Hey–there’s a nice quote from Stephanie Coontz in an article published in USA Today on Feb. 17, “Single and Now a Mom.”

“People feel more free to pick and choose their life trajectories and feel less compelled to marry,” says Stephanie Coontz, professor at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families. “It’s a sea change.”

The article notes that nearly 40% of all American babies were born out of wedlock in 2006, an all-time high, government statistics show. That’s more than twice the rate in 1980, when 18% of children were born outside of marriage. The fastest-growing group of unwed mothers: women 25 to 29. The number of babies born out of wedlock to women in this age group was 10% higher over the course of one year (2005-06). About half of unwed mothers live with boyfriends.

And speaking of CCF, I’m busy reading the entries for CCF’s 2008 Media Awards while I’m away – fantastic reading, all!

GUEST POST: Ok, so in this case, my intro is going to be longer than the actual post. But I wanted to introduce you all to this amazing guest poster with a full on bio because she’s amazing. Joie Jager-Hyman (pictured left) is a writer, consultant and doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Administration, Planning and Social Policy with a concentration in Higher Education. Before coming to Harvard in the fall of 2002, Joie worked as an Assistant Director of Admissions for Dartmouth College, her alma mater. Her current doctoral work focuses on policies pertaining to access and persistence in higher education for low-income students. In addition to her doctoral research, Joie recently completed her first book. Fat Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize (Harper Perennial, March 2008) chronicles the experiences of five very different students as they navigate the world of selective college admissions. Joie has been featured in the Washington Post, 02138 magazine and the Boston Globe, written opinion pieces for the Huffington Post, Women’s eNews and Metro, the world’s most highly circulated newspaper, and has lectured at Columbia University on making the transition between academic and popular writing. Here’s Joie!

Juno: I Don’t See What Anyone Can See in Anyone Else, But…

Entertainment Weekly has an interesting piece about why Juno is hitting an unexpected chord with audiences, who are apparently aching for movies about independent, unique, and strong female characters. It’s true–most “chick flicks” are formulaic fantasies that include weddings, make-overs, unlikely romances that work themselves out just before the credits, and a wardrobe designed by Patricia Fields.

I have to say: I loved Juno. I loved it so much that I saw it twice (though once was on a pirated copy at my friend’s house).

I also have to say: I work with 16-year-olds, and Juno is almost as much of a fantasy for teenage girls as Enchanted was for their little sisters.

Do real-life, knocked-up girls really have the “choice” that so many Americans have been fighting for for decades?

Do they really have the maturity to handle teen pregnancy in stride PLUS the support of their parents, friends, and nerd-stud boyfriends?

I’ve worked with girls who have had babies and known girls who terminated pregnancies. Many did have some support from their families, friends and boyfriends, but most did not have their shizz together, as Juno might say.

To be fair, Juno’s message is not that teen pregnancy is easy for the girl. Throughout the movie, Juno is faced with a host of obstacles, from good ol’ teen angst to problematic adoptive yuppie parents. Everyone stares at her enormous belly when she walks down the hallway at school, and she jokes that her classmates call her the “cautionary wale.”

However, in the end, Juno is able to persevere because of her inner-strength and amazingly strong support system. The movie’s supporting cast is stellar, especially her dad, step-mom and cheerleader best friend who is “into teachers” (props to whoever came up with that detail cause there’s always ONE like that at every school).

Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think back to my own high school and wonder how Juno would have fit in. When I was 16, I had heard of a couple of pregnancies (and I’m sure there were many more than the ones I knew about), but no one ever walked around with a bump. I wonder if these girls really felt like they had a “choice,” or if teen pregnancy was so socially unacceptable in our upper-middle class suburb that abortions became foregone conclusions.

On the flip side, I’ve worked with girls in low and lower-middle income schools who decided to carry their pregnancies to term. And they always kept their babies. None of them were like Juno–mature enough to realize that they weren’t ready for motherhood AND strong enough to go through with an adoption.

