Archive: 2011

Women’s History Month should be a time of celebration.  Sadly, when it comes to maternal health, there’s not a lot to celebrate this year.

Just one year ago, this wasn’t the case. In April 2010, maternal health was making headlines—with an encouraging story.  Research published in the medical journal The Lancet found glimmers of hope in the downward direction of the global maternal mortality rate.  Though certain parts of the world had experienced rising maternal mortality rates (including eastern and southern Africa, due to HIV-AIDS), the overall picture looked promising.  These trends were supported by data in another report, Trends in Maternal Mortality, researched and written by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fun, the United Nations Population Fund, and the World Bank, which found that the number of women who died due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth had decreased by 34% between 1990 and 2008.

In 2011, the Republican budget in Congress is targeting women’s health programs at home and abroad for deep cuts, with serious consequences for mothers and children.  How much money will these proposals actually save, and at what cost to the lives of women and girls?

Let’s revisit recent history.  In 2000, world leaders came together at the UN to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which identified eight anti-poverty goals to be accomplished by 2015.  The fifth goal was maternal health: to reduce by 75% the maternal mortality rate, and to achieve universal access to reproductive health.  In 2010, while much work remained to be done, the data suggested that most maternal deaths can be prevented, and that the safe motherhood movement was truly making an impact.  Celebratory headlines in newspapers like the one in The New York Times declared “Maternal Deaths Decline Sharply Across the Globe.”  This article quoted The Lancet’s editor, Dr. Horton, explaining that the data should “encourage politicians to spend more on pregnancy-related health matters”:

The data dispelled the belief that the statistics had been stuck in one dismal place for decades, he said.  So money allocated to women’s health is actually accomplishing something, he said, and governments are not throwing good money after bad.

At the same time, U.S. activists were becoming increasingly alarmed at rising domestic death rates.  Amnesty International issued a report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the U.S.A., that raised concerns about the two-decade upward trend in the numbers of preventable maternal deaths.  Amnesty International observed that “women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 49 other countries, including Kuwait, Bulgaria, and South Korea” and called for a legislative agenda that made maternal health a priority.

Who could have guessed that one year later, we would be retreating even further from making maternal health a priority?

Most of us know about the proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood, which provides a wide array of sexual and reproductive health services to women, many of whom cannot afford to go elsewhere.  Proposed slashes in funding to global women’s health are just as serious.  Ms. blogger Anushay Hossain explains what’s on the chopping block globally, and why this is such a big deal:

House Republicans not only proposed to cut U.S. assistance to international family planning funding, they also want to completely zero out any funds going to the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, the largest multilateral source of reproductive-health assistance in the world. The U.S. currently provides 22 percent of the UN’s overall budget, and UNFPA is the only agency within the UN that focuses on reproductive health.

At the recently concluded 55^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, listed the three main challenges we must face in order to improve maternal health globally: empowering women and girls to claim their rights, “including the right to sexual and reproductive health”; strengthening health services everywhere “to deliver an integrated package of sexual and reproductive health services”; and ensuring “adequate financing.”  He also spoke about girls’ education as “the most important intervention to avoid maternal deaths.”  I was inspired to read UNFPA’s mission, which reflects an understanding of health in the context of human rights and equality:

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity.  UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.

This struck me as fairly comprehensive and visionary.  Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen this picture of UNFPA in the mainstream U.S. media.  Nor have I seen the following question asked—or answered: how might the proposed cuts affect maternal mortality rates, at home and globally?  I would also like to see politicians address this issue.  I was glad to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detail the devastating effects of the elimination of funding to UNFPA; her testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations is posted on Feministing.  She observed that the quality of women’s health and empowerment in the developing world not only has an effect on their families and their communities, but also on our own security: “This is not just what we fail now to do for others.  It’s how that will come back and affect our own health here at home.”

As one of the truisms of globalization goes, we’re all connected.  Indeed—the security of women everywhere appears to be threatened by the proposed cuts and policies in the U.S. Congress.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Girl w/Pen friends — it’s been too long!  In keeping with today’s theme so wonderfully explored by Debbie Siegel, here’s my review of my shero Peggy Orenstein’s latest.  This review originally appeared on the Ms. Magazine blog and is re-posted with permission.  For more of Orenstein’s thoughts read my interview with her on SheWrites.

