Archive: Feb 2011

I have said it before about sexually transmitted diseases and HPV vaccines, and now I will say it again about brain trauma and football — men’s health is a feminist issue. 

Back in 2007, a NYT article covered “Wives United by Husbands’ Post-N.F.L. Trauma” whose activism motivated the NFL creating the “88 Plan” to provide dementia benefits.  Then, in 2008, a LA Times op-ed proclaimed, “The NFL’s in denial about depression.”  This week, the NYT article “A Suicide, a Last Request, a Family’s Questions” added yet another tragedy to the growing number of media stories about the physically and psychologically devastating consequences for NFL players. 

As I read it, I found myself flashing back to when I was an undergrad and first read sociologist Michael Messner‘s academic article, “When bodies are weapons: Masculinity and violence in Sport.” What does it mean for boys and men — and for all of us — when   not only normalize but also reward boys and men for using their bodies as weapons?

Check out the abstract (bold font added for emphasis):

This paper utilizes a feminist theoretical framework to explore the contemporary social meanings of sports violence. Two levels of meaning are explored: first, the broad, socio-cultural and ideological meanings of sports violence as mediated spectacle; second, the meanings which male athletes themselves construct. On the social/ideological level, the analysis draws on an emergent critical/feminist literature which theoretically and historically situates sports violence as a practice which helps to construct hegemonic masculinity. And drawing on my own in-depth interviews with male former athletes, a feminist theory of gender identity is utilized to examine the meanings which athletes themselves construct around their own participation in violent sports. Finally, the links between these two levels of analysis are tentatively explored: how does the athlete’s construction of meaning surrounding his participation in violent sports connect with the larger social construction of masculinities and men’s power relations with women?

Mainstream U.S. society continues to validate a very narrow construction of socially acceptable masculinity.  When I teach the Sexuality and Society course at CLU, I ask my undergrad students to tell me the traits of an “ideal” man.  Each time, a new group of students generate basically the same list which includes being heterosexual, tall, muscular/physically strong, and a “protector.”  With this clear and consistent construction of masculine bodies, it’s not a surprise that the NFL continues to attract players who are willing to sacrifice their health and fans who enjoy the spectacle. 

The lure of the N.F.L. — the glory of hyper-masculinity — masks the still unmeasurable damage that these players (and their families) endure.  Their sacrifices allow ‘armchair athletes’ to vicariously revel in battles on the gridiron.  These warriors, ill-protected by sports gear masquerading as armor, are paying steep prices for embodying unrealistic and unhealthy ideals of what it means to be a man in the U.S.  

As research studies work to document the ways in which this sport consistently results in life-changing injuries (and sometimes life-ending conditions), we owe it to boys and men to challenge the status quo.  But, how can we hope to do this if, as one political science blogger suggested, “Americans have begun to construe access to football spectating as a social right“?

True confessions: this is what I’ve been doing in all my spare time!

For the past six months, once a week, I’ve been going over to the local rink to learn ice hockey.  This is what I’ve learned: when I’m on the ice, nothing else matters.  It’s that much fun.  Really.

I was a little annoyed that the Today Show framed this story in terms of how the “new” hockey moms (i.e., stay-at-home and work-from-home moms) are no longer holding the hot chocolate but holding hockey sticks instead.  For one thing, there are plenty of women who are not moms who play (a point I made when they interviewed me), and for another, no one asked me what I do when I’m not on the ice.

Despite the rather conventional picture of motherhood that emerges, it’s great to have the media spotlight on women’s sports.  The other women I play with are truly amazing.  And our coach—she’s certified by Laura Stamm (which means something to hockey buffs: I tested it out on my husband), and she’s phenomenal.  Every week I skate out onto the ice, I can do something I couldn’t the week before.  And since I grew up in the middle of the country, where the buffalo roamed but frozen ponds were few and far between, I’ve never been a skater.  Until now.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to take up ice hockey when you’re forty-something and can barely skate forwards, let alone backwards (midlife crisis, anyone?) by starting a Tumblr log, “The Other Hockey Mom: Midlife Musings on Work & Play, Gender, and Parenting.”  I’m writing about the challenge of taking up hockey, the joy of watching my seven-year-old daughter play (she’s one of three girls out of 35 boys), and the anxiety about some of the darker aspects of the sport, like my husband’s recent concussion.  Still playing around with the blog, but come visit.

