Archive: Jan 2011

This week, Girlw/Pen writers are posting on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book, The Feminine Mystique. Coontz explores the impact of Friedan’s work through archival research and interviews with nearly 200 women and men who read the book when it came out in 1963. A Strange Stirring makes the story of feminism contextual, approachable, personal…and hopeful. I’m a scholar of this area, but Coontz’s book put me in touch with The Feminine Mystique and the generation’s experience it documented, and gave me a way into conversations that I suspect will be part of the book’s impact on many people who read this accessible, compelling book.

While reading A Strange Stirring, the people I wanted to talk to were men who were becoming adults back then. So, I asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell me their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963.

They read my columns at GWP, so they knew where I am coming from. They are white, college-educated, professional men who have lived comfortable though not always peaceful lives, and when The Feminine Mystique was published, each was married and raising their families of late-wave baby boomers. “Mad Men” might give you a pretty good picture of the world they lived and worked in. Indeed, every time I watch that show, I map the experience depicted there onto the way I imagine the wallpaper of these men’s minds (as well as these men’s wives.) That said, these guys were not boozing or philandering (as far as I know!), and only one of them was smoking. (And you can thank Coontz’s column for making the “Mad Men” connection so clear to me.)

What they said made me confident that the message of The Feminine Mystique was a legitimate one in its time. One of my friends said:

Looking back, I recall how different I assumed women were from men. For me, the Human Race had two types of participants: men and women. Both were members of the Race but men were the real representatives and transmitters of the Race. Women were a necessary and wonderful part of the Race but they were not “real” members (you should pardon the expression). So, I saw all women through the prism of “different,” and implicitly inferior because they were not “equal.” Women were similar but not the “same.”

My other friend put it more starkly: He said: “I was one of those arch male-chauvinist pigs that one used to hear about. When TFM first came out, I readily dismissed it in that I heard (never read it) all kinds of things — the usual anti-family etc. [claims].”

Then they described how they changed. In their recounting, their change came as a consequence of their experiences with women at work who were competent, capable, ambitious, serious-minded. Out in the world—with more and more women out there too—these two men were able to learn that women had sexual desires that were no different from what they understood “men’s desire” to be. And from what I know about my two friends, they continued to work in their professional lives from the 1970s to the present to counteract sexism in hiring, to promote women in leadership, and to mentor young women (like me!) with the same tenacity and high standards that they mentored young men.

But here’s the other piece, and it brings us back to Coontz’s book: these guys recalled the past with some regret, managing with dignity to fight against being defensive. This was a “touchy subject” they said. They “simmered” before answering my questions. I think that was because they had been contained in the same culture that Friedan’s women were. The conversation we opened moves me, and gives me hints of just how much change there has been (as Coontz writes) and also why and how after so much progress gender inequality can persist…and be so sneaky.

A Strange Stirring rightly reminds us about Friedan’s neglect of racism, economic inequality, and homophobia. Coontz writes about her skepticism at the beginning of her project about the The Feminine Mystique because of these absences: but she concludes that the work speaks to a common experience, and made a meaningful, progressive, and humane difference in the lives of many women. I would suggest also in the lives of many men.

Coontz gives us the means to recall the past with full understanding and compassion for women and for men. I think dialogues about the status of women in society and about feminism will improve, thanks to this book. Stephanie Coontz has quite a track record for doing so with her other books (such as The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage) as well as her public education endeavors with the Council on Contemporary Families.

Stay tuned for more on Coontz and A Strange Stirring this week.

-Virginia Rutter

I’m collaborating on a study of traumatic childbearing experiences, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the types of injuries that can occur as a result of pregnancies, labors, and different types of deliveries.  My research partner forwarded me a recent blog post on a board-certified urogynecologist’s website titled “Cesarean on Demand Does Not Eliminate Risk of Prolapse.”  This post highlights the findings of a 2009 research article published in the International Urogynecology Journal. In this research, three groups of women were studied: “vaginal delivery with sphincter tear (n = 106), vaginal delivery without sphincter tear (n = 108), and cesarean without labor (n = 39).” [The numbers reflect how many women were in each of the three groups.]