If you’ve been within 50 feet of a 4-year-old girl in the past decade, you can’t have escaped the fact that princess is a booming industry. From T-shirts emblazoned with “princess” to the fad for “makeover” parties to “princess potty seats”, there is no shortage of products with a tiara theme offered to girls. In her excellent new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes as a journalist, a mother of an elementary school-age girl and a former girl herself to investigate the explosion of pink “girlie-girl culture.”

Common wisdom would have it that the demand for pink is simply hardwired into girls. Orenstein evaluates this by consulting with neuroscientist and Pink Brain, Blue Brain author Lise Eliot, a proponent of neuroplasticity–the idea that “[inborn traits], gender-based or otherwise, are shaped by our experience.” Eliot’s research shows that, in fact, when kids are tiny, “[they] do not know from pink and blue.” She argues that children don’t begin to label behavior or toys as meant for girls or for boys until between ages 2 and 3, as kids come to understand there are gender differences. It’s also the exact time when they’re handed toys that are gender-specific. In other words, Orenstein writes, “nurture becomes nature.” Boys are blued; girls are pinked.

So if not nature, what’s the force behind all the pinking? The easy answer is money. As one example, the ever-more-present Disney Princesses line grossed $4 billion dollars in 2009. The “father” of that line, Andy Mooney, tells Orenstein, “I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy.” A sales rep at the annual Toy Fair has a more direct answer when Orenstein asks if all this pink is necessary: “Only if you want to make money.”

But even if cash-hungry marketers are pushing pink to rake in profits, there’s another piece to the puzzle: parents who buy the toys for their kids. Orenstein has a deep empathy for the competing pressures they face. She herself doesn’t want to restrict her daughter from choosing her own mode of self-expression–even if that’s a poufy princess dress–but worries that all the marketing itself constricts her daughter’s choices. Instead of the entire rainbow, girls only get to see the pink slice.

Orenstein’s sympathy extends to parents participating in the most extreme “girl-ification”–the pageant parents portrayed on the TV show Toddlers and Tiaras. Visiting a pageant held deep in the hill country of Texas, Orenstein leaves the tiara-fest more ambivalent. She’s not ready to dismiss the parents’ oft-repeated credo that pageants boost their girls’ self-esteem and that it’s okay to tell your daughter that she’s special. She also sees how much much participating in pageants can mean to a family. But it’s clear from her observations that Toddlers and Tiaras is doing its share of harm.

Orenstein mentions how exposés of the show have featured “psychologists who (with good reason) link self-objectification and sexualization to [a] host of ills previously mentioned—eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, impaired academic performance,” often rebutted by the pageant moms, who then defend their actions. And within the book’s first pages Orenstein references the well-respected American Psychological Association’s Report of The Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls which offered hard evidence that an overemphasis on beauty and sexiness made girls vulnerable to problematic behaviors linked to self-objectification.

So how can parents balance these pressures in order to stem the tide of pink? Orenstein leaves the question open, which might frustrate some readers. She muses as she researches, reflects as she consults, and ends the book optimistic but uncertain about how root-level change can be achieved. On her website she’s just launched a “resources” section which offers suggestions of books for kids and parents, recommended shows and films, even a clothing line. Lisa Belkin of “Motherlode” in The New York Times has also responded with a solid list of suggested reading in her column “The Princess Wears Plaid.” Additionally, the Ms. blog offers a list of contemporary retellings of fairy tales and myths from a feminist perspective. All ask readers to chime in with further contributions.

Orenstein has a final, crucial piece of advice: Just say NO to the overpinking. That might seem pat to a frustrated parent–saying no reaches beyond appeasing a demanding child to refusing cultural edicts that seem to whisper and shout from every side. Awareness is your best line of defense, Orenstein insisted in dialogue with Lori Gottlieb at a recent L.A. talk, as she repeated, “You just say NO.”

Ask me five years ago and I’d have told you I’d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.  I minored in feminist cultural studies!  I believe boys and girls are made, not just born!  But sixteen months into parenting my boy/girl twins, I’m starting to wonder how I’ll ever ensure that my boy grows up sensitive and my girl stays, as one of my favorite organizations has trained me to say, strong, brave, and bold.

