Do check out the newsy bits about female media personalities in this roundup, courtesy of the lovely Rebekah at the WMC:

Brown’s CNN Role: A Matter Of Opinion
October 21
Washington Post: When Campbell Brown left her high-profile perch at NBC and launched a nightly CNN talk show seven months ago, her luster seemed to dim amid the crackling cable landscape.

Fresh Face On Cable, Sharp Rise In Ratings
October 20
NY Times: Rachel Maddow, a woman who does not own a television set, has done something that is virtually unheard of: she has doubled the audience for a cable news channel’s 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days.

In Praise Of Peggy Noonan
October 20
Forbes: Every week on Saturday, I–like millions of others–turn in the morn to Peggy Noonan.

Ex-Times Reporter Judith Miller Joins Fox News
October 20
Hollywood Reporter via MSNBC: Pulitzer Prize-winner spent 85 days in jail for contempt during Plame affair

Online Campaign Asks NBC To Think Beyond Caucasian Males When Hiring Next Moderator Of Meet The Press
October 20
NY Observer: Last week, Margot Friedman, a public relations professional in Washington, D.C., launched a Web site encouraging NBC News executives to rethink their strategy for picking the next moderator of Meet the Press.

This influx of estrogenic news is making my head spin — in the good way, of course!  (Is estrogenic a word?  Do people use it? Oh dear.  Clearly I’ve got hormones on my mind.)

Check out the latter bit in particular, where Colin Powell speaks out against Republicans’ insinuations that Obama is Muslim. It’s up there, in my book, with Obama’s race speech.

Now that the group GWP is fully launched, we are finally getting around to some blog maintenance items that have long been on the to-do list. Like, ahem, expanding our blogroll. Our blogroll is on the left, scroll down. Are there sites that should be there but aren’t? And blogrolls that we should be on but aren’t? Your suggestions are most welcome! Please post em in comments and we’ll take it from there.

Thanks so much for your help!

Sarah Palin and Tina Fey do Sarah Palin on SNL!

And Amy Poelher does the Sarah Palin rap.

Joe Joe Joe. All we seem to be hearing about since Wednesday’s debate is Joe. Well, my colleague Linda Basch (Pres of the National Council for Research on Women) is leading us into a discussion of Jane the Plumber, cuz Jane’s got woes too. Specifically, Jane is worried about her retirement funds. As Linda notes,

So far, neither candidate seems to have woken up to the tough economic facts facing so many older women voters. Women represent 57 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries aged 62 and older and approximately 70 percent of beneficiaries aged 85 and older. Women who have been widowed, divorced, or never married are especially dependent on Social Security, which accounts for at least half the income of nearly three-fourths of non-married women aged 65 and older.

Read all about it in “What About Jane Plumber?” over at CNN.com . While I’m at it, I point you to this post by Cindy Hounsell (Pres of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement), “Why Women Are Poor in Retirement,” too.

Jennifer Baumgardner’s latest has a kick**s title: Abortion & Life. Jen’s book came out in September, and I’m eager to read it. But thought I’d spread the wealth, too. Are any GWP readers up for posting a review?

More about the book, from the Publisher’s Weekly review:

Activist, filmmaker (of I Had an Abortion) and co-author (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future) Baumgardner dedicates her work to spreading awareness about abortion. Graced with black and white photo portraits by Tara Todras-Whitehill of women wearing Baumgardner’s shirt, reading simply “I had an abortion,” the emphasis is on the testimony of these patients, revealing not only how common the procedure is (one in three women, according to the Guttmacher Institute) but how diverse those women and their situations are. Baumgardner begins with a brief history of abortion legislation in America, from pre-Roe v. Wade restrictions to clinic workers and doctors protested, threatened and murdered (as in the case of Buffalo doctor Barnett Slepian). Still, as Baumgardner says, it’s the record of “our lives [that] might provide the best road map to strengthening women’s reproductive freedoms.” Included is a comprehensive listing of abortion resources, and 10 percent of the book’s profits go to the New York Abortion Access Fund.

