For anyone who has taken my “Making It Pop: Translating Your Research for Trade” workshops, here’s a great way to keep it going: I’ll be doing a day-long workshop on nonfiction book proposals at Woodhull’s upcoming writers’ retreat. Tell them Girl with Pen sent you and receive a $50 discount. Details below.

Raise Your Voices: An Intensive Nonfiction Writing Retreat for Women
May 9 – 11
(Retreat starts Friday at 1PM and ends Sunday at 3PM)
Ancramdale, New York

Why: Women are underrepresented as nonfiction authors and opinion writers. In a long weekend of writing instruction and one-on-one critique, participants gain fundamental knowledge of: Op-ed pieces, features, book proposals and pitching ideas. Tuition covers lodging at Woodhull Institute retreat house, food and materials.

More info here. Contact: Elizabeth Curtis at ecurtis@woodhull.org

This weekend I’ll be at the Council on Contemporary Families 11th Annual Conference (April 25-26) in my sweet home Chicago, where I can’t wait to hang with all those CCFers board members I know and love–Virginia Rutter, Stephanie Coontz, Steve Mintz, and more. If in Chicago, come join me! I’ll be giving a workshop on blogging on Saturday (10:45-12:45), with the help of Veronica Aerrola, who prolifically blogs here, here, here, and here. My session’s aimed at researchers and therapists and is called “What You Need to Know about Blogging and Why.”

And here’s more:

CCF 11th Annual Conference
Family Issues in Contention
University of Illinois, Chicago (Room 605, Student Center East)
750 South Halsted

Featuring:

— A panel on the “hooking-up” patterns of today’s youth, with new
research and commentators from diverse perspectives on the impact of these practices.

— Another workshop on the controversial question, “Is Transracial and
Transnational Adoption the Right Policy for Parents? Children? Society?”

— Still another panel of demographers and clinical psychologists examines whether cohabitation is “good” for love or for marriage.

— And the latest thoughts of researchers and clinicians on whether unhappy couples should divorce of “stick it out.”

Full conference program available here. To register, visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org . Press may receive complimentary registration by contacting Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com.

Well if this isn’t the most timely book ever published, I don’t know what is. Deborah Carr, a brilliant sociologist at Rutgers, has teamed up with journalist Julie Halpert to write Making Up with Mom: Why Mothers and Daughters Disagree About Kids, Careers, and Casseroles (and What to Do About It). If they had timed it a bit differently, they could have easily added “and Candidates” to the subtitle. The book shows how generational differences in women’s lives have created (fixable) frictions between Gen X/Boomer women and their moms. I like the emphasis on “fixable.”

Here’s from the book description:

Young women today have infinitely more options than their mothers and grandmothers did decades ago. “Should I become a doctor, a writer, or a stay-at-home mom?” “Should I get married or live with my boyfriend?” “Do I want children?” Women in their twenties, thirties, and forties today are wrestling with life-altering decisions about work and family—and they need all the support they can get.

But the very person whose support they crave most—their mother—often can’t get on board, and a rift is created between the two generations, even for women who have always had a strong relationship.

A mother’s simple question, like “How can you trust a nanny to watch your children all day?” can bring her poised, accomplished CEO daughter to tears, or provoke a nasty response more suitable to a surly teenager than a leader of industry. Why can’t mothers and daughters today see eye to eye when it comes to important choices about love, work, children, money, and personal fulfillment? Why does a mother’s approval matter so much, even to the most confident and self-possessed daughter? And when daughters choose paths different from their mothers’, why is it so painful for the older generation?

Making Up with Mom answers these important questions by focusing on three core issues: dating/marriage, career, and child rearing. Relying on interviews with nearly a hundred mothers and daughters, and offering helpful tips from more than two dozen therapists, Julie Halpert and Deborah Carr explore a wide range of communication issues and how to resolve them, so mothers and daughters everywhere can reclaim their loving relationships. This enlightening book is a must-read for all women today.

