Susan McGee Bailey, PhD served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), and a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years.

Following college she taught in Asia, Latin America and the United States; experiencesthat fostered her commitment to gender equitable education as a cornerstone ofactive citizenship. As the principal author of the 1992 AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls, her insights fostered national public dialog on gender in K-12 education.

The years living abroad also strengthened her belief in the importance and power of women’s global connections. Currently she sits on the Board of the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World at Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon and is a member of the Advisory Council of Boston’s Ford Hall Forum. She has served on a variety of boards including the Board of the National Council for Research on Women, which she chaired.

Susan earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and held a postdoctoral fellowship in public health from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the Wellesley Centers, she directed the Resource Center on Educational Equity at the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, DC, the Policy Research Office on Women’s Education at Harvard University and held various posts at the Connecticut State Department of Education.
Susan has received numerous awards for her research and public advocacy, is frequently quoted in the media and has appeared on a variety of radio and television programs. In 2011 the National Council for Research on Women spotlighted her as a feminist icon. As the single mother of a developmentally and physically challenged daughter, she has worked for more than 35 years with community organizations addressing the needs of disabled children.

A firm believer in the continuing reality of the feminist adages: that the personal is political and that there are no individual solutions, she is delighted to join Girl w/Pen and will be blogging once a month at SECOND LOOK with posts focusing on where we’ve been and where we need to go.

Follow Susan on Twitter: @feministstrong

SO much to pick from this season, but among our summer highlights for those of you who missed it or are just now dropping in:

Natalie Wilson finds a gender con at comic con.

Virginia Rutter sets us straight on love and lust.

Elline Lipkin looks at the poetry and prose of “real” motherhood.

Susan Bailey cries uncle on Hobby Lobby.

Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe critique the over-thanking of straight male allies.

Adina Nack culls intel from guest Mary Assad on the science behind medical claims around fat and women’s hearts.

Kyla Bender-Baird invites Jocelyn Hollander to weigh in on Miss USA and self-defense.

Heather Hewett curates Emily Bent on what’s missing from girl power discourse in light of #BringBackOurGirls (namely: rights).

And I sound off on empowerment, tampon ads, and the Always #LikeAGirl campaign.

Over 20 years ago Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law two weeks after his inauguration in 1993. Remember the optimism? Under the FMLA a qualified employee can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a sick family member or for pregnancy, newborn, newly adopted, or for care of a new foster child. In a good-news bad-news sense, one of the notable features of the FMLA was that it was gender-neutral: men and women equally had no funding for their job-protected leave for up to 12 weeks per year. Otherwise, this policy for helping families has been the weakest compared to other rich countries. At the time, the FMLA was the “foot in the door” for improving the situation of working families. A hint for how FMLA is doing today was offered by Girlwpen’s Susan Bailey earlier this week.

So…how’s that foot in the door now? Several recent studies offer new tools for analysis. In “Expanding Federal Family and Medical Leave Coverage,” economists Helene Jorgenson and Eileen Appelbaum investigated who benefits from FMLA using the 2012 FMLA Employee Survey conducted by the Department of Labor. About one in five qualified employees has used FMLA leave within the past 18 months, according to a new Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) report. The authors found an extensive amount of unmet need for family and medical leave.

Several key limitations of the FMLA mean that, in practice, the law doesn’t apply to a large share of the workforce. The FMLA does not cover workers in firms with fewer than 50 employees. As a result, 44.1 percent of workers in the private sector (49.3 million workers) are excluded from protected leave for caring for their sick or vulnerable relations. The FMLA also excludes employees who have been at their current job for less than a year or have worked fewer than 1250 hours in the past year.

Not everyone with needy kin works in mid-to-large size firms nor has regular employment. So, those limits on access to FMLA do not affect everyone equally. Young workers and Hispanic workers had lower rates of eligibility than other groups. Education level was the strongest predictor of eligibility. People with less than a high school degree were 13.6 percentage points less likely than those with “some college” to have access to unpaid leave for family and medical concerns. Meanwhile, those with a college degree were 10.7 percentage points more likely than those with some college to have access to FMLA leave.

Have there been improvements in the past two decades? Another recent study from CEPR and the Center for American Progress, “Job Protection isn’t Enough: Why America Needs Paid Parental Leave,” by Heather Boushey, Jane Farrell, and John Schmitt, points to no. Analysis of data from the Current Population Survey over the past 20 years revealed two key things: First, women take leave way more than men despite the gender neutrality of the policy. Men have increased from a very low rate, but the ratio in the last five years studied is about nine to one. In addition, over the past two decades there has been essentially no change in women’s rates of leave-taking.

