More on the young feminist road trip I mentioned briskly in an earlier post. Twenty-three year old writer Nona Willis-Aronowitz (daughter of Ellen Willis, founder of Redstockings, Voice editor, and the New Yorker’s first rock critic) is pairing up with Emma Bernstein (daughter of painter and art journal editor Susan Bee — and niece of my mentor/friend Susan Bernstein) to document what “feminism” means to members of their generation, in words and images. Their book will map the future and acknowledge the past. I’m looking forward to doing whatever I can to help these ladies out – how much do I LOVE this project?!

I just learned about MediaCommons, an online community exploring the changing nature of what it means to “publish,” and new forms of digital scholarship and pedagogy. Interesting convo going on over there now about the issue of what blogging and other forms of online publishing “count” for in the academic system of reward. For those of you tenure bound, might want to check it out!

(Thanks to Elizabeth Curtis for the heads up.)

From the National Women’s History Project’s blog, Writing Women Back into History, come these tidbits and reminders:

September includes the anniversaries of Billie Jean King defeating male chauvinist, Bobbie Riggs, on the tennis court in 1973 and Sandra Day O’Connor being sworn in as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court eight years later. The first weeks of September also include the play-offs for the WNBA.

GREAT hooks for anyone considering writing an op-ed this month!

(Pic is of the tennis dress King wore at the match.)

Louise France and Eva Wiseman set it straight, with a piece in the Observer Woman on how younger women’s attempts to rebrand feminism 35 years after the launch of Spare Rib magazine. The article begins:

My mother and I are in the pub. I tell her that I’m researching a piece about Britain’s young feminists. My mother, who is in her 50s and was inspired by reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch when she was a Seventies housewife, looks astonished. ‘But there aren’t any,’ she says, with the finality of a lid being placed on a saucepan.

F-Word editor Jess McCabe and other young feminists answer the following questions: How did you become a feminist? How are you different from your mum’s generation? What are the clichés about feminism? Can you be a feminist and go to a lap-dancing club? What makes you angry? Check out their answers here.

(Thank you, Catherine, for the clarification!! -GWP)

People are always asking me if I know any freelance book editors, so I thought I’d post some info here about someone I always recommend.

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This just in: There’s been a sharp increase in never-married twentysomethings in just six years. According to new Census figures released today, almost three-quarters of men and almost two-thirds of women in their 20s in 2006 said they had never been married! As reported in USA Today:

Among men ages 20-29, 73% said they had never been married in 2006, compared with 64% in 2000. For women, 62.2% had never married in 2006, compared with 53.4% six years earlier.

The data also show the percentage of those marrying in their 20s continues to decline. A USA TODAY analysis of the new Census figures shows that just 23.5% of men and 31.5% of women ages 20-29 were married in 2006. (The analysis excludes those who are married but separated.) Both the number and percentage of those in their 20s fell from 2000, when 31.5% of men and 39.5% of women were married.

“These clearly are quite dramatic changes by demographic standards,” says demographer Peter Morrison of the non-profit RAND Corp., which studies public policy issues. “The amount of change in six years is quite substantial. It’s impressive in terms of the degree to which the institution of marriage is evolving. There clearly is a process of social evolution occurring here, and one can speculate about where it will end.”

The trend toward delaying marriage has emerged over several decades as economic and social forces have made it more difficult for those in their 20s to reach independence. Sociologists and demographers say other factors are also at work, including increasing numbers of cohabiting couples, more highly educated women who have fewer highly educated men of comparable age to partner with, and more choices open to women than in decades past.

For those reasons and others, experts say they don’t expect this upward trend in the ages for marriage to reverse.

So what are twentysomethings doing instead? For one, as also reported in USA Today, Gen Y is involved. Check it out here.

And finally, twentysomethings Nona Willis-Aronowitz and Emma Bernstein are taking a feminist roadtrip! Read all about it in The Metro. I’m looking forward to meeting with Nona next week.

Ok, I’m headed off to my cousins’ for Rosh Hashanah dinner (Mom – I made a killer kugel!) — I’ll be back on GWP tomorrow night!

(Thanks to CCF and Susan Bernstein for the links!)

Part 1 of our new little logo goes live. (Thank you, Marco!)

Marco strikes again, with a hot little logo for our “Women, Girls, Ladies: Join the Conversation” program for Women’s History Month this year. (THANK YOU, M!)

The group blog is now open. It’ll look prettier, though, very soon 🙂

A must-read over at Brain, Child magazine: In “Soccer Mom Loses Her Kick,” Tracy Mayor asks whether, starved after decades on the sound-bite diet, mothers might get some meat from politicians in ’08.

Think moms are apolitical? Think again. Check out these posts from one of my favorite political moms, here, here, and here. And definitely, always, stop by Pundit Mom, MomsRising, and the Mothers Movement Online, too.

(Thanks to Steve Mintz, Stephanie Coontz, and Veronica Arreola for the heads up!)

Talk about synergy. On the way to my authors group last night, I picked up a copy of Leo Braudy’s From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. Then I learned that on October 2, feminist superstar Susan Faludi is coming out with a new book called The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. Anyone remember how, following 9/11, media headlines declared women to be suddenly less inclined to be satisfied as single and independent beings? And that another baby boom was apparently bound to occur as women’s biological clocks began to tick faster after the tragedy? With what sounds like her hallmark in-depth documentation, Faludi looks at the gendering of cultural response.

The Liberaloc and USA Today have posted excerpts, and here’s what I’ve gleaned (from the book description):

Why, Faldui asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore “traditional” manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery?

Faludi shows how an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation led us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling “security moms,” swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the “rescue” of a female soldier cast as a “helpless little girl”? The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite “barbarians” on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.

In taking on the subject of American culture in the wake of 9/11, Faludi joins fellow superstar Naomi Wolf, who just came out with The End of America: Letter to a Young Patriot, as I mentioned in a previous post. It seems highly relevant that prominent feminist thinkers are turning their attention to the state of our union–which, according to both, is dangerously unraveling. The threat, they both argue, is not merely external; in the wake of 9/11, the threat to our nation’s integrity also comes from within.

I can’t wait to get my hands on these two books. More on this to come, for sure.