Now, I’m no urogynecologist, but I found it hard to believe that c-sections “on demand” (a.k.a. without labor) would not at least reduce the risk of pelvic floor damage, including pelvic organ prolapse (pelvic organs “slipping out of place” when the supportive muscles and ligaments are weakened or torn).  Prolapse can greatly impact the health and quality of life: for example, women with prolapse may suffer one or both types of incontinence and/or painful sexual intercourse.

I recognize that many medical practitioners, authors and laypeople have come to believe we have too high a rate of c-sections here in the U.S.  Research studies, such as the one celebrated in the recent blog post, call into question whether there are any health benefits of c-sections without labor.  As a medical sociologist who teaches research methods, I consider it to be of utmost importance to discuss research findings with the highest degree of accuracy.  No study is perfect: no study is without bias and no study is without limitations.  So, I read the complete research article to find out if it truly supported the blog author’s contention that these researchers “found NO DIFFERENCE in moderate prolapse between the three groups.” 

I was struck by significant methodological flaws and limitations which, while acknowledged by the authors of the original article, were glossed over or flat out ignored by the author of the blog post.  I found myself asking several questions:

Question #1: how healthy were the women before this childbearing experience?  No one knows: the researchers admit, “our findings cannot be attributed with certainty to delivery method, since some women may have developed prolapse before delivery or pregnancy and prolapse was not assessed prior to delivery in this population.” 

Question #2: who were the women who participated in this study?  The women for this study were recruited from prior studies performed through the Pelvic Floor Disorders Network, specifically from the follow-up study to their CAPS Study (which focused on “fecal and urinary incontinence after childbirth”).  How can we rule out a self-selection bias of those women who said “yes” when they were recruited to this initial study?  Could it be certain women who had C-sections, perhaps those feeling some pelvic/vaginal discomfort immediately following delivery were more likely to say “yes” because they saw value in being interviewed about incontinence?

Question #3: did the researchers recruit enough women for each of the three groups to be able to answer their main question?  No.  The authors wrap up their article by noting that “further research would be required to determine whether cesarean delivery before labor reduces the incidence of pelvic organ prolapse.”  So, this research doesn’t actually determine anything about what they claim as their primary research question.  Why not?  The short answer is that they never got enough women to participate.  The authors claim that they would have needed 132 women per group in order to test the statistical significance of the difference in rates of stage II prolapse between those women who had C-sections without labor and those women who had vaginal deliveries.  While they got reasonably close to their sample size goal of 132 for the two vaginal delivery groups (106 and 108), they only got 39 women to participate in the C-section group.  Is this acceptable?  Statistical significance is key to evaluating any study because it means that the results are “probably true (not due to chance).”  The researchers finally own up to the likely irrelevance of their study towards the end of the published journal article: “Furthermore, our sample size was not sufficiently large to exclude a significant difference between groups.”  In plain language: they didn’t study enough women to know whether or not there are not real differences between the health outcomes for women who have c-sections without labor and those experience other types of labor and delivery.

Question #4: can the researchers say anything definitive that might help improve women’s health?  Hmmm.  The only factor they definitively connect with less pelvic floor damage is lower birth weight: I’m betting that it won’t surprise many to find out that smaller babies causes less damage.  But, what are we supposed to do with this finding? 

The author of that recent blog post dares to call it a “beautifully executed study,” and that’s why I had to wrote this post: to help those of us who are not medical researchers better understand what we should value and what we should question when it comes to research studies that can impact women’s health.

A mere 3% of books published in the U.S. each year are translations.  An even smaller number of these books are written by women.  What are the obstacles facing women writers around the world?  What are their successes?  Given the different barriers surrounding literary production and distribution, how can U.S. readers find excellent fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays by women writing and publishing outside of the U.S.?

Read about the experience of Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur in the new column Jean Casella (former editorial director and publisher of the Feminist Press) and I are co-editing over at She Writes.  Jean’s debut post introduces readers to Shahrnush Parsipur’s story and her books, which include the novels Touba and the Meaning of Night and Women Without Men, recently made into a film by Shirin Neshat.