And you can read an excerpt on AlterNet.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Walker’s anthology, One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry,Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love, has a really long subtitle (then again, so did ours, Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo, which Rebecca is in, so ‘nuf said bout that). It comes out in February 2009.  From the book’s description:

Edited by bestselling author Rebecca Walker, this anthology invites us to step into the center of a range of different domestic arrangements and take a good look around. From gay adoption to absentee fathers, from open marriages to green-card marriages, the reality of the American household has altered dramatically over the last three decades. With changing values and expectations, fluid gender roles, and a shifting economy, along with increase in infertility, adoption, and the incidence of mixed-race couples, people across the country are redefining the standard arrangement of family life. In a collection of eighteen honest, personal, and deeply affecting essays from an array of writers, One Big Happy Family offers a fresh look at how contemporary families are adapting to this altering reality.

Each writing from the perspective of his or her own unique domestic arrangements and priorities, the authors of these essays explore topics like transracial adoption, bicultural marriage and children, cohousing, equal parenting, and the creation of virtual families. Dan Savage writes about the unexpected responsibilities of open adoption. Jenny Block tells of the pros and cons of her own open marriage. ZZ Packer explores the ramifications of, and her own self-consciousness about, having a mixed-race child. asha bandele writes of her decision to have a child with a man in prison for life. And Min Jin Lee points to the intimacy shared by a mother and her child’s hired caregiver.

All of these pieces smartly discuss the various cultural pressures, issues, and realities for families today, in a manner that is inviting and accessible—sometimes humorous, sometimes moving, sometimes shocking, but always fascinating.

Stay tuned, in both cases, for GWP reviews.

And for this week’s XY FILES (also a little late!), I wanted to share some analysis from my guy Marco, who continues to blog up a storm over at Open Salon. In his post this week over there, “Postcards from Camelot,” Marco offers a comparative analysis of political family portraiture from the days pre-Betty Friedan with today’s, juxtaposing a portrait of the Obama family that appeared on the Obama campaign’s website, and a portrait of the Kennedy family at Hyannisport circa 1962. Writes Marco,

While Barack is dressed identically to JFK, down to the wristwatch (signifier of male diligence during downtime), it is ironically Michelle who seems the more work-ready in the 2008 image. She is much more formal here than Jackie, as befitting a contemporary professional mom, yet it is also possible that the zetgeist is not yet ready for a black First Lady in leisure attire. Certainly this is true in corporate America, where non-white professionals can still feel the need to one-up their white colleagues in formality just to achieve equal parity.

At a time when Sarah Palin’s suitability for office is questioned even by liberals in the context of motherhood, it is significant that it is Barack whom the daughters embrace. Here we have a signifier not only of progressive gender politics but of the increasing importance of family values in the political sphere. The Obamas are in that sense a tighter unit here than the Kennedys; in the Kennedy image Jack looks true to the pre-Betty Friedan era, a man in proximity to his family yet not unduly “enmeshed”, which implicitly allowed him the freedom to work and “play” outside the domestic realm. Not so Obama, who must project utter wholesomeness in a post-Lewinsky landscape.

In this context, the control exerted over the Obama image is somehow comforting to me. It is, of course, a branded and vetted image, much more so than the snapshots of Camelot yellowing in the White House archives. John-John and Caroline seem distracted and ready to bolt from the Hyannisport porch. Jack is standing with, but not enveloped by his family. In contrast, the Obamas are eyes forward, directly engaged with the photographer and the viewer. Even the children seem utterly at home around the camera, as they seemed at ease in the spotlight of a stadium of tens of thousands. Finally, the Obamas are composed in the classic stable form of the triangle or pyramid, but while the senator is at the core of the group, there is no top-down hierarchy. This is a picture of family as a unit of strength, dynamic but immovable.

This visual read on family values adds a whole ‘nother level to the rhetoric we heard last night. If any of you have seen interesting analysis of Barack as a new kind of dad, or a new kind of man in general–the 21st century kind, that is–please do share links in comments! I’m becoming obsessed with the discussion of Barack’s masculinity over here.

