For a good while now, blogger Melissa Silverstein has been keeping excellent track of women at the movies–as producers, directors, and audiences. And this week over at Women and Hollywood blog, Melissa writes:
Sex and the City took in $5.5 at the box office on Monday making it the best non-holiday Monday of the year after Iron Man. News flash to Hollywood, women do go to the movies during the week.
Will SATC change the way Hollywood looks at the female audience demographic? We shall see.
Quick reminder, for those in the vicinity, or those coming in: I’m offering a 3-hour blogging workshop on Saturday at the National Council for Research on Women’s annual conference, Hitting the Ground Running: Research, Activism, and Leadership for a New Era, on Saturday. The conference froms from June 5-7 at the Kimmel Center at NYU (60 Washington Square South). And for anyone convinced that the blogosphere can be ignored, I urge you to read last week’s article in AdAge on just how mainstream it is–among women.
Developed in tandem with Courtney Martin, who will be out of town for this one, the session will be led with the assistance of Elizabeth Curtis.
You can still register for the NCRW conference, here. And thanks for passing it on to anyone you think might be interested! Description of the session below.
Strategic Blogging for Organizations, Women’s Centers, and Feminist Experts
Author and blogger Deborah Siegel will lead participants through the basics of blogging—both logistical and philosophical. Participants will leave with a sense of the ways in which blogging is changing the media landscape—especially for women!—and tools for how to start one for their organization or improve one that’s already off the ground. Topics will include: young feminism and activism online, reaching the momosphere, and publicizing events and publications through blogs.
Well, it’s over. And with heavy heart yet a solid sense of the stakes come November, this Hillary supporter is turning her energy now to the general election and getting herself completely behind the dude. So many important lessons and takeaways from primary season, which I’ll continue to write and speak about as we go.
Of course, one of the most important outcomes of having two such amazing candidates on the Dem ticket this primary season: the number of young people who rallied. On that note, definitely check out Courtney’s latest, Fanning the Flames of Youth Civic Engagement, over at the WMC this week. Here’s a summary:
As we finish the final contests of the primaries, young people are excited about politics. According to the PBS News Hour, 5.7 million people under the age of 30 voted in the primaries, a 109 percent increase from last presidential election. As Courtney Martin reports in the latest WMC Exclusive, young voters’ enthusiasm should not be written off as a case of “Obama mania” (he got just 57 percent of the youth vote in Iowa, for example). Courtney writes, “In 2004, youth turnout in the general election rose by 4.3 million votes over the 2000 level, and hit the highest level in over a decade… The challenge ahead is to keep the excitement over the primaries alive until November, but what’s more, make sure that civic engagement becomes an organic part of young people’s frenetic lives from here on out.”
This is why I love CCF, which I blog about here a lot because they’re just such darn good providers in the knowledge business. This week they’re issuing a press release on the importance of a time use survey, with contemporary spin and flair–and an important message with policy application: “Save ATUS.” What’s ATUS you ask? Here’s a sneak peak at the release, courtesy of Virginia Rutter, who just sent it to me. Feel free to pass it on!:
Making Time for Work and Family: Got Data?
For Family Social Scientists, the American Time Use Survey Provides Valuable Information on Work, Family, and How We Endure the Conflict between the Two
June 4, 2008 Chicago Il —- Mothers do more paid work—14 hours more—than they did 40 years ago. They do less housework—exactly 14 hours fewer—too. But they do 4 hours more of childcare than in the past. How do we know? Suzanne Bianchi, University of Maryland sociologist, and her colleagues used the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a time diary study that has been collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2003.
Dads are stepping up in new ways too. Men have steadily increased their participation in housework and child care over the past 30 years. And contrary to claims of some earlier studies, dads who work less than full-time don’t use their extra time just to watch TV. Part-time worker dads do more housework (about an hour more) than full-time worker dads, and about 40 minutes more childcare. We know about these changes thanks to forthcoming work from Liana Sayer (Ohio State University) and Sanjiv Gupta (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) in which they analyzed the 2003-2005 ATUS.
But if women have given up 14 hours a week of housework and taken on 14 more hours of paid work, what else have they given up to put in 4 more hours of childcare? Here the news may be less rosy. It appears that social bonding with spouse, kin, and friends is being sacrificed to the higher standards for time with children. Bianchi and colleagues’ analysis of the ATUS reveals that, compared to 20 years ago, married working moms now spend less time with their spouse—while single moms spend less time with friends and family.
SCIENCE HELPS US KEEP UP WITH SOCIAL CHANGE
These facts illustrate the on-going revolution in how Americans spend their time—what they do at work, how men and women organize family schedules, and how children and teens spend their days. To understand changes in family life and to guide policy makers—and families themselves—about the best ways to adjust to new patterns of work and parenting, researchers collect such information. This in turn becomes the basis for news stories, advice columns and television programs that citizens rely on—and are hungry for.
The American Time Use Survey is one of those key resources. (For more information on ATUS visit http://www.bls.gov/tus/home.htm and www.saveatus.org.) As researcher Bianchi explains, “ATUS provides essential information about how Americans spend their time—time spent caring for children, cleaning the house, working for pay, and caring for sick adults.” We all rely on these jobs being done in order to keep our society running well: but it is vital for us to know how, when, and by whom they are done in our changing social world.
“The Council on Contemporary Families uses this kind of scientific research in order to understand the complex and changing dynamics of the family,” reports Evergreen State College Professor Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education. “Many CCF briefing papers and fact sheets rely on data from the time-use studies.” (A host of examples are at http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/briefpapers.php.)
