This is my cousin Shaina, at her ballet recital. She’s a bumble bee. Aw. I took ballet at Shaina’s age too and didn’t quit til college. When the ballet teachers started telling some of the girls in my classes to lose weight I cut loose. I liked me my HoHos. So enjoy the dance of the bumble bees Shaina, but if you keep at it, fight for the right to your Hoho, too 🙂

The economy may be Issue No. 1, but what do working women have to say about it all?

The leading labor-rights organization, the AFL-CIO, and its community partner, Working America, are collecting data online for their Ask a Working Woman survey between now and June 20. The survey is a chance for working women to tell decision-makers what it’s like to be a working woman in America in election years. It’s open to all. They want to hear what working women need – health care, pension benefits, flex time? – to make the crazy juggling act that is working womanhood easier.

Findings will be announced to decision makers and released in nationwide media in order to highlight and help improve the status of the working mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, nieces, you get the picture. In 2006, more than 22,000 working American women took the survey. I hope in 2008 they get even more.

There’s more background information about the survey available on the AFL-CIO News Blog.

The devastation in Myanmar and China has been so overwhelming as to render me silent on it all. But this morning I caught a segment on the news, and later read in the paper, about all the Chinese parents who have lost their only child. And I lost it.

There’s a Bloggers Unite for Human Rights challenge going on today and so here I am, still wordless, carrying unspeakable grief in my heart all the while knowing it’s nothing compared to what the victims of the cyclone and the earthquake are feeling on the other side of the world.

Amnesty International has posted links to a number of their campaigns–ways to get involved in human rights and aid efforts around the globe. And here is a link to the Red Cross’ donate page.

But here’s my lingering question for this day, and I know I have much to learn from others on this front: When devastation is so emotionally overwhelming that your impulse is to turn away, what can you do in that moment, really do, to stay human and not just let yourself turn away?

I just got an email from a coordinator at Current TV, where they just released a compelling video that profiles “Ducky Doolittle” as she travels across the country teaching people about sexual empowerment. So I’m sitting here at Starbucks (yes, evil Starbucks) and I open the link for the video and before I know it Ducky is shouting “THIS IS THE CLITORIS!” through my computer, for all of Starbucks to hear. Hehe. I guess that’s kind of the point–and I’m all for it. But still, I’m left here at Starbucks kinda wanting to crawl under my chair.

I’m late and light on posting today because this morning I went to an 8am panel on “Women and Ambition,” sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women’s Corporate Circle. Those corporate ladies start early!

A true post about it coming before week’s end, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a little good fortune: I realized once on the subway that I already own the two amazing books that were included in the giveaway package. So I’d like to offer them as giveaways to the first two people who email me at girlwpen@gmail.com with their snail mail addresses. Please specify your choice. The books are:

1. Anna Fels, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives
2. Marie Wilson, Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (with a new afterword)

And an aside: I just did a quick Google image search using the word “ambition” and all the pictures that came up featured guess who…men! Except for this one above. Hmmm.

Just of few of many links, culled from around the internets:

NPR host Renee Montagne reports on “The Mother’s Index,” which compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries.

Broadsheet sounds off on some pop culture mom-ranking.

MotherTalk blog tours Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own and The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book.

And PunditMom smartly rants on the media branding of families, from the perspective of an adoptive mother.

The second class of PWV is well underway, and already I miss being a part. So yesterday I sat in–ok, lurked–on a Progressive Women’s Voices conference call with Janus Adams, the Emmy Award-winning author/historian, publisher/producer, creator of BackPax children’s media. Janus herself was one of four children selected to end de facto segregation in New York in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. These days, in addition to hosting a talk show, she writes a weekly column, her latest one titled, “25 Books that Changed African-America–Book #4.” In case you’re wondering, Book 4 is Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper launched on March 16, 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. These two launched not only a newspaper, but the history of African-American journalism as well.

I’m just curious to know whose idea it was over at Washington University to grant Phyllis Schlafly an honorary degree. Genius. NOT! And hey, wait, Phyllis, what are you doing accepting an honorary doctorate when women are supposed to be barefoot in the kitchen? Um, hypocritical much?

Feministing weighs in here, and Katha Pollitt weighs in at The Nation. (Thanks, Va, for that heads up the other day. Oy.)

The brilliant Alissa Quart (of last month’s NYTimes mag spread on transgender youth fame) has a short piece up at Mother Jones about the new fertility-movie genre that’s definitely worth a read.

In “When Chick Flicks Get Knocked Up,” Alissa questions the happy ending substitute of baby love and emphasizes their conservative bent. She also notes that these “embryo pics” invert film themes of yore:

The prenatal pics don’t mean to irk their viewers, of course: they are simply are a corny replacement for the serrated romantic comedies of the 1940s, in which sparkling, independent female protagonists, sporting sharply tailored suits and sharper repartee, wound up getting their comeuppance in the form of a rake who could finally domesticate them. In fertility movies, the rake taming all female powerhouses is an infant. Worse, embryo pics have inverted another film theme. Women who once chose an unusual life path picked child-free independence—liberated Klutes or unmarried women. Now, conceiving of an infant without marriage or even love is the filmic symbol of independence. In this way, these films recast the “pro-choice” narrative of feminists’ personal and political past as a different, less politically dangerous sort of pro-choice story—a woman’s right to choose from a smorgasbord of late fertility options. Once, in the recent age of “Murphy Brown” having a baby as a single woman was the most rebellious and politically radical thing our heroine could ever do. Now becoming a single mom onscreen makes a film heroine more conventional.

Thoughts?!

David Crary, an AP reporter I admire and a winner of the 2008 Council on Contemporary Families Media Award, had a piece up at Yahoo news last week called “Feminists Sharply Divided Between Clinton, Obama” that is one of the few truly thoughtful pieces on the divides in a MSM venue I’ve seen. Thank you, David, for being interested in the issues and not in the alleged fur and claws.