What we know: the dudes are getting better at childcare and housework, and the ladies are easing off. But are they undoing gender? If so, how much? Men have increased the average amount of childcare and housework they do each week from 12, in 1965, to 21, in 2000. Meanwhile, women have decreased their hours in the same tasks from 53 to 41 hours. Also note that these days, women now provide about 43 percent of household income.

So, there’s progress. It even looks like “convergence.” But there’s “something” that keeps dragging us back into the past, into unequal shares of domestic work, that gives us the feeling that there may be more for us to look at than counting hours of care and percentage points of household income.

Take the case of sleep. New research in Gender & Society (abstract) illustrates how even in dual-earner families, men’s sleep takes priority over women’s sleep. Sleep is valuable for short term health and mental functioning and long-term well-being related to things like immune function and maintaining a healthy weight. Sleep matters.

How’d they learn this? Sociologists David Maume, Rachel Sebastian (University of Cincinnati) and Anthony Bardo (Miami University) interviewed 25 white, two-earner, heterosexual families where at least one partner was employed in the food services industry. Partners were interviewed separately in order to learn about how these families organize their sleep routines.

The women wake up more because they are largely the “default parent.” That means they wake up for the kids, for problem solving, for doing things for the men. The men’s paid work (and their need to be rested for it) took priority. The women even expected themselves—and the men they were with expected them—to stick around in the “marital bed” even when the men’s snoring kept them awake. In the mornings, men woke up refreshed, women woke up tired, just in time to rejoin an endless cycle of falling behind and playing catch up again.

Any exceptions? Overall the researchers found that of the 25 couples they interviewed, 4 qualified as equal partners—where men and women were similarly engaged in all kinds of childcare and domestic work. The remainder were couples that were “pragmatic egalitarians”–accepting the practical necessity of both partner’s working. For these couples the men were committed to gender essentialism—a deep seated belief that women really are the appropriate and natural caregivers at home. You know, the “they’re better at it” view. They also found that some of the women held a “family first philosophy” and the rest spent time worrying about their partner’s qualifications for caring.

So, there’s something about sleep here, but there’s something about marriage here, too. While all of these couples had some features that looked like they were “egalitarian,” they weren’t living up to the dream. That seems to be harder than we thought. Back in the 1990s Pepper Schwartz looked for truly egalitarian couples when she did her research on peer marriage. She found a lot of couples who thought they were egalitarian, but they were what she called “near peers,” recreating subtle and not so subtle versions of traditional gender roles. Let’s celebrate the changes since Schwartz’s Love Between Equals – there’s more convergence of roles and opportunities for men and women in families with each passing year. But let’s stay on the look out, as Maume and colleagues did, for the ways that couples recreate gender inequality.

–Virginia Rutter

My daughter Maya turns 10 today.  You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.  Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however).

Now that I can talk about motherhood in terms of decades (well, at least a decade) instead of just years, it feels like a big deal for me, too.

In fact, motherhood has been getting a lot of media play these days.  If recent coverage is any indication, we’re either too harsh or too self-involved.  Consider the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s Why Chinese Mother’s are Superior excerpt in The Wall Street Journal and Judith Warner’s roundup of recent memoirs in The New York Times. Warner claims that in contrast with their own feminist moms, today’s mothers are turning inward and embracing home and family with a “deep desire for rules and regularity”

Neither the overbearing mother nor the self-involved ones hunkering down at home sound especially new to me (Freud, anyone, or Cinderella?).  But I am wondering where I fit into these public accounts of motherhood and how to define my own mothering.

For example, learning to ski would certainly have been low on my list of life pursuits before parenting despite growing up in the Northeast Ohio snowbelt.  Now as a steward of my kids’ (I have a 7-year-old son as well) health, I try to cultivate an active lifestyle and exercise habits that can serve them throughout their lives.  Thus the skiing lessons, which I have found that I love, and which allow me and my kids to learn something together.