It’s an unfortunate moment for complacency.  Children are boxed into hyper-gendered categories at ages younger than ever before.  Just last month, Disney infiltrated the delivery room.  New research shows that girls as young as three are internalizing the thin ideal.  As blogger Pigtail Pals reports, a study by Dr. Jennifer Harriger, published in 2010 finds that preschoolers are attributing stereotypes to others because of their weight.  The news is distressing.  Gender-aware parents can cleanse our daughters’ bedrooms of pale pink and defend a love for Tinkerbelle in our sons, yet the clutch of our pink-vs.-blue culture seems only to tighten its hold.  Why, we’re all asking, is this so?

There’s ample proof that since the utopian hope of “Free to Be You and Me” in the 1970s, as a culture we’ve slid backwards. As Peggy Orenstein documents so thoroughly and well in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie Girl Culture (reviewed here this week by Elline!), things are far worse than they were when we grew up.  The hyper-marketing of gendered purchases target kids at an increasingly vulnerable age, and it’s enough to make any parent tired.

We can blame Disney and we can fight the princesses, but perhaps two additional reasons that a generation of parents raised on feminism feels like we’re losing the war is that 1) we’re confused and 2) we’re alone.

We’re confused by “science.” Fighting gender-based discrimination has morphed into dealing with science, which carries boldfaced authority—and many feminist scientists themselves are now fighting this fight too.  Sometimes I wonder about the effects.  Have Gen X parents grown convinced of children’s innate gender sensibilities?  Decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nurture debate that second-wave feminism famously upstaged.  Have the things we’ve heard about gender affected a new generation’s parenting behavior?  “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,” suggests neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, (which argues, by the way, that social expectations—not biological differences—have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.)  Sensational, whiplash-inducing headlines tell us gender is inborn—no, wait, made—no, born.  Unless you’re steeped in this research, it’s often hard to know what’s what anymore.

But our biggest problem, I fear, is that when it comes to resisting the hyper-genderfication of childhood, we’re largely fighting it alone.

Over the past sixteen months, as my babies have progressed from a crawl to a walk and now to words, it’s slowly dawned on me how much the premise of my previous book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, applies to my new situation: As parents, and especially as new parents, we don’t always feel plugged into a movement to change the larger culture in which we raise our kids.  Instead, we’re left to focus on ourselves—in this case, our familial microcosms—on our own.

To be sure, there’s a burgeoning movement out there. I’m a huge fan of initiatives like SPARK and the Geena Davis Institute and efforts to redefine girly like Pigtail Pals and of course the longstanding work of Girls Inc.  I voraciously consume every new book by educators like Lyn Mikel Brown to learn what we can do to resist (See Packaging Girlhood, Packaging Boyhood, and also the resource page at the wonderful Peggy Orenstein’s site.) But these initiatives aren’t as mainstreamed as they might be.  I can control my growing babies’ media consumption and control what comes in the house, but control only goes so far.  I fear that as a new mother, I’m long on feminist parenting ideals, short on ways to make them stick in the world outside my home.

I hear that change feels more possible once your kids hit kindergarten.  My friends there tell me that they feel successful in their attempts to provide a larger context in which it’s natural for their girl to love Star Wars and their boy to take ballet.  They feel effective.  They feel their actions span far.

In the meantime, we mothers of babes continue our preparations for the good fight by lining our children’s bookshelves with The Sissy Duckling and No I Will NOT Wear a Dress and painting our nurseries sage.  But short of a massive and visible movement—you know, like the political ones we see right now on tv—sometimes I worry.  Are we all just focusing on the equivalent of wardrobes and walls?

What do YOU think?  Do you see a new generation of parents taking on the battle against the hyper-genderfication of childhood in spades?  Is there a movement?  Or are we all basically out here on our own?  If you have strong thoughts on this either way, for a writing/blogging/thinking project I’m working on (The Pink and Blue Diaries), I’d love to hear from you.  Please email me at deborah@shewrites.com

The war on the public sector is very personal. As a public sector worker — I teach at a state university — I am a state employee and a member of a teachers union. Even a little bit of the dismissive, contemptuous and ignorant rhetoric that I hear about public sector workers goes a long way with me. I mean, I love my job; I work hard and it feels good. But a co-worker and I laugh that if our private sector professional friends knew how little we make they would be sooo uncomfortable. But the point is I am grateful to have job security, good health insurance, employee rights like due process and collective bargaining, and I feel good working in an institution where all the other people I work with have the same thing.