Also, per Boushey and colleagues, guess who is most likely to benefit from leave? Women with college degrees and those in full-time jobs. Commenting on their statistical analysis, the authors state, “Better-educated, full-time, union women are more likely than their otherwise identical counterparts to take parental leave” (p. 12). Not everyone can be in a job that qualifies them for FMLA leave; however once qualified, not everyone has the financial security to use that leave.

These authors—like Jorgenson and Appelbaum—applaud the FMLA and the opportunities it has provided to qualified workers—but their data show that the 1993 Act did not generate a cascade of family-progressive policies for men, women, and families. But one can hope. Jorgenson and Appelbaum demonstrate that a policy that reduced the firm size from 50 to 30 and reduced the hours worked in the past year from 1250 to 750, an additional 8.3 million private sector workers would be eligible for family leave under FMLA.

There are some pretty great examples of places in the United States where better family leave policies have been put in place and have worked well. California passed a paid family leave act in 2002, and after twelve years, the program has been highly successful. Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman reported in 2011 about the social, family, and economic benefits of the program. Washington State passed similar legislation in 2007 but it has been help up since then. New Jersey did so in 2008, and Rhode Island’s law was implemented in January 2014. Another review of the California paid leave program demonstrates the growth in uptake since its initiation, but reports that uptake continues to be low because while the leave is paid one’s job is not protected.

We just celebrated 50 years of the Civil Rights Act. Last year we celebrated 50 years since the Equal Pay Act. Retrospectives on such landmark legislation includes successes as well as persisting shortfalls. We are at 21 and counting with FMLA. These studies remind us that with FMLA we need to do more to have more success than shortfalls.

The other week, Girl w/Pen bloggers and masculinity studies scholars Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe called us to pause the war on pink and take a look at boys’ toys, prompting a response from media studies scholar Rebecca Hains (author of the forthcoming The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years) and a reflection from me on feminist history and popular feminist debate.

This week, I invited Rebecca to dialogue with me. Here is our exchange. And keep an eye out for some thoughts on it all coming soon from Girl w/Pen blogger Susan Bailey, too! You can learn more about Rebecca’s work here.

Deborah: In my post the other week (“Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink?”) I looked back at the history of arguing “enough about girls, let’s focus on boys,” to mixed effect. You make the thoughtful point that the ploy is not merely a harmless rhetorical effect. Can you elaborate?

Rebecca: In all honesty, the argument that we need to stop (“or at least pause”) the war on pink didn’t even come off as a rhetorical device to me. I’m sad to say that it just came across as ill-informed. There isn’t a war on pink; there’s a thoughtful, measured argument that while pink isn’t inherently bad, it’s limiting the play worlds and imaginations of boys and girls alike. So “Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink” reads, to me and my colleagues, like a straw man argument. The authors were conjuring up a nonexistent epidemic of myopic thinking, instead of engaging with anyone’s actual writing on the subject of girl culture and the rise of pink. I expect better from our esteemed colleagues in masculinity studies: if they would like to engage with those of us working in girlhood studies, and perhaps learn from our successes (we’re happy to share what we’ve learned), that would be terrific–they just need to demonstrate that they’ve read at least some of our work so that we can have a meaningful conversation.

Besides, straw-man arguments strike me as more problematic coming from a feminist academic blog like Girl w/Pen than, say, an anti-feminist source like Christina Hoff Sommers. (A case of “the medium is the message,” perhaps?)

Deborah: Tell us a bit about your book that’s coming out next fall, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Source Books, 2014). Is there any way in which you think girls can be active agents in princess play? In what ways do you hope your book will steer popular debate? And what do you most want to change?

Rebecca: Thanks for asking. The Princess Problem is really a handbook for parents to raise media-literate daughters–girls who are able to think critically about marketing, the beauty ideal, gender stereotypes, and race representation. This is an important task for 21st-century parents: We must coach our children, guiding them to become critical viewers of media culture in general. And yet media literacy is not something that’s a mainstream concept yet in the U.S.; many other countries include media literacy in their K-12 curricula, but that’s not the case here. I’d like that to change.