And while I have given a lot of thought to teaching students about social constraints and feminist responses to them, I have also discovered that it’s altogether different teaching my children how to be change agents.  For one thing, I have my children for more than a semester, so if I get things wrong we can always try again!

Last year Maya ran for class representative and found herself in a runoff, which she lost, much to her disappointment.  Talking at home later she explained that she voted for a classmate in the first round because she “wanted to give someone else a chance.”

Although her generosity of spirit is one of her admirable qualities, I explained that it is sometimes fine and even important to pursue what you want.  That is, if you want to be class representative, vote for yourself.

This year, I’m happy to report that Maya was elected class representative.  But before you congratulate me for offering a successful lesson on assertiveness, I should add that Maya explained that she did not vote for herself in the first round of balloting: she voted for a friend, and the friend voted for her.

That same friend and Maya spent their Martin Luther King Day “on” by selling “Cocoa for a Cause” at our local sledding hill and donating the proceeds to an area soup kitchen.  They raised $47.

Sometimes working together is the best way to make a difference.  That’s not a bad vision for either of us to have as we enter double digits as mother and daughter.

And GWP readers, what’s your take on the latest mommy wars? Do you have favorite accounts of motherhood to share, and what does feminist mothering look like?

Tomorrow I meet for the second time with the undergraduate class I’m teaching this semester.  The class is called Disability, Power, and Privilege, and it’s about feminist disability studies.

During our first meeting we talked a bit about the rhetoric we use where disability is concerned.  I expect—and I’ve told them so—that we’ll all say things over the course of the semester that others in the class may find troubling or offensive, so it’s everybody’s job to assume that we’re all doing our best, and to call us out when we do wrong.

While this attention to rhetoric—people first language, for instance—is old news in disability studies and disability activism—indeed, in any of the civil rights movements of the 20^th century—it’s important for my students.  And not just my students:  over the last several months I’ve been reading memoirs written by parents of children with disabilities, and one of the things that’s surprised me has been the frequency with which the term “retarded” appears in these memoirs, even in memoirs as recently published as 2009.

It’s a term that a number of disability rights organizations have targeted.  The Associated Press stopped using the term in 2008, and in 2010 legislation was approved that removed the term from all federal documents, replacing it with “intellectual disability.”  And yet it keeps being used, not only in memoirs written by authors who ought to know better, but by professionals I interact with on a daily basis.  The most recent occurrence was last week, and the person who referred to a question as “retarded” was someone who deals with diversity on a regular basis.

In his book Life As We Know It (1996), Michael Bérubé offers a clear and compelling refutation of this word and its cultural meaning.  Because of the word’s familiarity, and the ease with which it continues to permeate conversations in 2011, I’ll offer you—as I’m offering my class tomorrow—an excerpt from Bérubé:

But you know, there really is a difference between calling someone a “mongoloid idiot” and calling him or her “a person with Down syndrome.”  There’s even a difference between calling people “retarded” and calling them “delayed.”  These words may appear to mean the same damn thing when you look them up in Webster’s, but I remember full well from my days as an American male adolescent that I never taunted my peers by calling them “delayed.”  Even for those of us who were shocked at the frequency with which “homo” and “nigger” were thrown around at our fancy Catholic high school, “retard” aroused no comment, no protest.  In other words, a retarded person is just a retard.  But delayed persons will get where they’re going eventually, if you’ll only have some patience with them. (26)

Please go read the moving post Deborah Siegel put up over at She Writes, “Words for the Littlest Victim.”  Read what others are saying, and post your own thoughts if you are so inclined.

I was going to write about Christina Taylor Green earlier today, but I’m a little relieved I didn’t, as Deborah did way more justice to the topic.  Christina is the latest victim of gun violence in a nation, and a world, in which too many children die. At the core of my feminism is the vision of a world where peace reigns, where children can thrive and grow to the fullest of their potential.  A world where we live a politics of peace.  In our country, but also in all the countries that struggle with the violence and weapons that have proliferated beyond reason.  How can we come together to make this vision a reality?

As many of you have noticed, Global Mama has been on vacation.  It wasn’t really a planned vacation, more of a hiatus in a busy life.  But she’s back!