“The complexity of coordinating families’ work and school schedules with the need for health care, down time, cultivation of intimacy, and everyday chores presents new challenges to couples, parents, and children in the way they spend their days,” explains Coontz. “Changes in time use help us understand how families cope with modern stresses–and also what happens when they cannot cope. Right now, the economy is slowing down, but many families find themselves speeding up. Unless we keep on top of these changes, we cannot analyze what kinds of practical support and information families need. Making sure that the data continue to be collected is an issue that cuts across partisan divisions, uniting family researchers from many different points of view.”
For further information on the American Time Use Survey, visit http://www.bls.gov/tus/home.htm.
WELL DONE, CCF!
Interesting piece in today’s NYTimes by Tamar Lewin, titled ‘Sisters’ Colleges See a Middle Eastern Bounty. It seems women’s colleges are a dwindling breed in the United States. So this spring the admissions deans of the five leading women’s colleges — Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley and Smith — went recruiting to a place where single-sex education is more than a niche product: the Middle East. Read the rest.
Kudos to Nancy Polikoff for her smart LA Times oped the other week! Nancy is the author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law, and a law professor at American University, and a scholar who calls for valuing contemporary families not as they “should” be but as they are. Here’s the lede graf (journo speak for the opening paragraph) of her oped:
It’s the 1968 revolution you never heard of. Forty years ago today, tucked in between the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling repudiated centuries of settled law by granting constitutional recognition and protection to a previously outcast group: children born outside of marriage and their parents….
From a “making it PoP” perspective, I like her lede sentence. Very grabby. For the skinny, read the rest here.
So Philip Weiss recently “reported” in New York Magazine on the secret lives of married men. And the gals at Slate’s XX Factor blog responded, calling the piece “not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer’s long-winded attempt to rationalize his desire to screw a variety of women despite being married.” I concur. Though Weiss’ article presents itself as provocative and edgy, the piece is inflected with the naïve, wishful rhetoric of 1970s thinking about sex. Here’s the XXers’ take:
Weiss explains that men “hunger for sexual variety” and determines that this hunger is “a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse.” He reports that men are using more porn than ever and quotes Mark Penn wondering what will happen when women “realize it.” He notes that sexless marriages among power couples are endemic. He harps on his own desire for “some[thing] strange.” Yet when his exasperated wife proposes an open marriage in response to all his bellyaching, he flinches at the thought that she might avail herself of the new rules, too.
Ah, Phillip. Double standard, much?
This is a pic of my authors’ group, the Invisible Institute, celebrating our fourth year last night! Sadly, I had to miss. But I’ve been writing here about my love of this group and so I thought I’d share a visual. This group has supported its members from proposal to publication–many are on our third books now–and it’s been like oxygen to me. Profound gratitude to Annie Murphy Paul and Alissa Quart for starting us and keeping us going all these years.
Hi girlwithpenners, Laura Mazer here again, this time blogging from BEA in Los Angeles! BEA, or BookExpo America, is the annual international book-industry convention held here in the United States, and it’s a major scene—everyone in the industry shows up to buy, sell, pitch, scope the competition, and score some pretty neat swag. (Thank you, Chronicle Books, I love my new sky-blue tote bag!)
The mood is buzzy on the floor, and I love to eavesdrop on the meetings in the lounge areas and booths. The Canadians are selling European book rights to the Italians, the Brits are working out co-publishing deals with the Americans, agents are pitching publishers, publishers are pitching booksellers, and everyone is eyeing each other’s new releases, wondering what the next big breakout title will be. It’s book-lover heaven.
The reason I wanted to blog from here is because BEA always reminds me just how many thousands of publishers, editors, and literary agencies there are. I used to think of the book world as small, insider-y. It seemed as though there were only a handful of publishers, and if you didn’t know someone who knew someone at one of those houses, you probably wouldn’t get a book published. But looking around me here on the convention-center floor, I’m seeing row after row of big houses, indy houses, academic presses, niche publishers, boutique publishers, nonprofit publishers, and all the hundreds of imprints that specialize in certain categories (particularly popular this year are the mind/body/health/spirituality publishers, which seem to be cropping up all over the country). There are so many publishers here that I actually got lost one afternoon when I went in search of a publicist friend’s booth without my floor map.
The point of my telling you all this is: If you have a good book idea, there is a publisher out there that’s right for you. There’s a little bit of a dating-and-mating game to be played in the process of finding that publisher, but I guarantee you it’s out there. Make yourself familiar with which imprints and houses are publishing the kind of book you want to write, and target those houses when you’re pitching your idea.
And if you’re in New York next year, drop by BEA for a day and see for yourself how big and beautiful this industry really is. (Just wear comfy shoes, and don’t lose your map.)
Some interesting tidbits today, once more, on momhood:
First, an interesting article by Paul Nyhan in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reporting that the gap between the demands of work and home in 2008 remains wide, far wider for those sitting on the bottom and in the middle of the wage scale, according to Virginia Rutter, a senior fellow with Council on Contemporary Families. They have less money for child care and often face meager benefits at work.
In another twist, older moms are more likely to keep working after having children than younger moms, according to an analysis of federal data by former Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Charlotte Yee. In 2004, 67 percent of moms age 30 to 44 were in the labor force after having their first child, compared with 56 percent of moms in the 20 to 24 age range.
And finally, a propos of this weekend’s grand opening of Sex and the City, a Slate article reports that one of the three married mommies innocently trailing their little tyke is cheating. Wowza. The data comes from a new “Sex and the American Mom” survey conducted by Cookie magazine and AOL Body and apparently filled in by 30,000 women. Researchers, does this data ring true?