These 15- and 16-year-old girls knew that having a baby was going to make it hard to stay in school, get a good job etc., but as far as I knew, none of them considered giving their babies up. I think it just seemed like an emotionally impossible decision for a teenage girl who loves and wants to be loved.

Juno is a heroine, but like most heroines, she’s not quite real.

(Cross-posted on Crucial Minutiae)

GUEST POST: Elizabeth Curtis recently graduated with an M.A. in women’s studies from George Washington University, where her M.A. thesis focused on blogging and the creation of feminist networks online. (The full text of her thesis is available at
here.) Currently, Elizabeth continues blogging and serves as Program Coordinator at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership.

Ah, Interweb Mythology. The NYTimes article Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain highlights the myth that men and boys dominate the internet while women and girls aren’t really active world wide web users. Despite the fact that many, many individuals have spent time debunking this untruth (ie, statements of statistics, explanations of cultural expectations, discussions of female visibility, etc), articles like this one still seem to be very necessary in terms of making known the work female internet users.

Specifically, the article concentrates on a recent Pew Institute study that documents that girls (ages 12-17) create more content than boys while also pointing out the gendered differences in technology careers:

The “girls rule” trend in content creation has been percolating for a few years — a Pew study published in 2005 also found that teenage girls were the primary content creators — but the gender gap for blogging, in particular, has widened.

As teenage bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006, almost all the growth was because of “the increased activity of girls,” the Pew report said.

The findings have implications beyond blogging, according to Pew, because bloggers are “much more likely to engage in other content-creating activities than nonblogging teens.”

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This article strikes me as a great start to a bigger conversation about gender, blogging, and technology.

What’s your take?

PS And what’s up with the boys versus girls title? Anyone put up a “opposite sex keep out” sign on her/his website recently? Anyone?

Crossposted at A Blog Without a Bicycle

As Daph and I get ready for the paperback launch (Feb 26) of Only Child, I came across this historical perspective on only childness in an article by Carl Zimmer in Wired, courtesy of CCF:

Starting about two centuries ago, families in Western Europe began to shrink, and then — country by country, continent by continent — the rest of the world followed suit. The trend is so big that it may rein in the world population’s exponential growth, perhaps even causing it to stop growing altogether over the next century. But exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery.

Hmmm…Well, why may be a mystery, but what it’s like ain’t. More on that, of course, in the book 🙂

Advert over.

(Image cred–oddly, a site for pets! No subcontext there – total accident. I saw the image and thought the bone signified historical artifact — not dog! Oh well.)

Great post from Ann at feministing, citing a big new report from Legal Momentum (“Sex, Lies, and Stereotypes”), which reports on how abstinence-only education is especially harmful to young women and girls.

I’m delighted to bring you this guest post this morning from Renee Cramer (pictured left), an assistant professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University in Des Moines, IA. Renee’s recent scholarly work has focused on intersections of race and class in American Indian law and politics and has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press (Cash, Color, and Colonialism) and several academic journals. Here’s Renee!

This Bridge Called Barack

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote that Barack Obama is the only presidential candidate – either Republican or Democrat – who can bring the United States out of the morass that is the “Culture Wars” and into a saner, more peaceful future. Sullivan wrote that Obama is the candidate who can “bridge th[e] widening partisan gulf” in American politics, suture the fissures created by divisive discourse on religion, and connect the generational divide that typifies Baby Boomer Era politics and rubs those of us in Generations X and Y the wrong way.

Sullivan pictures Obama as the bridge to the future that Bill Clinton sold us on, the bridge to the 21st century. And Sullivan’s right. It is useful, indeed, inspiring, to envision Barack Obama and his candidacy as a bridge that takes us beyond where the Clinton administration left off, and from which the Bush administration has tragically backtracked.

