For those of you who, like me, are not currently in DC, some highlights from the concert. On the eve of MLK Day, it’s moving to see this taking place in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Pete Seeger, The Boss, and a bunch of other performers singing “This Land Was Made for You and Me”:

Beyonce singing “America the Beautiful”:

As readers know, I just can’t seem to stop writing about this recession — ever since hubby got laidoff last week.

A piece I wrote in response to that NYTimes article from Sunday (“Daddy’s Home, and A Bit Lost”) is now live at the Women’s Media Center site. It’s called “Masculine Mystique, Meet Feminine Mistake”. Thanks for passing it on!

First, thanks to Aviva over at Fourth Wave for posting a roundup of links to the Great Ms. Cover Debate of 2009 (“Super-Feminist Obama to the Rescue!“), and to Yondalla, who writes in reference to the image of Obama as Super-Feminist-Man in comments here at GWP, “A man who is a feminist would not be someone who would rescue us. It would be someone who walks beside us.”

Having read the critiques, I get it now.  And I respect the dissent.  But I stand behind my original praise of the cover.  I agree with Jill over at Feministe, who writes,

“Obama has reportedly self-identified as a feminist, and has the legislative record to back it up. Is he a perfect feminist, or a perfect progressive? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Is he going to disappoint us over and over? Yeah, he’s already started. But he’s still pretty damned good, especially for a mainstream, center-left politician elected to the highest office, and I don’t really see the point in kicking him out of the club just yet.”

The brouhaha over this cover is not generational, nor is it necessarily PUMA-related (as Megan at Jezebel snarkily and dismissively asserts). The controversy is over the rescue narrative, and how one reads visual imagery, which is often more polyglot than it seems.

Looking at the current cover next to the famous 1973 cover featuring Wonder Woman, a bunch of questions come up for me.  First, wasn’t this cover perhaps intended as satire?  Because next to the cartoonish Wonder Woman cover, the current one certainly strikes me as having an element of fantasy to it too.

Second, Ms. is a magazine that has tried to reinvent itself over and over again.  Its current readership skews older, and I imagine engaging younger readers is now key.  In putting Obama on the cover in this way, are the publishers sending a message that the feminism of Ms. is big-tent enough to encompass younger Obama-supporting feminists?  Was this a move to get beyond the stereotype of Ms. as “your mother’s magazine” that some younger women continue to hold?  If so, I laud the extending of this generational olive branch.

In the end, I get the critiques about how men can’t save feminism.  I really do.  But bottom line over here: I like the playful, subversive idea that inside the most prominent man in the world right nows lies a feminist ready to more publicly engage.  Time will tell whether or not it’s true.

(Paging Marco, my laid-off graphic designer husband who thinks a lot about superheros and blogs about the narratives behind images!  Weigh in, my dear Clark Kent?!)

Hells yeah!  It’s high time we include worthy men in the visual iconography of feminism.  The question of whether Pres-Elect Obama is such a man remains, fully, to be seen.  But I’m banking that he is.  And if he’s not, then I’m banking on Michelle and Hillary–and all the rest of us–to keep him in line.  More than any president in our past, this man has got serious feminist potential.

But apparently, the cover of the special inaugural issue of Ms. magazine is generating a whole lot of buzz. In a HuffPo piece yesterday, publisher Eleanor Smeal stands by the magazine’s choice, noting:

“It’s not every day Ms. puts a man on its cover. In choosing the cover for this special Inaugural issue, Ms. wanted to capture both the national and feminist mood of high expectations and hope as the 44th President of the United States takes the oath of office.”

She adds,

“But we are not giving President-Elect Obama a blank check. For our hopes to be achieved, we must speak out and organize, organize, organize to enable our new president’s team to achieve our common goals. Ultimately, we must hold our leaders’ feet to the fire or, to put it more positively, uplift them when they are caught in the crosscurrents of competing interests.”

Personally, I think the cover is FAB.  I haven’t yet read the commentary by those who find it–what, offensive, I guess?  Have you?  Is this a generational thing?  A Hillary thing?  And regardless, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

From time to time, we put your comments into posts. Here’s one I couldn’t pass up, from Girls Education and Mentoring Services’ (GEMS) Patti Binder, who blogs at What’s Good for Girls. Patti’s resilience story inspires me right back. –Deborah

Hey Deborah!

I have been thinking of you– your honesty about what’s happening and your ability to write about it on a day to day basis are really amazing and inspiring. No doubt you and Marco are resilient and will have what it takes to get through this on the other side, perhaps even in a better position. If I can do anything– let me know! I’d be happy to!

