By Guest Bloggers Cheryl, Emily, and Laura of Catalyst

Gender stereotypes can be quite insidious when it comes to emotional display. A recent Penn State study featured on last week’s New York Times shows that perceptions of crying vary depending on whether it’s a woman or a man doing the crying. “A moist eye was viewed much more positively than open crying, and males got the most positive responses,” the study suggests.

Why are gender stereotypes to blame? Because gender stereotypes portray women as more “emotional,” a crying woman is almost expected and – as such – not taken seriously. A crying man, on the other hand, must really have a valid reason to be crying. Or he is viewed as a sensitive person, capable of expressing their emotions in a healthy fashion…

Here is another telling excerpt from the article:

“Women are not making it up when they say they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” said Stephanie Shields, the psychology professor who conducted the study. “If you don’t express any emotion, you’re seen as not human, like Mr. Spock on ‘Star Trek,'” she said. “But too much crying, or the wrong kind, and you’re labeled as overemotional, out of control, and possibly irrational.”

And, unfortunately for women, it doesn’t take much for women to be labeled as overemotional.

Guest post by Alison Piepmeier of Baxter Sez.

I’m giving a talk at Auburn University next week about why feminism still matters. In part of the talk, I map out a familiar feminist concept about oppression operating on three levels–the individual, the symbolic, and the institutional. The individual level is pretty self-explanatory: our thoughts, feelings, and actions perpetuate racism, sexism, and homophobia. The institutional level is a little harder for my students to grasp: this is where we see sexist or other oppressive ways of thinking helping to structure our societal institutions. The higher up we look in economic, educational, political, and religious institutions in our society, the more likely we are to see straight white men–that’s an example of oppression operating on the institutional level.

And then there’s the symbolic level. This is the realm of ideology, imagery, symbolism, and narrative. It’s the realm where common sense is created and perpetuated. Most of my research focuses on this level. I’m studying zines created by girls and women, for instance, and one of the reasons I find these little funky self-produced booklets so fascinating is because they’re intervening in the symbolic realm, offering resistant interpretations of familiar icons of girlhood or ideals of femininity.

On the left you’ll see a page from the zine Mend My Dress by Neely Bat Chestnut in which she’s creatively messing with the Cinderella myth. This issue of her zine is all about her relationship with her grandmother. Here she layers an excerpt from a description of a 1950s mental institution and a sentence from the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl” over repeated images of the fairy godmother from Disney’s Cinderella. I won’t go into great detail here, but I think this is an incredibly complex zine. Chestnut’s stories of her conflicted (and heartbreaking) relationship with her real grandmother, who was institutionalized for mental illness, undermine the fairy-tale images of the grandmother she reproduces on this page. Her zine shows us that the fairy godmother isn’t actually coming, and that the Cinderella story is a lie–an appealing lie, but one that doesn’t help women.

So all of this is leading to a question (two questions, really). When one of my colleagues read over the talk, she observed that much of the activist work young feminists are doing these days seems to take place at the symbolic level: zines, blogs, magazines about pop culture, books, even Radical Cheerleading. Is this accurate? And if so, is it because we live in an increasingly mediated, informationally overstimulated, visually frenetic cultural moment–a moment in which the symbolic seems to be where all the action is?

By way of introduction, I wanted to share a link with all of you loyal GWP readers so that you will have some great feminist blog material to get you through Deborah’s absence. Check out the 46th Carnival of Feminists on Cubically Challenged. The Carnival of Feminists is one of my favorite blog carnivals.

I am sure that many of you are already familiar with blog carnivals, which are collections of the hottests posts on a specific topic that have appeared in the blogosphere during a specific period of time. Bloggers take turn hosting blog carnivals, which travel from blog to blog like a traveling fair and build strong blog networks. I studied blogging and the creation of feminist networks online with a focus on blog carnivals in my M.A. thesis. If you’re interested in this topic, you can learn more at my blog, A Blog Without a Bicycle.

I’m going under for a few days! But while I’m under, GWP will be alive and kicking. Stay tuned for some savvy commentary from a slew of hand-picked smart-n-feisty girls with pens: Patti Binder, Elizabeth Curtis, Helaine Olen, Alison Piepmeier, some amazing women who work at one of my fave organizations (Catalyst)…and maybe more!