I focus in my book on princess culture in particular because “princess” is so pervasive–it’s THE defining pop culture phenomenon in early girlhood. And it’s the perfect example to use in a text on raising media literate girls because the issues we need to discuss with our daughters so often differ from than the issues we would discuss with our sons. (For example, body image issues are a very different beast when it comes to girls and boys.) But the principles I teach in The Princess Problem could easily be extrapolated to raising media-literate sons, too.

And yes, I absolutely believe girls can be active agents in princess play. Kids are not passive victims of media and toys; they’re active consumers who regularly defy our assumptions. That’s a position I’ve espoused in some of my earlier work–for example, my study of girls and Bratz dolls.

It’s important to note, then, that in The Princess Problem, my goal is not to persuade girls that princesses are bad or to “de-princess” them; rather, it is to help parents help their girls reason become critical viewers who can see that there are many, many ways to be a girl.

Deborah: I loved your recent post at Sociological Images (“When Cowboys Wore Pink”), where you concluded, “Monochromatic girlhood drives a wedge between boys and girls — separating their spheres during a time when cross-sex play is healthy and desirable, and when their imaginations should run free.” Some of our Brave Girls Alliance colleagues have created incredible alternatives. From where you stand, what do you see as some of the most exciting challenges to the children’s industrial complex as we know it?

Rebecca: The Let Toys Be Toys movement is doing terrific work challenging the status quo in the UK. By calling for toys to be desegregated–grouped by theme or interest type, rather than by gender—they’re empowering parents and children to think outside of the pink and blue boxes that marketers have been placing children into. I’d really love to see a comparable movement here in the U.S. and Canada. With folks like Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals, Michele Yulo of Princess Free Zone, and Ines Almeida of Toward the Stars raising so much consciousness about the limitations that today’s marketing foists upon kids of both sexes, it’s the right time.

I’d like to see a movement that goes one step further, too, and challenges marketers to put an end to the incessant pink-washing. By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink–it’s a perfectly nice color–but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors.

Pink-washing is unfair to our boys, as well: I just heard from a mom the other day whose two-year-old son wanted a toy shopping cart for his third birthday.  All she could find at her local Toys R Us was a pink cart. She bought it anyway–but she knows that the adult men in her family are likely to think it’s weird (which is a shame). But, come on; have you ever seen a real shopping cart in pink? I haven’t. I doubt they exist. Pink-washing toys that have no good reason to be pink–that would be considered gender-neutral if they were not–perpetuates so many retrograde stereotypes about sex roles, it’s offensive.

Deborah: When GoldieBlox, a company initially celebrated for its creation of a toy designed to foster girls’ interest in engineering, ultimately disappointed many of us by slapping a princess narrative on it, it seemed challenging, at the time, to articulate a position that both acknowledged the step in the right direction and pushed for more.  (My feeble attempt posted here.) In the war between industry and better alternatives, is it always necessary, do you think, to choose sides? How do we measure progress in a world half-transformed?

Rebecca: I prefer to think of it as a dialogue rather than a war. I don’t want to fight companies; I want to hold them accountable and ask them to do better. Companies have so many stakeholders to work with that they often don’t realize that they are perpetuating gender biases. If they receive constructive criticism from enough parents and advocates, though, they can create better offerings.

Unfortunately, the world is indeed half-transformed in these matters, and it’s often a case of one step forward, two steps back. For example, we can look at Disney’s films and see that slowly but surely, their representations of race and gender have been improving with time. I believe that their efforts at racial inclusivity and empowered female characters signal that they’ve been paying attention to their critics over the years. The problem is that in a behemoth company like Disney, change comes very slowly; and their own Consumer Products Division isn’t keeping pace with the positive changes within the Studios division.

So when it comes to the toys, we’re seeing the same old stale ideas about what’s “princessly,” or stereotypically feminine–even when the products are based on innovative new on-screen characters. That was certainly the case with Disney’s Consumer Products Division’s horrible redesign of Merida last year: she was strong on screen, per Pixar’s wishes; but as her look didn’t “fit” with the existing high-glamour Disney Princess brand, Disney’s Consumer Products Division made several changes to Merida’s looks (see posts here, here and here), undercutting everything parents and kids loved about Merida. What a conundrum.

Deborah: It’s a conundrum indeed. Frozen, anyone? I’m already wondering how princessly those Anna and Elsa action figures will be.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen, join me on Facebook, and subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to keep posted on my coaching workshops and offerings, writings, and talks.

Let’s face it. It’s hard not to jump on the gratitude wagon this time of year.  Research, we know, supports it. But research aside, I’m feeling it. And thought I’d share.