And yet again today, Girl with Pen is extremely pleased to bring you the inaugural post from Veronica Arreola. Veronica will be posting her column, Science Grrl, which brings you the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering the second Wednesday of each month. Here’s Veronica! -Deborah

“While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks he (Senator Obama) voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?” –John McCain

The first project I worked on after I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in biological sciences was called “Women & Scientific Literacy.” Its goal, put simply, was to infuse humanities and social science courses with science and “warm” the cold lab projects in introductory science courses. While the project had an eye on bringing more women to science, we also kept a sharp eye on how these changes might bring more underrepresented men and women to science. Look in your bag and you most likely will find many examples of technology that permeates our world without much thought on our part – Your MP3 player, mobile phone, smart phone/PDA, age-defying lotion, lip-plumping gloss, SPF 35 sun block, and a smudge-proof pen. This was part of the underlying message of our project, that to be a true democracy, we as citizens needed to be literate in science because so many decisions were being made and we all needed to lend our voices and opinions.

The current Presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain highlight the need for scientific literacy. Well, their campaigns don’t say it too loud, but look at some of their campaign promises and you see discussion about stem-cell research, space exploration, and global warming. How can voters decide who represents their views if they don’t understand the science or even the basic need for, say, space exploration? This is why it struck me as odd that McCain, who touts space exploration on his campaign site, decided to use the Adler Planetarium’s need for updated technology as an example of earmarks gone bad. (You can read about the space program here on McCain’s campaign site.)

For the past 50 years, space activities have contributed greatly to US scientific discovery, national security, economic development, and national innovation, not to mention pride and power (the ultimate example of which was the U.S. victory over the Soviets in the race to the moon).

From the debate: “While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks he (Senator Obama) voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”

I am the director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at the University of Illinois-Chicago and we have an outreach program which includes taking pre-college girls from Chicago Public Schools to places like the Adler Planetarium to meet women who work in science and experience the wonders of that dreaded “over head projector” sullied in the debate. What the projector really is is a theater system that displays the constellations in a huge rounded theater. It invokes wonder about the stars and what might be beyond them. We take girls there and other Chicago area science attractions with the hope that such a presentation will spark a lifetime interest in science. It not only rubs me the wrong way that one of the Presidential candidates (ok, his staff members) doesn’t understand this but that much of the country didn’t understand the hoopla.

And let’s not even go into the grizzly bear research earmark… Ah, but that’s the subject of another post.

Tonight, I’ll be watching the debate and waiting for one of the candidates to outline how we will return our country to a place where being smart, an intellectual, is not a smear, but something to be proud of. I will be listening closely to hear their plan to let science lead the way to solutions to many of the crises we face today.

–Veronica Arreola

What do women want from the candidates? GWPers ain’t holding back. Here’s what some of you are saying:

# Katka Says:
October 14th, 2008 at 1:06 pm e

I *definitely* spend more on daycare than food. I not only want affordable daycare, I want great daycare, with informed and well-compensated teachers, where kids are loved and taught respect of others and themselves, along with chances to explore art, music, and other languages. NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK!

# Virginia Says:
October 14th, 2008 at 4:12 pm e

This will be a great panel. Here’s what I’ve got on it: Where 3rd-wave, girlwithpenner style feminism leads us is down a path towards all kinds of equality, all kinds of social and economic justice. I want us not to destroy the planet; I want us not to do violence abroad; I want us to reduce economic inequality. These are women’s, men’s issues, family issues, too! I’m a little utopian at the moment, but if I’m leveraging identity (as a feminist) that’s what I’m thinking about when I think about our new Obama administration! (Here it comes! Here it comes!)

Keep it comin. Tell us what YOU want!

I’ve finally figured out how to post images on WordPress from my Mac (thank you Kristen!) – whohoo! So here’s the one I’ve been wanting to post, here 🙂