This vision – of Obama as a bridge – is a powerful one for many reasons. But for me, its powerful because it brings to mind the mind-blowing, transcendent work of Gloria Anzuldua. Hermana Anzuldua wrote Borderlands – La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which was published by Spinsters/Aunt Lute press in 1987 and went on to become an often assigned, much cited, lovingly read classic in feminism, Chicano/a studies, and queer theory. In elaborating the title of that book, the late Anzuldua wrote, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”

Barack Obama inhabits these borderlands. As the African American son of a “white” Midwestern woman and an African man, he lives on the borderlands of racial identity in the United States. As someone who has lived with varying degrees of material comfort, as a former community organizer with an Ivy League education, he occupies the borderlands of social and economic class. As a man who publicly celebrates being married to a strong woman, and the father of two daughters, he lives on the borderlands of gender relations. As a person who has lived for extended periods abroad, in developing nations, and who has crafted a persona of calm and compassionate rationality on the world stage, Obama has potential to change the face of the United States in the international arena; he is on the borderlands and the frontier of US foreign policy.

As a powerful campaigner who connects as well in small settings as large venues, indeed, Obama shrinks space with intimacy.

But it is not Anzuldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera that Sullivan’s piece evoked for me – rather, it is her earlier work, the edited volume that she and Cherrie Moraga compiled, titled, famously This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and published in 1981.

That groundbreaking collection was utterly transformational – for scholarship, for women of color, for me (a Midwesterner, a “white” girl), when I read it in college in the early 1990s. The book juxtaposes disparate female voices, in a multitude of languages, attitudes, genres and guises. In it, writers like Audre Lorde call for a “radical restructuring” of the United States – they call for liberation, justice, and subversion. They argued that these transformations could occur in the most intimate of places – the home, the person, the body – as well as in the halls of government and the workings of the law.

NPR’s Tom Ashbrook noted in an interview with Sullivan that Obama’s candidicay, at this particular point in US history, is like a “miracle of American culture.” Anzuldua’s writings, her demarcation of the borderlands, her indigenista mestijae message, her ability to collaborate, to hold onto her idea of self while transcending identity politics – those, as well, are miracles of a truly American culture. I see them embodied in the Obama campaign.

Anzaldua’s writing was called, by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez in their weblog’s obituary for the author, “honest as a cactus.” Obama would likely smile at that phrase. Certainly he has his own tendencies for telling prickly truths, like when he famously spoke about raising auto emission standards, not at an environmental rally, but in front of United Auto Workers members and assembly line workers in Detroit, and when he is frank about the costs of some of his proposed programs, and candid about the costs of the campaign on his personal life.

Some feminists have argued that Hillary Clinton is the candidate we must support, primarily because she is a woman. And lately, supporters of Clinton have accused Obama of sexist language on the campaign trail, as when he said that she “periodically” attacks his campaign, when she’s “down” in the polls.

But my brand of feminism is an anti-essentialist, transformational politics. It is not a reductivist regressive identity politics that sees insult and victimization in the most innocent of phrases. Barack Obama’s very identity requires an anti-essentialist stance. And his refusal to play the race card in the face of clearly racializing language from his opponents refuses the victim cast. Like Anzuldua’s writings, the potential of Obama’s candidacy is “transformational,” as Sullivan writes – transformational of the culture wars, of America’s image abroad, of our sense of responsibility to each other, and of our cynicism and apathy towards “politics as usual.”

In his hybridity, in his transformational and historic campaign, in his focus on empowering and employing the grassroots of American democracy, I see Obama as the most feminist candidate currently running. Certainly, he is a bridge – not a bridge to the dubious promises of the 21st century; but a bridge that evokes the promises of the borderland, the understanding and acknowledgment that American democracy has, as Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga reminded us, been built on the backs of others who came before.

He is A Bridge Called Barack.

You can reach the author at renee.cramer@drake.edu. And thank you to Shira Tarrant for making the connection!

Patti Binder, Guest Blogger, promotes girls’ organizations and girls’ leadership at Whats Good for Girls. Full disclosure– she’s also the Deputy Director at GEMS and the Board Chair for Girls Write Now.