Between latkes and turkey leftovers, please join me in a collective shout out to ten feminist thought leaders in our midst. They are PhDs, soon-to-be PhDs, and/or serious mavens, all with a keen eye for popular debate, and they’re the current crew of active bloggers here on Girl w/Pen. Check out their latest, read all about them, and post a note here or at my FB page about who you’re feeling particularly grateful for in this realm. I’m always searching for models of thoughtful thought leaders, particularly in the zone of feminist public conversation. And additionally, we are always happy to induct new Penners into our crew.

So here we go. For their mind-bending, evidence-based, eloquent, witty, and pithy feminist dazzlery, I’m thankful for:

Veronica Arreola, who is currently pursuing her Ph.D., directs an academic support program for women majoring in STEM and is a longtime mover and shaker in the Chicago feminist community and nationally. Veronica taught me how to blog and is now my terrific colleague in my new hometown, where we frequently find ourselves sharing a stage. Veronica pens Science Grrl, a column exploring the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering.

Susan Bailey, who served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years, and as principal author of the 1992 AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls, is a thought leader whose insights fostered national public dialog on gender in K-12 education and someone I’ve long admired. She pens the column Second Look, offering her reflections of where we’ve been and where we need to go. Take a second look with her at the work unfinished in the realm of girls and sports.

Kyla Bender-Baird, author of Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law, is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and GWP’s fearless Managing Editor. Kyla pens The Next Generation, a column featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career. Kyla and I met when she was my intern at the National Council for Research on Women—and now, like so many former interns, I learn from her.

Tristan Bridges, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, book review editor at Men & Masculinities, and editorial board member of both Gender & Society and Men & Masculinities, pens the column Many Musings, with CJ Pascoe, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and chair of the American Sociological Associations section on Sex and Gender. Together, they share thoughts on masculinity, inequality, and everyday life. They’re our newest addition, and I’m beyond grateful to have them with us. Check out their recent post on bro-porn (think: naked rowers) and the heterosexualization of straight men’s anti-homophobia.

Heather Hewett, who writes about women, feminism, and culture in the U.S. and globally for both academic and mainstream publications (including The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, Brain, Child, and The Motherlode at the New York Times) and numerous anthologies, is an Associate Professor at SUNY New Paltz and a dear old friend without whom I would have probably given up writing a long time ago. Heather pens the Women Across Borders column, offering us a transnational perspective on women and girls. Read what she has to say about the complications, and the promise, of the global girls movement, and what she did on the International Day of the Girl this year.

Elline Lipkin, a scholar, poet, and nonfiction writer who has also worked as an editor for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals, is a girls’ studies guru who explores the state of contemporary girlhood in the United States and how gender is imprinted from birth forward.  Her book, Girls Studies, is a guidepost in the field. She pens the Off the Shelf column, offering book reviews and news, and more. Read her latest (and we mean latest) on the GoldieBlox controversy.

Dara Persis Murray, who writes about the intersections of beauty and feminism as they occur online and in consumer culture (branding campaigns, advertisements, television programs) and whose work has appeared in the academic journals Feminist Media Studies and Celebrity Studies, and in edited collections, pens the Mediating Beauty column, where she muses on the intersections of beauty and feminism as they appear in consumer culture and digital culture. Dara and I met when she was my intern at the National Council for Research on Women; she then became my research assistant, and now I, too, learn from her. Read Dara’s take on Miley’s embrace of the f-word.

Adina Nack, who has been researching and writing about health, sexuality and stigma since 1994 (and winning myriad awards as she goes!), is author of the book Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable STDs and has covered topics including STD stigma, sex education, and HIV/AIDS in venues including Ms. Magazine, academic journalis, and anthologies. Adina is largely responsible for getting us over here to The Society Pages, where we are so happily at home. Adina pens Bedside Manners, in which she applies the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health. Check out what Adina recently had to say about Miley Cyrus, sexuality, and her alma mater.

Virginia Rutter, who has been working at the intersection of academia and media for two decades: first in DC in Congress and at a mental health organization, and (during and after her PhD at the University of Washington), is a sociologist translating academic ideas to general audiences. The author of two books (The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, both with Pepper Schwartz) and numerous articles for Psychology Today, Virginia has written on topics including divorce, marriage, gender, sexuality, stepfamilies, adolescence, infidelity, depression, women in science, psychotherapy research, couples therapy, and domestic violence. Virginia is mentor and guiding light to many (including me). She pens the column Nice Work, sharing insights on social science in the real world.