The perfect gift for Mother’s Day?! The authors will be reading at Barnes & Noble in North Brunswick on Tuesday May 20 at 7:30 p.m. For more, check out www.makingupwithmom.com.

Gloria Feldt is a sanity-inducing voice in the midst of the generational snarkfest that’s currently going on. I’m sharing her comment on my last post here, as a post, because I wonder if I ever shy away from the flames of controversy just a wee bit too much. (Hmm…paging Dr. Freud!)

I truly believe in engaging debate and viciously hate the anger-filled tone that debate seems to have taken on of late. Doth Girl with Pen protest too much? I’d be curious to hear what others think about tactics for airing differences. How do we clear a space for argument, as Gloria urges below, in a way that genuinely moves debate forward? (And doesn’t this image of Gloria on an IPOD just make your day?)

In any event, one of the many things I value about Gloria is her ability to engage–meaning debate and differ–with younger generations while maintaining a deep sense of respect. And here she is:

Deborah-
I couldn’t agree more with your suggested course of action to defeat McCain together. That’s the job #1 of all feminists for sure.

At the same time, I want to put in a good word for engaging the debate even when it is with gloves off. I suggest that what women need most is to learn how to engage vigorously and constructively without being turned off or frightened off.

Like you, I believe we shouldn’t trash each other, but (probably because I’ve had lots of experience with hardknuckle conflict and know that one lives to tell the tale–and even learns and grows stronger from it), I think we need to clear a space for arguing about the issues together with the goal of not just understanding but making concrete plans to go forward on matters like winning the general election.

Every generation has to speak in its own tongue. We don’t have to be angry with one another to air our differences.
Gloria Feldt

Just read a post over at the Mother Jones blog called “Throwing Clinton Under the Bus To Spite Mom.” Really? I mean, really? This conversation is going nowhere fast. In the post, Debra Dickerson trashes (to dredge up a dread practice from the 1970s) Courtney Martin and Amy Tiemann, then concludes:

We’ll stop saying aloud that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you’ll stop believing that you know everything already. Deal?

Here’s what I posted in comments to Dickerson’s post, and here’s how I feel:

Deal.

Deborah Siegel here – a young(ish) Hillary supporter who feels pained at the way some young female Obama supporters are getting flamed. I don’t care how it started, or who said what about whom. Time to start focusing on beating McCain. I hope this is the last post of this tone that we’ll be seeing for a while. Goodbye to all THAT, I say.

Quick sidenote: Feminist history is full of intergenerational division, as I write about in my book. Important to remember that young Alice Paul and older Carrie Chapman Catt shared a goal (suffrage) but disagreed on tactics. “Libbers” and the older Betty Friedan disagreed on whether politics meant what you do in the bedroom or what happens at city hall. Together albeit in different ways they made the momentous change that became the 1st and 2nd+ waves.

Difference today is that we have blogs and online media, where it’s easier, it seems, to write snarkily and quote each other out of context. If I’ve been guilty of it too, mea culpa. Let’s move on. A Democrat in 2008. Deal?

Two quick hits:

Amy Tiemann interviewed me for the MojoMom Podcast this morning. Here’s the link.

Courtney just published a response to Linda Hirshman’s critique of her in The American Prospect today.

And ok ok, I take back “brouhaha.” Totally just playing into the sentiment that it’s a mini-war. In all honesty, I wish we could see MORE media stories about the kinds of conversations we WomenGirlsLadies have been seeing take place from Ypsilanti to Cambridge. And in our own backyards. Or the kind Amy and I–who are on opposite sides of the Clinton/Obama divide–had this morning.

Empathy, people, empathy. Eyes on the prize. I know our politics are intensely personal, but can we please start cutting the noise and get ready to get behind the notion that we’ll need to unify in order to successfully do battle with McCain??? I’m getting nervous. Though I KNOW we can win.