I often write here about the girl in my life, my daughter, Maya.

Today I want to focus on girls nationally. The National Women’s Studies Association convened several girl-serving organizations at its 2010 conference, and learned, among other things, that the organizations wanted to broaden the audience for disseminating research and information about their programs.

To that end, NWSA created a research roundup. Some highlights:

• 90% of Girls For A Change participants know they can create change in their communities, they can and will use those skills to create change in their own lives
• The Girl Scout Leadership Experience curriculum is designed so that girls learn to advocate for themselves and others, locally and globally
• Hardy Girls Healthy Women offers a strength-based approach to working with girls and is grounded in a review and critique of resilience literature for its over-emphasis on the individual and lack of attention to relationships and environments
• Smart-Girl is a program that works with 8^th grade girls in Denver, Colorado; a program evaluation shows that participants had increases in science grades and overall GPA

Even this brief overview points to some effective strategies for serving girls: we can teach girls to take leadership and translate their ideas into action.  We can create sustaining, respectful spaces for girls to engage and learn.  GWP readers, what has worked for you?  What other girl-serving organizations do you know?

You’ll also find highlights from girl-centered presentations at last year’s NWSA conference, with topics ranging from public education to food and sexualization.

This promises to be a growing area in NWSA.  The conference proposal submission deadline has been extended until February 21, 2011. Plan to come and find out the latest in the world of girls and girls’ studies!

This past week you might have noticed something different around here.

In addition to a guest post from Andrea Doucet (author of Do Men Mother? and a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’) about whether dads are facing discrimination on the playgrounds and a well-earned celebratory announcement from Veronica Arreola (go SCIENCE GRRL!), a number of regular GWP writers devoted our monthly columns to various aspects of historian Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.  Coontz’s book is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book.  A forum about book about a book?  Sounds rather…discursive.  So why did we do it?

As “crossover” scholar type peeps, we think the way conversations about feminism play out in public, in this case the cultural conversation about a second-wave feminist text, are important to track.  As a generation, we’re indebted to Betty Friedan for her classic.  And we’re  indebted to Stephanie Coontz for reviving a conversation about the journey this book helped launch–not only for women at the dawn of the 1960s, but for those of us striving for egalitarian marriages and humane workplaces and raising our children here in 2011.

Here’s a recap:

To kick it off, Virgina Rutter (NICE WORK) asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell her their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963. The kicker: they’re both men.

Fueled by Coontz’s analysis, we cleared up some myths about TFM and encouraged readers to Test Your Feminine Mystique Cliche Quotient. In a Review of ‘Stirring’ Reviews, we offered a reading of the initial reviews of Coontz’s book appearing in in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Salon, Ms., Bitch, and feministing.

Natalie Wilson (POP GOES FEMINISM) asked whether “Housewives” today are just as “Desperate” as in the era documented by Friedan and offers up pop-culture infused Thoughts on Coontz’s A Strange Stirring.

Finally, Deborah Siegel (MAMA W/PEN) waxed intergenerational and mused on How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last. (Your comments on that one are giving me–it’s Deborah here–tons of food for thought…!)

We hope you find the discussion of interest.  We’d love your feedback.  And if you’d like to see more of this kind of group forum, or would like to propose one yourself for the future, please do let us know!

I’m taking a point of privilege here this month to boast about my recent trip to Washington, DC. Why did I go? My office received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring!

To answer the first question I get, no, I didn’t get to meet the President, but the director of our center did. She’s third from the left in the seated row. She’s even shown shaking President Obama’s hand (at 4:35) in a “West Wing Week” video!