Truth is, I have been off doing other things this past semester.  For one, I had the privilege of being on pre-tenure leave from my teaching job, and boy oh boy, did I have some projects to work on.  And I did get a lot of work done.  Of course, not everything I might have wanted!  But then again, I never do.

You see, I tend to have big eyes.  I dream up projects and get terribly excited about them and then, somewhere between making dinner and driving my kids to ice hockey and working full-time and sitting down to a long conversation with my husband and trying to squeeze in phone calls to dear friends, I realize that I simply don’t have enough time.

In the past, I have compensated with one of two methods: not sleeping at night, and working during the weekends.  Frankly, #1 makes me irritable and cranky (I am a solid 9-hour-a-night sleeper) and #2 is no longer acceptable.  Weekends are for play, and my kids are no longer babies who take long naps and simply come along for the ride.  They can play by themselves and with their friends, sure, but it also turns out that we are a high-energy family who likes to go places and take hikes and play sports and spend time with one another.  Which means that working during the weekend not only makes everyone else (most of all my husband) irritated—it makes me cranky and feeling like I am missing out on all the fun.

So I made a very conscious decision to live my life with balance this past fall, and guess what?  I did.  I worked, but I also played.  I wrote in my journal.  I read books that have been on my reading list for years.  I took Spanish lessons so that I could help my daughter with her homework (she’s in a dual-language program, a topic that I wrote about here).  I went to all of the school events: the Halloween parade, the winter concert, the gingerbread house art day.  I even (horrors) found myself on a school committee.

During the (unseasonably cold) first- and second-grade Halloween parade (I think the weather was hovering around 40 degrees), which consisted of the kids walking around the concrete parking lot in costume while the middle school band played what they had managed to learn in two months of school (the same medley, over and over…), my daughter giggled the entire time.  This despite the fact that we had rejected her idea of bringing a light saber to the parade (per the school’s detailed Parade Instruction Note).  Even without her weapon of choice, she proudly strutted around, showing off her paper-thin Luke Skywalker costume.  (Her flourish had been to pull her hair back into a low ponytail, so that she looked just like a boy.)

I turned to another parent and asked, “Do they always hold the parade on Friday?”  And when she nodded yes, I realized: this was the first time I had made it.  I had missed, all those other years, because I had been at work.  I suddenly felt empty and hollow inside.  I promised myself not to miss the next one.

Now, before I get too sentimental, I will also say that as I walked to my car, wishing I had remembered to wear a hat, I was thinking about a couple of other things.  For one, being a mom who obsessively worries, I could not help but wonder: how many kids will get sick after parading around for so long in their flimsy costumes?  For another, what about all the parents who have no job flexibility to attend a Halloween parade on a Friday morning?  A lot of middle- and working-class families live in our school district, a lot of them Spanish-speaking, many of them recent immigrants who are working very hard simply to survive.  (In fact, a lot of families are working very hard simply to survive.)  Should we really be holding all of these events that many parents can’t attend?  They are, after all, fairly impractical and, from an adult perspective, unnecessary.

This last semester taught me something else, though: having fun is really, really important.  Kids need to play, and you know what?  Adults do, too.  (And based on all my reading this semester, I might even argue that art is a sophisticated form of adult play… but that’s for another day!)

So I have also promised myself to keep the spirit of play alive, as I go back to the classroom this semester.  Maybe I can’t require my college students to parade around in costume, but I can certainly work on figuring out ways of keeping it fun for all of us.

Arne Duncan and I have often held differing opinions when it comes to our children’s education. Considering that he use to run the school system where my seven-year-old attends school, I have years of experience of yelling back at my radio hoping that Duncan hears my cries. In December the results from another international test to gauge where the world’s children rank were released. The USA did not get an A+. Duncan bemoaned our results in math, science and language and pointed towards China as a threat to our intellectual dominance.

But I’m really not that worried about China.