Right before heading out to our Harvard panel, I discovered that famed-controversy starter Linda Hirshman had used me as the lead to her latest provocation. Basically, she argued that the woman’s vote in this election could be boiled down to a mother-daughter dynamic. Here’s a piece I wrote in response, which argues essentially that intergenerational interactions within feminism are most productive, joyful, and fortifying when they acknowledge all of our complexity. I used my disappointing and exciting experiences along the way on our still-building tour as evidence. An excerpt:

I have gained an immeasurable amount from the wise, older women who have challenged my views on this election and other issues within a context of complexity. These women have made me a better thinker, a better writer, a better feminist, and a better human. And because of them, I will not cower, but I promise to be grateful. I will not forget, but I must also move on. I will not be a dutiful daughter, but I promise to be an impassioned, authentic, and brave inheritor.

Thanks to Debbie and Kristal for the encouragement to pen this piece on the way home Saturday morning!

A belated Happy Passover to those who celebrated this weekend! I spent the first seder at my aunt and uncle’s (who I learned are readers of GWP!) and the second at a dear friend’s dear parents’ house. Among the attendees at the latter was an Iraqi refugee, peace activist, and school teacher who arrived in New York from Baghdad about 8 months ago. I’ll call her S.

My friend’s dad is a linguist (and also a blogger!), and we asked the 4 questions in 7 different languages. Marco read them in Spanish, and S. read them in Arabic. I felt very verklempt at the whole thing, and proud to be part of a tradition that requires us to invite people who aren’t Jewish to the seder, in the spirit of being “welcoming to the stranger in your midst”. May this season usher in a time of renewal, rejeuvenation, and true freedom for all who remain in chains, whether enslavement be internal, external, or both.

We’re back from our WomenGirlsLadies event at Harvard, orchestrated by the Harvard Women’s Center–a center which didn’t exist, we learned, until just 2 years ago. Not that Harvard hasn’t been in need of this center or anything before then (ahem). Shout outs to Susan Marine, Sandra Ullman, Natasha, Annemarie, Andreas, and the rest of the crew over there for bringing us to town (we had a blast!), but mostly for the important work you do on campus all year long.

We always try very hard to turn the panel (subtitle: A FRESH Conversation about Feminism across Generations) into audience conversations, and after our presentation this time a very interesting Q&A ensued. Courtney is writing about it in her column today over at The American Prospect, so stay tuned.

And ohhh but it’s been an interesting week in the land of intergenerational feminist convo around the election! In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

Amy Tiemann in Women’s eNews (with a follow-up on her blog)
Amanda Fortini in New York Magazine
Rebecca Traister in Salon
Linda Hirshman in Slate

Commentary to follow–I’ll be doing a podcast this morning over at MojoMom.com with my 2cents on it all and promise to post the link.

I’m back from a WomenGirlsLadies event at Harvard, orchestrated by the Harvard Women’s Center–a center which didn’t exist, we learned, until just 2 years ago. Not that Harvard hasn’t been in need of this center or anything before then (ahem). Shout outs to Susan Marine, Sandra Ullman, Natasha, Annemarie, Andreas, and the rest of the crew over there for bringing us to town (we had a blast!), but mostly for the important work you do on campus all year long.

We always try very hard to turn the panel (subtitle: A FRESH Conversation about Feminism across Generations) into audience conversations, and after our presentation this time a very interesting Q&A ensued. Courtney is writing about it in her column today over at The American Prospect, so stay tuned.

And ohhh but it’s been an interesting week in the land of intergenerational feminist convo around the election! In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

Amy Tiemann in Women’s eNews (with a follow-up on her blog)
Amanda Fortini in New York Magazine
Rebecca Traister in Salon
Linda Hirshman in Slate

Commentary to follow–I’ll be doing a podcast this morning over at MojoMom.com with my 2cents on it all and promise to post the link.