But along with my coworkers and the other awardees, I did get to go on a tour of the White House. I also participated in a meeting with Ray M. Bowen, Chair of the National Science Board, and Cora Marret, Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation, where we had a great discussion about the role of two-year colleges, the need to additional funding and of course the importance of mentoring in the effort to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.

One afternoon all the awardees spent presenting our programs to each other. It was humbling to hear from awardees who have been working to increase diversity in science and engineering longer than I have been aware of the issue. In some ways we are all doing the same work. In more ways, we are addressing the problem in our own ways. Some are focused on American Indian students, some on increasing diversity in energy jobs, others work at institutions where the population has flipped from majority Caucasian to majority Latino and others are using mentoring as a framework to expose their students to international health issues.

It was no coincidence that we received this award the same week as the State of the Union. President Obama and his administration are truly committed to science and engineering. Yet there are holes in this commitment as well stated in a recent NY Times article on science fairs. If this is truly our Sputnik moment, there should also be a Sputnik-sized investment in our education system from pre-school through graduate school. Considering who is in control of the House of Representatives, I doubt we will see that.

No amount of mentoring will get ever get us the increase in scientists and engineers the USA needs without additional support for their education and yes, I do mean cold hard cash. Science and engineering is expensive. Can you imagine how many petri dishes a college runs through in a year? Egads, right? Those costs are passed on to students. Tax credits can only go so far with the skyrocketing cost of college. And that’s just at the undergraduate level.

I will continue to do my part of solving this large challenge to increase diversity in the ranks of scientists and engineers. I love my work and even without this amazing honor, I would still get up in the morning happy with the work I do. This honor is phenomenal and I have stared at the certificate that bears President Obama’s signature a few million times since returning to Chicago. But it’s time to get back to work and if you see me with an extra hop in my step, you know why.

This is the fifth and final in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers 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.

I’m obsessed, you could say, with second-wave feminism’s legacy.   Questions like “How has feminism’s past shaped its future?” and “Why are battles begun 40 years ago so damn difficult, still, to win?” keep me up at night.  So when I first heard that Stephanie Coontz—a pre-eminent social historian, and one tremendously adept at translating feminist research for popular audiences via the New York Times op-ed page no less—was writing a cultural history of The Feminine Mystique, I nearly peed in my pants.

Foremost on my mind was the question I hoped would be addressed: “What’s the relevance of The Feminine Mystique—book and concept—today?” Coontz’s book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, did not let me down.  But I’m finding that in the wake of finishing it, I’m more than a little depressed.

As ever, the personal is political.  And vise versa.  I can’t help but read this social history through personal history—my own.  Last week, after a year and a half of equally shared parenting with both of us working part-time from home, my paid hours were cut back and my husband Marco, who got an unexpected offer, went back to a full-time, on-site job.  Overnight, I became Primary Parent, Emergency Contact, and Master Coordinator for our beloved 15-month old twins.  I wrote—bitterly, I now confess—about the first day of the new arrangement at my other blog.  The source of my knee-jerk bitterness?  Though still a working woman, I feared being swallowed by the feminine mystique.  Is this feminism unfinished, or undone?

The feminine mystique.  I’m here to report that its ghost is alive and kicking in the psyches of a generation whose mothers knocked down doors so that we could walk through them. I won’t go so far as to say we’re haunted the way children of Holocaust survivors are (Betty Friedan wrote about the home as a “comfortable concentration camp”–she also, of course, and as Coontz expertly rehearses, wrote SO much more), but let’s just say that the term “feminine mystique” conjures up a vortex that women like me—highly educated, high-earning potential—dread.

Granted, to cut back momentarily (and temporarily) on paid work is not exactly the same as embracing the feminine mystique, but mentally it’s a slippery slope. I think back to Charlotte from Sex and the City at the very moment she quits her job at the art gallery to stay home: “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” she doth protest–too much.  That first shakey day at home, I spewed the opposite: “I didn’t sign up for this.”