Natalie Wilson, who is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author who teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, militarism, body studies, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of Seduced by Twilight and Theorizing Twilight and is currently co-authoring a book examining contemporary representations of zombies, witches, and ghosts in popular culture. She also regularly writes film reviews for Ms. Magazine and pens our Pop Goes Feminism column, where she ponders all things popular culture from a feminist perspective. Read her take on the feminist pull of Gravity.

I am also ridiculously grateful for GWP bloggers emeritus currently on hiatus or who have blogged with us in the past: Avory Faucette, Alison Piepmeier, Allison Kimmich, Gwendolyn Beetham, Shira Tarrant, Leslie Heywood, and others, who we welcome back anytime – once a Penner, always a Penner, they say.

Thank you, all, for sharing your minds, passions, and words–you all utterly make my day.

Follow Deborah on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen,“like” her page on Facebook, and subscribe to her quarterly newsletter to keep posted on workshops, offerings, writings, and talks.

We’ve made the society pages!  No, not those society pages.  These ones.

For those of you know us already, the only thing that’s different, really, is our url.  Our content will remain unchanged. For those who are meeting us for the first time, allow us to introduce ourselves—and what we’re doing here.

Girl w/Pen is a group blog dedicated to bridging feminist research and popular reality. We publicly and passionately dispels modern myths concerning gender, encouraging other feminist scholars, writers, and thinkers to do the same. We’re a collective of feminist academics, crossover writers, and writers who have left the academy to pursue other thought leadership forums and forms.

Like researchers and writers themselves, blogs grow up, evolve, and shift shapes.  Such has been the story of Girl w/Pen, which began in 2007 as a way for me to keep friends and family posted as I hit the road on book tour. The name, Girl w/Pen, came in a flash, an easy way to describe myself at the time—an academic transitioning to an identity as a writer in a different realm.

Girl quickly became girls (I know, I know, women—but it was the youthful blogosphere, right?). When I started giving workshops on translating academic ideas for trade, participants of my seminars contributed guest posts.  Some became regulars.  Other fellow travelers followed suit, coming in and out as interests and workflow allowed.  In 2009, we decided to turn GWP into a full-fledged group blog, with a full roster of columns, and the name stuck.  Though admittedly anachronistic, our name continues to speak to the writerly journey many of us have taken, are on, and aspire to, as we put our thoughts to metaphorical paper, raise our collective voices, experiment, bridge research and reality, rabble rouse, and inform.

GWP has become a true interdisciplinary forum, enriched by its range.  Our current lineup of columns includes:

Bedside Manners (Adina Nack): applying the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health

Body Language (Alison Piepmeier): Because control of our bodies is central to feminism. (“It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” –Lucy Stone, 1855)

Body Politic (Kyla Bender-Baird and Avory Faucette): A co-authored column on queer bodies, law, and policy.

Girl Talk (Allison Kimmich): truths and fictions about girl

Mama w/Pen (Deborah Siegel): reflections on motherhood, feminist and otherwise

Nice Work (Virginia Rutter): social science in the real world

Off the Shelf (Elline Lipkin): book reviews and news

Second Look (Susan Bailey): a column on where we’ve been and where we need to go

Science Grrl (Veronica Arreola): the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering

Women Across Borders (Heather Hewett): A transnational perspective on women & girls

We’re delighted to be teaming up with The Society Pages, where we join an active and far-reaching multidisciplinary blogging community, supported by publishing partner W.W. Norton.  When we first started looking for a home, TSP was the first that came to mind.  Major props to Adina Nack for suggesting it, Virginia Rutter and Heather Hewett for seeing it, Lisa Wade and Letta Page for brokering it, Jon Smajda and Kyla Bender-Baird for so beautifully executing it, and Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen for having the vision in the first place—and for welcoming us in.

Here in our new neighborhood, you’ll find long-established and esteemed blog neighbors like Sociological Images, Thick Culture, and Sexuality and Society—blogs that in many ways share our DNA.  You’ll also find here roundtables, white papers, teaching resources, and Contexts magazine. Everyone here is invested in bringing academically-informed ideas to a broad public, to speaking about society with society—just like we’ve always been.

Those of us thinking in public about the way feminist research informs our surroundings and shapes our world look forward to settling into our new digs.  As ever, we invite you to join us.  We welcome your comments and critiques, your follows (@girlwpen) and your shares.  We welcome pitches for guest posts. We’ll keep evolving, enriched by our TSP neighbors, and by you.