NOW-NYC presents the Susan B. Anthony Awards tonight with three NYC girls’ organizations receiving recognition. While NOW-NYC’s parameters for the award are to honor grassroots activists dedicated to improving the lives of women in New York City, I’m very pleased they have chosen three girls’ organizations to honor, that are all WGFG FAVES, no less.

Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls
Girls for Gender Equity
and
Girls Educational and Mentoring Services

Film maker Rachel Fleit will also receive an award.

Congrats to NOW-NYC for recognizing three outstanding girls organizations!
Wanna come? Deets below:

Ceremony and Reception | February 21, 2008 | City Hall | 6 PM | RSVP 212.627.9895

Cross posted at Whats Good for Girls

Well, she inspires the heck out of me. And Jennifer Baumgardner too.

There’s a pro-Hillary letter going around that I thought I’d post here, since tomorrow’s GUEST POST is pro-Obama. (Please note: this is not Girl with Pen playing it both ways, but rather Girl with Pen very much wanting to maintain an open forum where readers and guest posters are free to share their opinions!) Here’s the letter, for those who might be interested, with info about how to sign on, below….

Feminists for Clinton

We are women who support Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States. We do so because we believe that she will be the best president for the entire country. And as feminists, we also believe that Clinton is the best choice for attending to issues of special importance to women.

We write to you now because it’s time for feminists to say that Senator Obama has no monopoly on inspiration. We are among the millions of women and men who have been moved to action by her. Six months ago, some of us were committed to her candidacy, some of us weren’t, but by now we all find ourselves passionately supporting her. Brains, grace under pressure, ideas, and the skill to make them real: we call that inspiring. The restoration of good government after eight years of devastation, a decent foreign policy with ties to world leaders restored, withdrawal from Iraq and universal health care: we call that exciting. And the record to prove that she can and will stand up to the swift-boating that will come any Democratic nominee’s way: we call that absolutely necessary.

Clinton’s enormous contributions as Senator, public servant, spokesperson for better family policies and the needs of hard-pressed women and children are widely known and recognized-even by her opponent. Her powerful, inspiring advocacy of the human rights of women at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1994 was heralded around the world as a stunning departure from the normal anodyne role of First Lady. Corporate special interests managed to defeat the health care program she advocated in 1994. But she kept on fighting, acknowledging her mistakes, and in ensuing years she succeeded in winning expanded coverage for children. Now she has crafted the only sensible and truly universal health care proposal now before the voters.

On the Iraq war, many of us believe she made a major mistake in voting for Joint Resolution 114 in 2002-along with the 28 other Democratic senators, including John Edwards and John Kerry. But we also note that her current opponent, when asked about that resolution in 2004, responded that he did not know how he would have voted had he been in Congress then. We do not know either. But we do know that at the time, his opposition to the war carried no risks and indeed, promised to pay big dividends in his liberal Democratic district.

Now, the two candidates have virtually the same plan for withdrawal from Iraq. And on the critical, broader issues of foreign policy, we believe that Senator Clinton is far more consistent, knowledgeable, modest, and realistic-stressing intense diplomacy on all questions and repairing our ties with world leaders.

We are keenly aware right now much is at stake-not just on national and international security, but on the economy, universal health care, the environment, and more. Our country needs a president who knows the members and workings of Congress, and has a proven record on Capitol Hill of persuading sympathizers, bringing along fence-sitters, and disarming opponents. There is an irony in her opponent’s claim to be able to draw in Republicans, while dismissing her proven record of working with them as a legislator. We need a president who understands how to make changes real, from small things like the predatory student loan industry to large things like the Middle East. Hillary Clinton has the experience, knowledge and wisdom to deal with this wide range of issues.

Our country also needs a president who has a thorough mastery of “details”-yes, details – after eight years of Bush and Cheney. The job of restoring good government is overwhelming, and will require more than “inspiration” to accomplish it. We believe that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, and many more can be restored to full and effective functioning only by a president who understands their scope, regulations, personnel, problems and history. Knowing these “details” and acting on them are essential to begin the healing and recuperation of the country.