After whining to my mother and counting my many blessings–battling the feminine mystique mirage in my head is a luxury compared to the real and punishing demons many single women with kids, for instance, face–I  came to my senses and realized that not much in my life had changed from the one day to this next.  Except that it had.  Because I had this revelation: it only took one day as Primary Parent for me to realize how tenuous the so-called battle lines between “Stay-at-Homes” and “Working Moms” really are.  At one point or another, we are each other.  And the reason for our resentment-filled (and highly media-fueled, let’s face it) fighting, apparently, is that we are largely unsatisfied ourselves.

As Coontz notes in the final chapter (“Women, Men, Marriage, and Work Today: Is the Feminine Mystique Dead?”), a chapter in which I found myself underlining every other word, wives who work paid jobs and those who don’t say they’d like to switch roles (according to a study conducted 10 years ago that is).  “In 2000 25% of the wives who worked full-time said they would prefer to be homemakers.  On the other hand, 40 percent of all wives without paying jobs said they would rather be employed.”  Those who work wish they could be working less—and that applies to men as well as women.

Why are so many men and women with families unhappy with their lot?

Because the job of feminism is far from done. Blinded, now, by the workforce ideal that “defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work” (some call it, as Coontz points out, the “career mystique”), our culture replaced one mystique with the next.  And no one, so far, has had the power to take this new mystique down.

The moment for Career Mystique warriors has come.  They are out there already, rattling our collective cage. Conversations at places like Role/Reboot and Daddy Dialectic and The Council on Contemporary Families and work+life fit and Viva la Feminista and Pundit Mom and The Motherlode lead us in the charge.  And in the meantime, books like The Feminine Mystique remain relevant—all the more so—because their missions remain incomplete.

*Title inspired by the last line of Lisa Belkin’s recent post, “New Fears of Flying” over at The Motherlode.

This is the fourth in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers 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, is a book that, as Coontz notes “has been credited—or blamed—for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home.” In her new study of the book, its era, and its reception (both at its publication and over the years), Coontz doesn’t shy away from documenting The Feminine Mystique’s faults (chief among these, the limited view offered by its white heterosexual middle class author that not only silenced issues of working class women and women of color, but also framed homosexuality as a menace).

The faults of Friedan’s book have of course been extensively analyzed and debated over the years, constructing Friedan as what Rebecca Traister names “a revered and reviled feminist foremother.” Coontz current work goes far beyond this debate though, placing The Feminine Mystique within the context of its time and then expertly weaving in analysis of how many of its key arguments have resonated in the decades since. As Traister puts it in her New York Times book review, the text functions as “a timely contribution to the conversation about what constitutes progress for women (and for which women) in these days of mommy wars and mama grizzlies.”

The continuing “mommy wars” and their particular pervasiveness in the contemporary cultural moment makes Coontz’ book (and the book her book is about – The Feminine Mystique) incredibly relevant. As I read it, I could not help but picture the ways in which current females on the cultural radar – Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Katie Perry, for example – STILL fit into the wife/mother-is –tantamount-to-a woman’s-identity model. Yes, Palin is a politician, but she and others actively highlight that it is motherhood and wifery that defines her. Yes, Jolie has famously said she will not marry Pitt until all people have the right to marry, but she is positioned by the press as a global mother, with news of her adoptions/mothering trumping her acting career. As for Katie Perry – she is not a mother, but her well documented marriage to Russell Brand (not to mention her bubble gum bright, salaciously sexy 50s era outfits) bring a sexed up cross between June Cleaver and I love Lucy to mind.

Another cultural zeitgeist – Twilight – similarly shapes women’s identities as dependent on their relationships to men, famiy, and the home, with the end goal (as it is for the series protagonist) to become an eternal wife and mother.

And – a show with a title that would fit very well between the pages of The Feminine Mystique – Desperate Housewives – has largely explored female identity as tied to what goes on in the home, between the sheets, and while chatting by the picket fences that populate Wisteria Lane, a block that, like Friedan’s book, is mired in white middle class heterosexual privilege.