We’re honored to be here, and to be a part of your society. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and let us know what you think.

The Girl w/ Pen team is made up of our current editors, regular columnists, and contributing writers. To find out more about each member of our team, click on any linked name to see a full bio. If you’d like to join our team, please see “Submit Your Ink.”

Founding Editor

 Deborah Siegel

Deborah Siegel, PhD is an expert on gender, politics, and the unfinished business of feminism across generations. She is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave), co-editor of the literary anthology Only Child (Random House), co-founder of both the webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online and the popular website SheWrites.com, and a collaborateur with The OpEd Project.

Managing Editor

Kyla Bender-Baird

Kyla Bender-Baird, author of Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law, is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds an M.S. in Women’s Studies from Towson University and a B.A. in Sociology from Principia College.  Kyla specializes in gender, sexuality, law and society, and medical sociology.

Columnists

Susan Bailey

Susan served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years (1985-2011). Following college she taught in Asia, Latin America and the United States; experiences that fostered her commitment to gender equitable education as a cornerstone of active citizenship. As the principal author of the 1992 AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls, her insights fostered national public dialog on gender in K-12 education.

Tristan Bridges

Tristan Bridges is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. He received a B.A. in Sociology from Colorado College in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University Virginia in 2011.  Tristan is also a book review editor at Men & Masculinities and currently serves on the editorial boards of both Gender & Society as well as Men & Masculinities.  He teaches courses on gender, masculinities, sexuality, family, as well as introductory courses in sociology.

Kelsy Burke

Kelsy Burke is a sociologist researching sexuality, gender, and Christianity in contemporary America, paying special attention to how digital media shape religious culture and politics. Her first book is Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (2016, University of California Press). She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Karlyn Crowley

Karlyn Crowley is the author of Feminism’s New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism (SUNY P, 2011), that explores the relationship between feminism and New Age culture. It was a 2011 finalist for the ForeWordBook of the Year Award in the Women’s Issues category. Karlyn directs the new gender center, the Cassandra Voss Center, at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. She is also a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and English and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as an east-coast transplant with her 4-year old, partner, cats, and snow.

Heather Hewett

Heather Hewett writes about women, feminism, and culture in the U.S. and globally. Her essays have appeared in several books, including Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction and Mothering in the Third Wave. Her work on the myths and realities of motherhood and family life has appeared in academic and mainstream publications including The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Mothers Movement Online, Ms. Magazine Online, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Elline Lipkin

Elline Lipkin is a scholar, poet, and nonfiction writer who has also worked as an editor for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland to receive the Kore Press First Book Award and was published in 2006. Her second book, Girls’ Studies, was published by Seal Press in 2009. Endorsed by Peggy Orenstein and part of the Seal Studies series, Girls’ Studies explores the state of contemporary girlhood in the United States and how gender is imprinted from birth forward.

Dara Persis Murray

Dara Persis Murray writes about the intersections of beauty and feminism as they occur online and in consumer culture (branding campaigns, advertisements, television programs). She has examined topics such as the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, the “Am I Ugly?” YouTube phenomenon, America’s Next Top Model/Tyra Banks, cyberfeminism and eating disorder/disordered eating websites, and Kate Moss. Her work has appeared in the academic journals Feminist Media Studies andCelebrity Studies, as well as in edited collections.

Adina Nack

Adina Nack PhD, has been researching and writing about health, sexuality and stigma since 1994: starting as an outreach educator for Girls, Inc. of Orange County, CA and continuing through her doctoral work at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Author of the book Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable STDs, Nack has published articles and essays on topics including STD stigma, sex education, and HIV/AIDS. She has written for Ms. Magazine, her academic articles have been reprinted in over a dozen anthologies, and she has won awards for her research, teaching, activism, and public policy work.

CJ Pascoe

CJ Pascoe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon.  She is also the chair of the American Sociological Associations section on Sex and Gender. She teaches courses on sexuality, social psychology, deviance, gender and education.  Her current research focuses on gender, youth, homophobia, sexuality and new media.

Virginia Rutter

Virginia Rutter is Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University (MA) and member of the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her books, articles, columns, and engagement of public sociology through CCF and Sociologists for Women in Society aim to do what she does as an award-winning teacher at FSU: to make accessible and clear the best available social science research on families, sexuality, and inequality. She is co-author or co-editor of Families as They Really Are 2nd edition, The Gender of Sexuality, and The Love Test, and writes and researches topics related to sexuality in more- and less-committed relationships; divorce; family policy; infidelity; inequality; and scholar activism. 