The recession sucks– and it amplifies everyone’s fears. In the non profit world, where I live, the loss of state contracts in the wake of Paterson’s proposed budget, the increased competition for foundation dollars as their endowments take hits, or close all together in the case of Picower and Jeht– (all of their money was tied up in Madoff) we are now all “bunkering down” in your words, running numbers, strategizing, crying, hoping, praying, and as always, working, working, working, and remembering the reason we do the work– the girls we serve.

Sometimes I feel my mind running all of the terrible what if scenarios..and I feel like its what people used to say about terrorism, you know, if you are afraid to go outside then “they’ve won already.” I wasn’t one to be wrapped up in fear and paranoia around the terrorism thing, but I do feel that its good to stop obsessing and worrying (but thinking and strategizing) or “they will have won already.” I refuse to let the Madoffs and the Bushes and the Cheneys win in my personal world–

ramble, ramble…at any rate, thinking of you!

Patti

And GWP just became a media partner! What’s Fem2.0, you ask? Check it out, at their blog!

Some preliminaries:

Feminism 2.0–a conference slated for February 2, 2009 at George Washington University in Washington, DC–will bring together the leadership of major women’s advocacy organizations and online women’s communities, to “further the connection between the experience, knowledge, formidable real-world grassroots networks and online advocacy tools of women’s advocacy organizations with the powerful and growing communities of women online.”  How cool is that?

Among this gathering’s goals:

• To harness the power of women on the Internet to promote women’s issues.

• To create a forum – starting with the Fem2.0 website and continuing through the event – for women to discuss the issues that are of most concern to them today, and to encourage them to use the Internet to learn more, express their opinions about them and advocate for policies that benefit women and families.

• To create an opportunity for a “meeting of minds” across generations and media platforms.

• To unite women’s voices behind the issues that the vast majority of women support, such as education, healthcare, workplace fairness and economic security.

• To position women’s issues and their advocates for the incoming administration.

• To draw new audiences to women’s issues, especially those who are Internet-focused and can cross-pollinate to increase activism.

• Expand the audience of women engaged in online media activity and activism.

For more info, check out the Fem2.0 blog, email Gloria@fem2pt0.com, or call 703.304.5859.

A few quick hits:

A front page story in this weekends Style section titled “Daddy’s Home, and a Bit Lost”

Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon on “Rosies of the Recession

Barnard’s new President on “One Gender’s Crash” in WaPo

Former Sec’y of Labor Robert Reich on The Stimulus: How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

And for kicks (though not explicitly on recession), a new video from the YWCA’s OWN IT initiative on what young women want from the Obama Administration.

Seen more stuff on gender and the recession? I’m collecting links!

For those in NYC, an event to get one’s mind off the recession and onto…the future.  The last Girls Write Now event like this I attended pretty much blew me away. Here’s the story:

Today is Day 1 of my being sole and primary breadwinner—for the first time in my married life.

I gave Marco the home office this morning and headed off to COSI to do my work.  And boy oh boy is there company here.  Is everyone on the Upper West Side a freelancer, or looking for work, today or what?  The guy across from me is biting his bottom lip and reading the Wall Street Journal. A casualty of Lehman Brothers?  Maybe I’m just making myself feel better, but heck if Misery doesn’t love her some company right now.

Except that I’m not feeling so miserable.  The news is still fresh, and Marco is still processing in many ways.  But for the most part we are taking refuge in a shared bunker mentality and making the best of things.  Last night we ate cookies for dinner and watched a marathon 4 hours of 24.

Apparently, we’re not alone in feeling good–or at least, ok–amidst the bad.  I read with interest this article about resilience in yesterday’s NYTimes, titled “Down and Out–or Up,” which was accompanied by the image in this post.  My favorite bit was this:

“[T]he depth of this economic collapse has unceremoniously stripped thousands of far more than money: reputations have reversed; friendships have turned sour; families have fractured. Yet experts say that the recent spate of suicides, while undeniably sad, amounts to no more than anecdotal, personal tragedy. The vast majority of people can and sometimes do weather stinging humiliation and loss without suffering any psychological wounds, and they do it by drawing on resources which they barely know they have.”

And to be honest, that’s kind of how it feels.  I’m discovering resources I didn’t know were in me.  Marco’s got resources too, and we’re both keeping focused on what’s most important.  “All I have to do is look at Tula’s face,” Marco said to me at one point this weekend when we were both marveling at how not-yet-panicked we felt.  Tula, being our 5 month old crazy kitten.

It’s our mantra this week: Tula’s face.

In the midst of horrible headlines, a bright spot.  As reported at Womenstake, the National Women’s Law Center blog, today the House of Representatives passed both the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. “These key bills provide women with critical tools to challenge pay discrimination. However, in order to ensure that women truly receive equal pay for equal work both of these bills must pass the Senate before reaching the desk of President-elect Obama.”  Read what’s next, here.

And on that note, I wish everyone a good weekend. Marco and I will be laying low, though I have some potentially exciting new projects brewing now in my head….