In contrast, a show set in the past, Mad Men, is a much more valuable lens through which to view not only The Feminine Mystique but also changing gender norms (as Coontz expertly reveals – with many show spoilers – here).

So, what does it say that a show set in the 60s is more feminist, more astute about gender norms and the damage they do to both men and women, than too contemporary shows such as Desperate Housewives (and, I might add, pretty much all of Reality TV)? What does it say that current cultural icons such as Sarah Palin and Katie Perry (and yes, Bella Swan) would fit better in a 50s/60s world where women were presented as needing to be tied to the home on the one hand and beholden to the male gaze on the other? Are we, as I have heard so many discuss, heading so far into the backlash that soon the era Friedan and Coontz document will seem more liberated than our own?

I certainly hope not – and I hope this concern drives people to read Coontz timely work, a book that taps into something that should concern us a great deal – the continuing hold post-feminism and “enlightened sexism” has over our cultural imagination.

Here’s a review of (some of the many!) reviews of Stephanie Coontz’s A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

Was Coontz Dissing or Loving TFM?(Answer: Neither)

In the Wall Street Journal online, Melanie Kirkpatrick notes,

Ms. Coontz is clearly a fan of the book, and she quotes many early readers who said that The Feminine Mystique gave them the courage to pursue their dreams.

She highlights some of the debunking that Coontz’s book accomplishes, such as the myths that TFM was man-bashing or that Friedan was an apolitical housewife. It is a nice, uncritical connection to the story of TFM and A Strange Stirring.

A puzzling contrast was in the Washington Post (included in the print edition), where Elaine Showalter is troubled by Coontz’s story of her own (ambivalent) relationship to TFM because it didn’t match Showalter’s positive experience. Coontz, who isn’t one to reply to reviews too often, responded to the Post in a letter to the editor. In it, Coontz points out that while in 1963 Showalter was going through a very similar experience to that of Friedan (young, married with children), Coontz, though just a few years younger, was still at college, not in the job market, not in the domestic world, and thus the themes of TFM did not touch her personally (the way, for example, the civil rights movement did, which was where Coontz focused her stunningly intense sixties-style activist energies.)

The resolution between those first two reviews—was Coontz dissing or loving TFM?–came in Rebecca Traister’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Traister recounts Coontz’s personal journey with TFM and how, along with her concerns for those women whose experiences were not represented by TFM, she still came to value it. Traister writes:

Halfway through A Strange Stirring, the social historian Stephanie Coontz — parsing the reception of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s 1963 examination of middle-class female repression and despair — confesses to feeling some ambivalence over Friedan’s project, and hence her own.

Acknowledging the working-class and minority women left out of Friedan’s best seller, Coontz admits that while it is “pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more,” her own initial reaction to Friedan’s elite scope “was to dismiss the pain of the middle-class housewives as less ‘real’ than that of their working-class sisters.

Traister then describes how Coontz herself reconciles the “dissing vs loving” issue, by recounting a dialogue Coontz had had with TFM-loving colleague.

It didn’t matter, [Coontz’s colleague had said to her], that the women Friedan wrote about weren’t “representative either in size or even aspirations of most American women of their time.” What mattered was that they had spent “years of their lives with their noses pressed against the proverbial glass — looking in at a world that they would never be a part of.”

For a Traister personal bonus, the New York Times online includes an interview with Rebecca Traister about her own reflections on The Feminine Mystique. The interview highlights Traister’s connection with Coontz’s ambivalence, and offers her reflections on TFM. Such reflections on TFM across multiple generations (and microgenerations like Showalter vs Coontz)spurred on by SS are among my favorite benefits of this Strange Stirring phenomenon, as you can see in my own reflection and interviews with two men in their seventies here at Girlwpen.

Reviewers’ reflections on SS and TFM repeatedly engaged their own stories. When you read the reviews of A Strange Stirring, you’ll see how people write from their personal as well as their intellectual perspectives–sometimes without total self-awareness, but still, it reminds me of how much that linking of personal, political, and intellectual is part of what feminism is all about, what it gives us.