How many of us have heard brilliant and resourceful women in the workplace dismissed or devalued for “detail-orientation” in contrast to a man’s supposed “big picture” scope? How many of us have seen what, in a man, would be called “peerless mastery,” get called, in a woman’s case, “narrowness”? How many women have we known-truly gifted workers, professionals, and administrators-who have been criticized for their reserve and down-to-earth way of speaking? Whose commanding style, seriousness, and get-to-work style are criticized as “cold” and insufficiently “likable”? These prejudices have been scandalously present in this campaign.

With all this in mind, we believe that Hillary Clinton is the best candidate for president, because she is the surest to remove the wreckage and secure the future. Politics is not magic. Hillary Clinton as president promises what government at its best can truly offer: wise decision-making and lasting change.

If you wish to sign on, please send your name to Ellen Dubois (edubois@history.ucla.edu). Please include any relevant affiliations and titles.

Ellen Carol Dubois, Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles Christine Stansell, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago

Coming in May 2008 from Seal Press: The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change. Edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, and with a foreword by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the book includes thirty powerful, hard-hitting literary essays by women who are striving to make the world a better place for children and families—both their own and other women’s—in this country and globally.

From the book’s description:

Each contributor tackles complex issues facing mothers and society today. Whether it’s a mother teaching her children to live ecologically responsible lives, a mother struggling to get out of poverty while raising her kids, a mother’s response to her child being sent to Iraq, or a mother voting for the first time, each writer forges the link, the crucial relationship, between the personal (life with family) and the political (life in the world) to give voice to, and thus empower, other women to realize and seize their collective political clout as mothers. Written by and for mothers, The Maternal Is Political is crafted to help motivate us to discover, appreciate, and use with greater effectiveness our tremendously powerful (and too often underutilized) political votes and voices to create positive social change.

(Thanks to Helaine Olen , who has an essay in it that I can’t wait to read, for the heads up.)

GUEST POST: Helaine Olen is the coauthor of Office Mate: The Employee Manual for Finding and Managing Romance on the Job, with Stephanie Losee. Helaine’s work on parenting, families, books, feminism, politics, personal finance and career strategy has been published in numerous print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon.com, AlterNet.org and The Los Angeles Times, where she wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature. Her essays have been published in Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit and Devotion as well as in the upcoming The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Social and Political Change. Helaine is supersavvy, sassy, and a very welcome addition to the blogging scene. Here she is!

Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Cali Williams Yost, the work/life blogger for Fast Company, thinks a recession could be good for the cause of balance. Sure, there will be a few companies that turn to the tried and true method of firing as many people as they can get away with and forcing the survivors to work 60 hour weeks. But they are so unenlightened! As Ms. Yost posits:

In a recession, more needs to be done with fewer resources. It’s even more critical that your employees are at their most productive and your work-flow and communication management is at its most efficient. Studies show that flexibility to help employees manage their work+life fit results in increased productivity, more efficiency, and better communication.

Finally, companies that need to cutback will use flex to creatively downsize. By offering to reduce schedules or a transition people to project-based, consulting work, employees who otherwise would lose their tie to the organization can stay. When business turns around, those companies then have the option of offering those employees a return to a full-time schedule.

Methinks Ms. Yost has been drinking a wee bit too much corporate Kool-Aid. Wherever she got this delightful idea from, it’s not from working in an actual office during a recession. In my experience, they always come for the part-timers first no matter how short-sighted that approach might well be. The folks who survive the purges are expected to put in 10 to 12 hour days. And while I’ve known a few people desperate enough to work for their former employers (you know, the people who used to offer them benefits) on a contract basis, I’ve never known one who went back to them when the economy improved. Frankly, I know more who opted out of the paid workforce entirely.

Could it be different this time? Hey, anything is possible. But given that most companies are already asking their employees to give them their lives (remember, 40% of American employees work 50 hours a week and up and that’s in a good economic climate), I wouldn’t bet on it.

(Cross-posted here.)