What does this have to do with women? The Institute for Women’s Policy Research just published a fact sheet on men and women in the public sector. Women make up 43 percent of federal workers; 52 percent of state workers; and 61 percent of local workers. The war against the public sector is a war against women workers. But it is also a war against workers of color, specifically African American workers. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (unpublished analysis of Current Population Survey 2010), while 10.7 percent of all workers are African American, 14.3 percent of public sector workers are.

In the next week or so, I’l post a few questions and answers about the public sector puzzles, like why is it a “war”?… what about “Waiting for Superman”?… what is collective bargaining anyway?… why don’t you care about the deficit?…and we’ll see what else comes up. Another question I will write about is why should women in particular or workers in general care about the assault on public sector workers’ rights if they are in the private sector?

-Virginia Rutter

This interview originally appeared in the Ms. Magazine Blog and is re-posted with permission.

Move over dot-com, dot-org, and dot-gov. There’s a new domain on the block: dot-xxx. With 370 million sites and $3,000 spent for online porn every second, the industry’s revenues surpass earnings by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined.

This is author Gail Dines’s point: Porn is about profit, not pleasure. Some people make a buck; many more are harmed, argues Dines in her new book PORNLAND: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press).

Gail Dines calls herself an anti-porn feminist, but she is quick to clarify that she’s not anti-sex. Unlike Dines—and in the interest of full disclosure—I am not anti-porn. I oppose censorship and unproductive arguments pitting sex-positive feminists against anti-porn activists. This keeps rival groups in far corners of the Sex Wars boxing ring. We need more conversation—not less—which means asking tough questions across ideological divides. To that end, I interviewed Gail Dines, curious about our agreements and differences on The Porn Question.

Ms./Shira Tarrant: You wrote Pornland for a mainstream audience. What is your primary hope for this book?

Gail Dines: I wrote Pornland to raise consciousness about the effects of the contemporary porn industry. Many people have outdated ideas that porn is pictures of naked women wearing coy smiles and not much else, or of people having hot sex. Today’s mainstream Internet porn is brutal and cruel, with body-punishing sex acts that debase and dehumanize women.

Pornland looks at how porn messages, ideologies, and images seep into our everyday life. Whether it be Miley Cyrus in Elle spread-eagle on a table dressed in S&M gear, or Cosmopolitan telling readers to spice up their sex lives with porn, we are overwhelmed by a porn culture that shapes our sexual identities and ideas about gender and sexuality. Pornland explores how porn limits our capacity for connection, intimacy and relationships.

ST: What is it about Miley Cyrus in S&M gear that bothers you? Is it her age? Or simply that she’s wearing pseudo-bondage gear?

GD: The problem is that women in our culture have to conform to very narrow definitions of femininity and it’s defined by porn. Miley Cyrus’s performance is not about creativity but dictated by capitalism. She aged out of Disney and this is the carefully planned-out launch of the new Miley Cyrus.

My issue is about the market and about how pornography frames femininity. Women are either fuckable or invisible. Miley Cyrus wouldn’t make any money [with an unfuckable image].

ST: Are you opposed to consensual BDSM sex in real life? Or do you see this as a harmful and exploitative relationship?

GD: What people do outside corporate forces, or outside capitalism, is none of my business.

I’m critiquing the commodification of sex. That gets confused with the idea that I’m telling people what to do in the bedroom. It’s a much easier argument to make [but] it’s a refusal to take seriously a radical feminist critique of the culture.

ST: Some people working in the business argue that porn is a legitimate way to earn a living. I know you disagree, but that keeps us stuck in an us-versus-them sex war. Do you see a way to move past that stalemate?

GD: The industry frames the work as a choice, because otherwise that would ruin porn. Choice is built into the way men enjoy porn. Men I interviewed are convinced the women in porn really choose this and enjoy their job.

Increasingly, women are drawn to porn by the glamorization of the industry. Some women have made porn work for them—Sasha Grey, Jenna Jameson. Jenna Jameson was on Oprah, who was gushing about her. Oprah went to her house and showed the audience Jameson’s expensive cars and private art collection. This looks attractive to women with limited resources. Capitalism can only succeed if there are people around who will do the shit work. Women with law degrees are not lining up to do porn. The vast majority of women doing porn don’t make it and don’t get famous. They end up in low paid work as well as the brothels of Nevada.

We need a world where women have real options to make a living. This is a class issue and a race issue. To talk about choice is to ignore how people are constrained by their social and economic situations.

To be continued in Part II …

Above: pornographic film set, 2007. Photo by Larry Knowles for The Naughty American website licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

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.