What are the uses of a book? (Answer: They are totemic, but that doesn’t tell us whether they cause movements…like the Women’s Movement)

At Ms Magazine online Carol King focused on historical context (“If you were to pick up The Feminine Mystique today, I suspect you’d wonder what all the fuss was about”) and writes appreciatively of the contextualizing of the Mad Men type experience of many of the women depicted in TFM, and those whom Coontz interviewed for SS. She concludes:

There would have been a Women’s Movement without The Feminine Mystique, but there would have been holes where those women described in the book should have been.

A variation on King’s point was in Louis Menand’s essay in The New Yorker. The essay provides a great review of many of the women’s movement publications around the time of TFM—which I had already read about in Coontz’s book. But the best part is where Menand argues “Why the Women’s Movement Needed Betty Friedan.” He picks an argument with Coontz around her assessment of the American reception of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and also with her contention that the cultural shift towards the Women’s Movement preceded TFM, rather than followed it. But he makes Coontz’s case any way, as well as a wonderful case for the value of books as a cultural intervention. Here’s how: Menand includes TFM with several other books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that made a difference because, as he says, “books became totems.”

These are books whose significance exceeds anything they actually said. For many people, it doesn’t even matter what they said or why they were written. What matters is that, when the world turned, they were there.

Yes! The books were there for people to point to to express the ideas that they were already starting to have.

In Bitch Magazine Eryn Loeb wrote a delightful reflection on the imagery of The Feminine Mystique (very Mad Men, very old issues of Good Housekeeping). The images help to conjure the myths of womanhood and the myths of TFM from the earlier era. Then, she draws our attention to Coontz’s skillful work on decomposing those myths—and links this myth-busting to Coontz’s body of work, especially The Way We Never Were and Marriage, A History. Loeb concludes with another important point. See, Coontz, like people Coontz interviewed, didn’t even realize that she hadn’t read the book “back in the day.” Still, it had stuck with her, and many others. Loeb notes:

The book’s legendary status had eclipsed its actual content. In some ways, this is a triumph: Friedan’s salvo for women’s liberation has been so effectively distilled and shared in the 47 years since its release that there’s no need to actually sit down and read 350-plus pages. As long as we get the gist of it, do the specifics really matter?

Where are women—and men—today? (Answer: “In it together”)

Tracy Clark-Flory’s interview with Stephanie Coontz for Salon.com focuses on “Why Feminism Was Good for Marriage.” The interview highlights links between growing gender equality and improvements in marriage, adding a coda to Coontz’s Marriage,A History. The interview links up what Coontz wrote in SS to how she sees gender and feminism today. Message: A big piece of it has to do with keeping men—working men, caregiving men, and really all men—in the equation.

And if you want to hear more of Coontz on where are men and women today—in relation to what she wrote about in A Strange Stirring—listen to her interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

…there’s more: I can only imagine what will be the lesson from Coontz’s interview on The Colbert Report later this month (slated for 2/23/11). But I bet it will have something to do with men and women “these days.”

What else? (Answer: It keeps coming!)

I’ll keep adding links here to other reviews and interviews, but here are a few more I found useful:

History News Network: “Puncturing Betty Friedan, but Not the Mystique: An Interview with Stephanie Coontz”: This engaging interview gives more details about how Coontz did her research.

The Feministing Five: Stephanie Coontz: Chloe Angyal presents a thoughtful, more personal interview with Coontz.

–Virginia Rutter

It’s my deep pleasure to introduce Andrea Doucet, who is a guest contributor for Global Mama this month. Andrea is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of the award-winning book Do Men Mother? and is currently completing research for her book, tentatively titled The Bread and Roses Project: Breadwinning Moms and the New ‘Problem with No Name’. She is delighted to be a contributor to Girl with Pen. (And we are delighted to have her!)

Are Dads Facing Discrimination at the Playground?