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Submit Your Ink

GIRL WITH PEN publicly and passionately dispels modern myths concerning gender, encouraging other feminist scholars, writers, and thinkers to do the same. We frequently post Guest Posts (“Your Ink”) and invite submissions that fall under the topics of our various columns in particular.

If you are interested in contributing GIRL WITH PEN, please send a short pitch along with your bio to the editor of the column for which you’d like to write a post.  Contact info for those editors currently accepting submissions appears on their individual bio pages (see “Who We Are“). If accepted, we will request a turnaround time of 1 week for a post of 300-700 words.

Columns are as follows:

The Coach Is In (Deborah Siegel, Editor): building a bridge to a (more) public voice

Nice Work (Virginia Rutter, Editor): social science in the real world

Science Grrl (Veronica Arreola, Editor): the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering

Girl Talk (Allison Kimmich, Editor): truths and fictions about girl

Off the Shelf (Elline Lipkin, Editor): book reviews and news

Bedside Manners (Adina Nack, Editor): applying the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health

Body Language (Alison Piepmeier, Editor): because control of our bodies is central to feminism. (“It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” –Lucy Stone, 1855)

Women Across Borders (Heather Hewett, Editor): A transnational perspective on women & girls

Second Look (Susan Bailey, Editor): Reflections of Where We’ve Been and Where We Need to Go

Pop Goes Feminism (Natalie Wilson, Editor): All things popular culture from a feminist perspective

Mediating Beauty (Dara Persis Murray, Editor): writing about the intersections of beauty and feminism as they appear in consumer culture and/or digital culture

The Next Generation (Kyla Bender-Baird, Editor): featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career

Manly Musings (Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe, Editors): Thoughts on Masculinity, Inequality and Everyday Life

GenderLab (Karlyn Crowley, Editor): Director of new kind of Gender Center runs an experiment. How do we talk about gender and identity in ways that have mass appeal especially for college students? Put on your lab coats and find out.

Oh, God! (Kelsy Burke, Editor): On religion and sexuality

RULES ‘N REGS FOR POSTING ON GWP

Some rules and regs, so that we are all on the same page:

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research and popular reality. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. Bust myths and give us facts, with some personal edge and attitude thrown in. Our content has been described as “personal experience blended with evidence-based expert critique.”

-When polled before the group re-launch, GWP readers favored the posts that offered cultural critique, feminist publishing news/reviews, tips on writing for trade, and items on new research (in that order).

-The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, provocative, somewhat personal, and, importantly, evidence-based (ie backed up with stats, research).

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (500-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts must include links, preferably to other items currently in the news. When submitting a post, if you’re comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you’d like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you’d like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE

: Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.”  If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

FORMAT. The gist of your post should come in the first 300 words (the section before the jump). Content-wise, please consider this template:

• • Place newshook in first few sentences (newshooks can be new book or research, your own, or someone else’s or an interesting news item, an event, a current or upcoming holiday or anniversary, a current happening in pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news)
  • State argument or opinion before the jump; use personal voice here; be provocative or counterintuitive if you can
  • In body of post, cite some hard evidence (stats, studies, your own or others’) to back yourself up
  • Conclude by opening it up to readers to react to either by a) posing a question or b) stating a strong opinion

If you’d prefer to use the format of a roundup or a series of quick takes or quick hits, please see examples, here:

Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
XY Files: Sexist Earners, Boomerang Boys, and Teenage Dads

Some general principles to keep in mind:

1. We prefer proprietary content. However, if you must crosspost, please post on GWP first.

2. Each blogger is responsible for responding to comments on her (or his) own post; one catch-all comment in response to a batch of comments is fine.

Columns

Check out our mission statement, to the right! In keeping with that mission, we frequently post Guest Posts and invite submissions to our regular columns and to Girl w/ Pen in general.  You’re also welcome to contact us if you’re interested in becoming a regular Contributing Writer (see “Submit Your Ink“).

Regular Columns

Bedside Manners (Adina Nack):

applying the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health

Body Language (Alison Piepmeier):

Because control of our bodies is central to feminism. (“It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” –Lucy Stone, 1855)

Body Politic (Kyla Bender-Baird and Avory Faucette):

A co-authored column on queer bodies, law, and policy.