PS. If anyone who has guest posted here on GWP before would like to sign up to post next week, please email me by the end of today at deborahsiege@gmail.com and we’ll set you up. (Guidelines for guest posting available here.)

Photo cred: Wolfs Den Crafts

Cougars, move over. Here comes Alpha Kitty.

I’ve been a fan of the White House Project’s partnership with CosmoGirl over the years. I’m all for mixing politics and pop culture, and meeting teens where they are. (And do check out the latest poll from this partnership, on whether the next generation is ready for a female president, and whether they’d be more likely to vote if a woman was on the presidential ballot,via Women’s e-News. The answers, not suprisingly, are yes and yes.)

So I just learned that CosmoGirl’s founding editor-in-chief, Atoosa Rubenstein, who I met once at a Barnard function (and was impressed by, in spite of being underwhelmed by the magazine) has now left Seventeen to pursue other ventures–and is currently circulating a proposal for a book called Alpha Kitty: I Made My Dreams Come True, Despite What the Haters Say, So Can You. Says the New York Times, “Ms. Rubenstein’s alpha-kitty philosophy is the electronic version of the girl-power gospel that Ms. Rubenstein’s mentor, Helen Gurley Brown, advocated at Cosmopolitan.” Rubenstein describes an alpha kitty as a fearless, fashion-conscious woman, who pursue what she wants. Go girl. I just hope that Atoosa keeps the politics somewhere in her prowl.

(Thanks, Mom, for the heads up.)

Our dear Courtney Martin has done it again. Check out her retort to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed on “Generation Q” over at American Prospect. In Friedman’s piece, Q is for Quiet. Courtney’s called hers “Generation Overwhelmed.” If this girl ain’t emerging as one of the most important voices of a generation, I don’t know who is.

(Full disclosure: I was at the party Courtney mentions in her piece. Marco and I were the oldest ones in the room, representing Boomer and Gen X respectively, and we were, as usual, deeply inspired by the FOCs–friends of Courtney–we met that night.)

Are you an academically-inclined writer with a great idea for a book but aren’t sure how to write a trade book proposal that sells, or whether your idea is ready for primetime, or how to think about things like “market” and “platform” in this age of new media? Sign up NOW for my fall bloginar,“Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade” which consists of six Tuesday evening conference calls (8-9:15 PM ET) beginning Nov. 6 and an accompanying online forum.

Read more about MAKING IT POP (and its instructor) in Women’s eNews and the New York Times. And see what past participants are saying about the course here.

Next week is the last week to register! I’m jazzed about the format this time. The online component is going to be a private group blog, where participants post as we go, and I will comment. Participants will also “meet” with my by phone (aka weekly group conference calls), during which I’ll interview editors, agents, academics-turned-journalists, and publicists and then open it up for Q&A. To whet your appetite, here are bios for just a few of our fabulous interviewees:

Tracy Brown is President of the Tracy Brown Literary Agency. Tracy held senior editorial and executive positions in book publishing for 25 years before becoming a literary agent in 2003. He was Editor in Chief of Book-of-the-Month-Club, Editorial Director of Back Bay/Little, Brown, Editorial Director of Quality Paperback Book Club, Executive Editor at Holt, and Senior Editor at Ballantine. As an editor he acquired such New York Times bestsellers as Real Boys by William Pollack, and The Six Day War by Michael Oren. He worked with such esteemed writers as Larry Brown, Rikki Ducornet, Barry Gifford, Greil Marcus, Stewart O’Nan, Salman Rushdie, Jeff Shaara, and Alison Weir. In 2003 Brown began his career as an agent in association with Wendy Sherman Associates. His clients include Esther Perel (MATING IN CAPTIVITY/sold to HarperCollins), Courtney E. Martin (PERFECT GIRLS, STARVING DAUGHTERS/sold to Free Press), Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller (ONLY CHILD/sold to Harmony), Clifton Leaf (WHY WE’RE LOSING THE WAR ON CANCER/sold to Knopf), Joie Jager-Hyman (FAT ENVELOPE FRENZY/sold to HarperCollins), and Jessica Valenti (FULL FRONTAL FEMINISM/sold to Seal Press). In January 2007 he opened his own agency: Tracy Brown Literary Agency (TBLA).