Are men being kicked out of playgrounds? Are dads facing playground or playgroup discrimination? These questions, and some answers, were floating on the blogosphere and twitterverse over the last few weeks. It all started with a conversation between three leading and admired voices in parenting – Dad Labs, Free Range Kids’ Lenore Skenazy, and Jeremy Adam Smith’s Daddy Dialectic – on fear and mistrust of men in public spaces.

The pace with which this discussion unfolded would make any slow-moving scholar’s head spin. A newspaper article, then a blog post, a tweet, the creation of an online survey and voilà: the results were up on Daddy Dialectic and on The New York Times Motherload.

I’ve had a 20-year academic and personal interest in male exclusion and surveillance on the landscapes of parenting, so I followed the discussion with great interest. It speaks to an important social dynamic, one that is largely absent from much of the current thinking on (heterosexual) couples working to reverse traditional gender roles.

Yet, as I sat at my desk, watching the words ‘playground discrimination’ and ‘stay at home dads targeted’ tweeting from my computer, something troubled me.

I think the discussion, thus far, overstates the issue of discrimination. It also underplays change over time and the growing acceptance of fathers in community sites. Playground discrimination? With all due respect to those who blogged and tweeted about this, I disagree. Only 3 fathers (4.5%) who filled in the ‘playground discrimination’ survey were asked to leave a playground.

What about the nearly 25% (18 men) who reported being refused entry to a group setting? We need to know more about why, when and where men were refused entry. Was it direct or implied? Was it in an infant group with breast-feeding moms or a group with older children? Was it recent or 10 years ago? Was the father a new or a long-time caregiver? Did the community know him?

As for the 55% of fathers who indicate that their parenting skills are criticized or corrected in a public setting, this does seem to be a recurring problem, especially for fathers of infants. According to the Daddy Dialectic survey and many recent media articles, fathers who are forced into primary caregiving roles during this man-cession, can still face those ‘looks’ and questions from friends, an elderly neighbor, and the ever-present ‘woman at the grocery store’.

I also see positive changes. Looking back 20 years, many stay-at-home dads and single fathers did face serious discrimination as they tried to navigate through, what one of the fathers in my book Do Men Mother? called ‘estrogen filled worlds’. That was long before daddy blogging and the daddy shift. Today, many caregiving men have the support of their breadwinning partners and/or kin networks, access to amazing dads groups, and an overwhelming litany of online and community resources. Like women who enter work fields dominated by the other gender, men are also actively creating their own networks (often through children’s athletic activities) – and their own playgroups.

Mothers, of course, are also targeted with criticism, although in different ways (which Smith also notes). Some of the breadwinning mothers I’ve recently interviewed avoid those same playgroups that are turning some fathers away.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of radical change in daddy discrimination is a Canadian couple I’ve interviewed several times over the last 10 years. When Richard, a former mechanic, started staying home in 2000, he and his wife Aileen told me that “nobody spoke to him in the playgroups”. He kept going. By 2001, he went to three weekly playgroups as well as a library group. He also began caring for a few children in his home. Yet his desire to open his own day care was continually greeted with disapproval and rejection. The reason: he was male.

After four years of patiently waiting, Richard was finally granted a licence to open his daycare. In 2009, he told me: “The praise that I receive from the parents and the agency personnel and mostly the love I feel from the kids, make this the most satisfying job ever”.

Richard also captures the incredible change for men in community settings along with a subtle reminder that full gender parity on this issue remains a formidable challenge:

“Today my daycare is full with 5 kids and I have 8 kids on my waiting list who want to come to my daycare specifically. But I am not accepted by all. Some parents refuse to have a man as childcare provider. And I can respect that. But to many, it is an alternative they favor.”

Playground and playgroup discrimination, where and when it occurs, is undoubtedly an uncomfortable experience. The Daddy Dialectic’s survey was, according to Smith, meant to be a “catalyst for conversation”. I want to add a few questions to this ‘daddy discrimination’ conversation: What key changes are fathers observing on this issue over time in their own communities? What is supporting or inhibiting that change? What challenges remain, where and why? What can mothers, fathers, community organizations, policy activists and feminist scholars do to help facilitate more father-inclusion? Is it reasonable to accept some women-only, as well as men-only, spaces when it comes to caregiving?

