich on One-Child Policy

And one that reflects on work/family policy here in the US:
The Motherhood Experiment

Very clever the way this second piece, by Sharon Lerner, links women's work/life issues, fertility rates, and national policy. Lerner notes that the U.S., with its largely hands-off approach to family policy, spends far less than other wealthy countries on child care while guaranteeing no paid parental leave--all of which leads women to feel that they must choose either work or motherhood. "As a result," she concludes, "being an employed parent may be more difficult here than in countries now experiencing even the most severe baby droughts."

Now here's the part I love: Counter to the rhetoric of family-values champions, the promotion of larger families and the promotion of women's careers may go hand in hand. Keep an eye out for Lerner's book--it sounds smart.

I Survived JetBlue...And Please Come Out to Hear Contributors Read Next Week in NYC!

Having survived the JetBlue fiasco of February 2007 (yep, I was one of those passengers stuck on the JFK tarmac ad infinitim), I am happily back in NYC. Only children may crave a crowd, but being holed up with 200 angry, hungry travelers was hardly this only's idea of company. The best part was meeting Marco's parents for the first time, when we finally landed in Tampa, even if a day later than planned. And the alligators at Silver Springs were pretty cool too. Oh - and the guy we met in line after our flight was cancelled, who flew biologists, environomentalists, and politicians into remote wildlife areas for an organization called Lighthawk and offered to charter a plane for a group of us. He was cooler than the alligators.

Two OC readings coming up next week:

Tuesday, Feb. 27 - KGB Tuesday Night Nonfiction Series
7pm
85 East 4th Street (betw 2nd and 3rd Ave)
New York City

Contribs Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn ("Becoming an Only Child") and Janice Nimura ("Mother of Two") will be joining Daph and me at this far-hipper-than-we-are LES locale. (Thank you, Kelly McMasters! We heart you very much!)

Wednesday, March 1 - Barnes and Noble, Upper West Side
7pm
2289 Broadway at 82nd St.
New York City

Contribs Kathyrn Harrison and Sara Reistad-Long will join us on this one. (Huge shout out to Jainee McCarroll here!)

Grab an only child -- or come as a party of one -- just come!

Only Child Hits New York Times!

We're in the Style Section of today's paper. As you can imagine, Daphne and I are jumping up and down with delight.

From Leisl Schillinger's "And Baby Makes Three":

PITY the only child. Rattling around in a cavernous house like the last Tic Tac in a box, he (or she) has no brothers or sisters to play hide and seek with or to diffuse the high-beam glare of parental attention. What an unenviable fate! Or maybe not.

In “Only Child,” Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller gather the reflections of 21 writers and other creative types (including themselves) to demonstrate the ups and downs of “growing up solo.”...

Read the rest here.

Air Only, for real

This just in: There will be a mention of Only Child in the March 15 issue of American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines.

Ted Rose's essay in the anthology, "Air Only," was prescient!