Jean Casella is a freelance book editor who offers a full range of editorial services to authors, publishers, and non-profit organizations, from project development and “book doctoring” through line editing and copy editing. Previously she worked in independent publishing for more the twenty years, most recently as publisher and editorial director of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, a publisher of international women’s literature, U.S. literary classics, and nonfiction for the trade and academic markets, where she oversaw acquisition, editing, production, and marketing of twenty new titles annually and backlist of 250 titles. Jean is co-editor of two anthologies, Almost Touching the Skies: Women’s Coming of Age Stories and Cast a Cold Eye: American Opinion Writing, and is currently collaborating with journalist James Ridgeway on a book about the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina.

Laura Mazer is the managing editor of Seal Press, a trade imprint of Perseus Books. Previously, Laura edited Op-Ed columns for nationally syndicated writers, including Tony Snow, Molly Ivins, Arianna Huffington, and Hillary Clinton, and lifestyle columns by writers such as Ann Landers. She was a senior editor at Brill’s Content magazine and the special sections editor for the Los Angeles Times. She also managed the bestselling Rick Steves series of travel books.

To register, shoot me an email at deborahsiege@gmail.com and we’ll take it from there.

A few random-like quick hits in feminist news this morning, cause this is how my brain feels (aka all over the map): The Times Online chronicles the rise of the “gobby girl,” while New York mag chronicles the scarcity of top female chefs. Meanwhile, The Toronto Star comments on Canadian feminism and generations, and that article in Sex Roles on how feminists do it better goes live. In case you missed the latter:

The two-part study asked 242 undergraduates and 289 older adults about feminism and their relationships. The results…showed that women who identify themselves as feminists are more likely than non-feminists to be dating or married, and that men and women with feminist partners tend to be happier with their relationships and more satisfied with their sex lives.

Can’t say that we’re surprised!

Check it out! The Daring Book for Girls now has an accompanying must-see video.

CONGRATS and heartfelt kudos to Miriam and Andi, the ingenius authors, who are also the women behind the ingenius blog tour community known as MotherTalk. This book is going to kill. In fact, already is, at #132 on Amazon, and it’s not even out yet! I’ll be blogging about it in December, as part of their blog tour. And I’m dreaming up other ways to help them get ink too–because they so deserve it. Well done, ladies.

For anyone remotely skeptical, here’s the book description, straight from their website:

THE DARING BOOK FOR GIRLS is the manual for everything that girls need to know –– and that doesn’t mean sewing buttonholes! Whether it’s female heroes in history, secret note–passing skills, science projects, friendship bracelets, double dutch, cats cradle, the perfect cartwheel or the eternal mystery of what boys are thinking, this book has it all. But it’s not just a guide to giggling at sleepovers –– although that’s included, of course! Whether readers consider themselves tomboys, girly–girls, or a little bit of both, this book is every girl’s invitation to adventure.

The authors’ appearances–including a spot on The Today Show on Oct. 31–are posted here. Spread the word!

So women make up more than 50% of the population, and although we have a female Speaker of the House and leading presidential candidate, women currently hold less than 25% of all elected offices in the United States. If women are choosing not to run for office, how do we change that, and should we be concerned about equal representation? (Um, YEAH!)

So goes the description for this panel tomorrow sponsored by the Women’s Campaign Forum and the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service called Politics and the “F” Word: Does Feminism Matter? (um yeah part added by me.)

During what sounds like a hard hitting and interactive panel discussion, Hillary for President Senior Advisor Ann Lewis, Us Weekly Editor Janice Min, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, NYU’s SVP of Public Affairs Lynne Brown and Community Board 1 Chair and WCF Board Member Julie Menin will address the important question of whether a “women’s agenda” still exists in today’s political life. In other words, why is it important for more gender-based representation to address women’s issues such as health care, child and elder care, education, etc?

Date: Tuesday, October 23rd
Location: NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, The Puck Building, 2nd Floor, 295 Lafayette Street
Time: 8:30AM Breakfast, Program: 9:00AM – 10:00AM
RSVP online or by phone at:
212-981-5285
FREE ADMISSION