This is the second in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers 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.

The reviews are out (more on that coming soon!).  While some give an apt assessment of this rich new look at a classic feminist text, some lapse into cliche about both Coontz’s book and Friedan’s.  Here are four myths–cliches, really–about The Feminine Mystique, and feminism the movement, as cleared up in Coontz’s book:

1.  MYTH: Betty Friedan was a man-hater, and The Feminine Mystique was anti-marriage.

REALITY: Friedan hated housework (and her willingness to say that was considered shocking in the early 1960s), but she loved men and greatly enjoyed flirting with them. She even suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Friedan believed that marriages would be more harmonious and loving when wives were free to find meaning in their own work or community activities rather than seeking fulfillment through their husbands’ accomplishments. When wives have interests and skills of their own, she argued, they will stop nagging or belittling their husbands. Their daughters, seeing their mothers fulfilled instead of discontented, will grow up “sure that they want to be women.” And in fact, I interviewed many women who told me they had developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by seeing how unhappy their own mothers were. They were able to commit to family life only after they were sure they would not be trapped the way their mothers had been.

2.  MYTH: Friedan encouraged women to put their personal gratification and career ambitions ahead of family or community concerns, leading directly to a “sex-in-the-city” individualism.

REALITY: Friedan told women it was a mistake to think that better sex or a new man would meet their need to grow. She argued that only an un-liberated woman would believe that more money or a bigger house would fill the hole inside her. She also said it was better to do volunteer work, if possible, than to take a job just for the money, insisting that women, like men, could find themselves only by developing their individual capacities in the framework of socially useful work, whether paid or unpaid. She would have hated “Sex in the City.”

3.  MYTH:  The entry of women into the workforce and their growing educational advantage over men destabilized marriage and doomed many women to a life of loneliness.

REALITY: Divorce rates initially rose as more wives went to work, but this trend reversed as people adjusted to women’s new rights. Today the states with the highest percentage of working wives generally have the lowest divorce rates. And marriages where one spouse specializes in housework and the other in paid work are now more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses share domestic and paid work.

Divorce rates have fallen sharply over the past 30 years for college graduates and for women who delay marriage while they establish themselves in careers. In fact, every year a woman delays marriage, up into her 30s, lowers her chance of divorce.

Marriage rates have been going down for all Americans, but women with Ph.D.s are the only group with a higher marriage rate today than in 1950. And while a highly-educated woman is slightly more likely to reach age 40 without ever marrying than a woman with less education, she is also much less likely to divorce. As a result, educated women are now more likely to be married at age 40 than their less-educated counterparts.

Three-quarters of female college graduates aged 40 are married at age 40, compared to two-thirds of women that age with some college education, 63 percent of high school graduates, and only 56 percent of women with less than a high school degree. And 88 percent of women aged 30 to 44 who earn more than $100,000 per year are married, compared to 82 percent of other women in that age group.

And here’s a win-win scenario for women who can take advantage of the new educational options for women: Educated couples with egalitarian views have the highest marital quality. Educated women who remain single and enjoy their jobs report nearly equal levels of happiness as married women. And a never-married college-educated woman in her 40s who wants to marry has twice the chance of doing so as a never-married high school graduate.

4.  MYTH: The feminist movement has hurt homemakers.

REALITY: In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, only eight states gave stay-at-home wives any claim on their husband’s earnings, even if they had put their husband through school and then devoted themselves to raising the children for 40 years. The husband got to determine what was an “adequate” level of support, and if they divorced, the wife had no right to a fair division of the property. She could not even get alimony unless she could prove “fault” by a very stringent standard. Feminism has improved the security of homemakers as well as of employed women.

What are the cliches that come to mind when you think about The Feminine Mystique or any other classic second-wave feminist text–and more importantly, are they, or aren’t they true?