No, I’m not happy that our kids had an average score. I’m not happy that we’re losing ground to other countries. What I really am worried about is that this news will fuel a new fervor to copy China’s method of educating our kids. And that’s the real bottom line isn’t it? How do we want to educate our children? What kind of children do we want to raise?

“Successful ones!” I hear you. But how do you define successful?

In China children spend all day in school drilling facts and perfecting test prep. Believe me, our kids are perfecting test prep here too. When my daughter came home from kindergarten with homework sheets that had bubbles on it, I nearly lost it. “Really? Are we already teaching them how to fill in standardized test bubbles?” And my daughter attends one of the best public schools in Chicago.

Of course some parents, like Amy Chua, are all for turning our schools into American Chinese schools chock full of rote and consequences. I’m thankful that the Wall Street Journal highlighted her highly offensive parenting style. Because it reveals the end of the path we have allowed our schools to start walking down. That is the true wake-up call. For all our desire to regain our global dominance, we have gutted our children’s education.

Gym? Cut for additional study time. Ditto for art, music and recess. All this despite the fact that music HELPS our children learn and appreciate math better. Research shows that children behave better when given a mid-day recess. The 30 minutes my daughter and her classmates get before school does not meet my standard for a real recess. Play allows children to engage in many things including their imagination, negotiation and of course fitness.

The reality is that while China and other countries may be beating us out on standardized tests, the USA is still winning the overall education game. The number of Chinese students coming to the USA for graduate education continues to climb. They come here for the superior educational experience in all fields, including education theory. The USA is winning in terms of innovation and ideas. We may not be making a lot of widgets in this country, but we are overflowing with ideas on what to make, design and invent. I am though in favor of extending the school day, but not to cram in more studying at the expense of their imagination and well-being.

Yes, we have a lot of work cut out for us here in terms of our education system. Even from my daughter’s very privileged school I can see it. But we aren’t going to rise in the rankings by just teaching our children Chinese  or by increasing their access to test prep. Rather we will, as a country, increase our scientific literacy and achievement by increasing access to early childhood education, making the teaching profession one where dedicated people will flock, increasing the number of science labs and ensuring that every single school has a library. A recent demonstration at Whittier elementary school revealed that almost 200 Chicago Public Schools do not have a library. How can we ever believe we will get our children to learn more and achieve more if they do not have access to a school library?

There are many things we need to do to get our education system in working order. Worrying about China isn’t one of them.

The first study of California’s paid family leave (PFL) program details just how well it works for employers as well as families. Through California’s Paid Family Leave, eligible employees receive up to six weeks of wage replacement at 55 percent of their usual earnings to bond with a new child or care for a seriously ill family member. It is funded solely by employees paying into the program.

You can read Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Eileen Appelbaum and UCLA/CUNY’s Ruth Milkman’s report for the details but here are a few highlights:

A representative sample of 253 employers and 500 employees using PFL were surveyed in 2009-2010. Appelbaum and Milkman found that an overwhelming majority reported good results. Here’s what employers reported:

• 89 percent said that PFL had either a “positive effect” or “no noticeable effect” on productivity.
• For 91 percent, profitability/performance was neutral or positively affected.
• 96 percent reported a positive of neutral effect on turnover
• 99 percent (!) reported positive or neutral effects on employee morale
• 91 percent said “No” when asked if they were aware of any employee abuses of the program.

And from workers, a few highlights include:

• 84 percent of those in low-quality jobs using paid family leave received at least half of their usual pay while on leave.
• Only 41 percent of workers in low-quality jobs not using PFL received any pay while on leave
• The rate of bonding claims filed by men has climbed steadily since the beginning of PFL.
• Duration of breastfeeding among new mothers who used PFL also increased.

The report explains, “According to California’s Employment Development Department, in FY 09-10, 167,253 Californians used Paid Family Leave for bonding with new children and 23,220 used it to provide care for seriously ill family members.” Even so, one of the biggest problems they report is that too few people know they are eligible to participate. According to the report, “half the workers interviewed did not know the program existed, despite having had a qualifying circumstance for which to use PFL; low-wage workers, immigrants, and Latinos were least likely to be aware of the program.”

-Virginia Rutter