Girl Talk (Allison Kimmich):

truths and fictions about girl

Global Mama (Heather Hewett):

myths and realities of motherhood, family life, and ge

Mama w/Pen (Deborah Siegel):

reflections on emergent motherhood, feminist and otherwise

Nice Work (Virginia Rutter):

social science in the real world

Off the Shelf (Elline Lipkin):

book reviews and news

Pop Goes Feminism (Natalie Wilson):

an intersectional feminist analysis of popular culture

Second Look (Susan Bailey):

a column on where we’ve been and where we need to go

Science Grrl (Veronica Arreola):

the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering

Archived Columns

Beyond Pink & Blue (Lori Rotskoff)Book Smarts (Laura Mazer)Generation Next (Courtney Martin)Global Exchange (Gwenn & Tonni)Relating Radially (Avory Faucette)Sex & Sensibility (Kristen Loveland)The Intersectional Feminist (Allison McCarthy)The Man Files (Shira Tarrant)The Next Generation (guest contributors)XY Files (Deborah Siegel) The Xena Files (Leslie Heywood)

Comment Policy

We encourage and invite your comments on all our posts! We maintain a spirit of civil discourse over here. We’re happy to have disagreements — and frequently do, even amongst ourselves — but we don’t tolerate no disrespect. Please respect the community, and that means the editors and guest posters as well as readers and other commenters too.

I’ve been struck lately by the polarities that sometimes infuse popular feminist debate around gender, childhood, and toys. On multiple fronts.

CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges’ post here last week, controversially titled “Stop the War on Pink—Let’s Take a Look at Boys’ Toys,” sparked a minor bruhaha in popular feminist circles. In their title, and in their post, Pascoe and Bridges used a rhetorical technique that my colleagues at The OpEd Project call “the refocus.” While it seemed to me that their stance of “enough about pink already” could be read as a foil, and a way into their argument, others, like media studies professor and author Rebecca Hains, rightly took issue.  “Does the ‘War on Pink’ Need to Stop for Boys’ Sakes? No, and Here’s Why,” the title of a post by Hains, in response, stated.

Ultimately, as a brief exchange over at Facebook made clear, all parties stand on the same side of the issues here and believe boys and girls all deserve a wider rainbow of options. We agreed a forum didn’t make sense, since it would consist primarily of head nodding. We may disagree on the effective use of certain rhetorical tactics. But we all agree on a similar flavor of change.

Still, it stayed with me. As someone obsessed by the way feminist history repeats, it got me thinking about the past.

There’s a long history to the so-called boy versus girl advocacy in the popular realm. When conservative critic Christina Hoff Sommers came out with The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men in 2001, the very title made me cringe. While willing to be persuaded that boys, in fact, had problems, I saw zero correlation between their issues and “misguided feminism,” however one defined that phrase. Sommers maintained that the so-called “girl crisis” (her term) had led to changes in schools, politics, and parenting that had a horrible cost for boys, who allegedly became even more at risk, as a result.  Interestingly, the book was reissued in 2013 with the “Feminism” of the subtitle changed to “Policies” instead.

But back in 2001, egged on by Sommers’ barb, feminists took the bait. Many responded with what seemed to me the wise yet obvious retort that the war for healthier childhood was not about the girls versus the boys, and that feminists (doh) were not to blame.  I was as indignant as the rest that Sommers, who registered as a scholar, had stooped to such a ploy. I remember thinking, did she really believe some of the things she wrote and said? Whether she did or whether she was using rhetoric to magnify her point, for all the attention given her book, it was an effective, if maddening, ruse.

Much has changed in the 13 years since Sommers’ controversial title first made waves. The field of girls studies has grown exponentially, built on an incredible foundation laid down by the field’s early architects (Girl w/Pen’s own Susan Bailey among them). The field of masculinity studies has deepened and widened, too.  In 2014, those advocating for boys and those advocating for girls are no longer in opposition.  Or at least, we shouldn’t be. Right?

As is often the case on the Internets, a forum as enriching as it can be problematic, when I find myself agreeing with both “sides” of an alleged debate, nodding “yes” to parties who somehow find themselves on opposing divides, my instinct is to bring them together.

Watch for a dialogue between me and Rebecca Hains–-as well as more Manly Musings from CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges–all coming to this space very soon.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen, join me on Facebook, and subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to keep posted on my coaching workshops and offerings, writings, and talks.