Just a quickie this morning. This just came to me via Laura from Catalyst–thanks, L!

A nice summary of an interesting sounding article, “Locating Mothers: How Cultural Debates About Stay-at-Home Versus Working Mothers Define Women and Home” by Heather Dillaway (dillaway@wayne.edu) and Elizabeth Paré:

Most women must decide whether to work for pay while mothering or make mothering their sole social role. Often this decision is portrayed in terms of whether they will be “stay-at-home” and presumably “full-time” mothers, or “working mothers” and therefore ones who prioritize paid work over caregiving. Inferred within this construction is women’s physical location as well—either women are at home or work, not both. In this article, the authors explore common conceptualizations of stay-at-home versus working motherhood, as evidenced by feminist family scholarship and recent media items. To keep in tune with contemporary media conversations, the authors begin to investigate what cultural discourse about these mothers also illustrates about our definitions of home, and the individuals and activities that exist within this space. In writing this conceptual piece, the authors’ goal is to initiate further feminist research on motherhood and paid work, and women’s locations while engaging in both.

Tonight! On WNBC (local NYC news station) sometime between 7-7:30pm, I’ll be on talking about the new study from the Council on Contemporary Families that I blogged about this morning. I got the call this morning and (Courtney will appreciate this!), I dashed off to buy a cheap dress at The Gap near Rock Center because I was wearing ratty jeans and inappropriate boots. Fortunately, the producer promised me, you won’t see my boots.

And on Sunday, March 16, I’ll be appearing on WCBS (again, local news) in a segment on feminism as part of a women’s history month special series. I hear Linda Gordon was interviewed too, and that Courtney Martin will be on it too. I feel so honored to be in their company. And grateful to the Women’s Media Center for the use of their office for the shoot.

I find it heartening to wake up to this news bit sent to me by CCF this morning: Men have more and more stepped up to the plate in sharing housework and childcare. The longer a wife works, the more housework her husband does. Hallelujah amen.

According to a briefing paper prepared in advance of the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, April 25-26, 2008 at the University of Illinois in Chicago, (“Men’s Changing Contribution to Housework and Child Care,” by researchers Oriel Sullivan and Scott Coltrane):

For thirty years, researchers studying the changes in family dynamics since the rise of the women’s movement have concluded that, despite gains in the world of education, work, and politics, women face a “stalled revolution” at home. According to many studies, men’s family work has barely budged in response to women’s increased employment. The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack.

But new research suggests that these studies were based on unrealistic hopes for instant transformation. Such studies, explain Sullivan and Coltrane, underestimated the amount of change going on behind the scenes and “the growing willingness of men to adapt to their wives’ new behaviors and values.”

In fact, it turns out, more couples are sharing family tasks than ever before. The movement toward sharing has been especially significant full-time dual-earner
couples.

Interestingly, whatever a man’s original resistance to sharing, men’s contributions to family work increase over time. In other words, the longer their female partners have been in paid employment, the more family work they are likely to do.

Bottom line is this: “American couples have made remarkable progress in working out mutually satisfying arrangements to share the responsibilities of breadwinning and family care. And polls continue to show increasing approval of such arrangements. So the revolution in gender aspirations and behaviors has not stalled.”

But lest we we women of the second and third shift get too excited, here’s where things are stalled: getting employers to accommodate workers’ desires. And high earners are forced to work ever longer hours. Less affluent earners face wage or benefit cuts and layoffs that often force them to work more than one job. Aside from winning paid parental leave laws in Washington and California (with similar bills being considered in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York), families have made little headway in getting the kind of family friendly policies that are taken for granted in most other advanced industrial countries.

So even as American couples’ beliefs and desires about gender equity have grown to be among the highest in the world, America’s work policies and social support systems for working parents are among the lowest. Depressing, to say the least.

All in all, the “stalled revolution” in America is not taking place in families but in the highest circles of our economic and political elites.

For more information on this report, contact:

Scott Coltrane, Professor of Sociology, University of California
Riverside, (951) 827-2443; cell: (951) 858-1831 scott.coltrane@ucr.edu

Professor Oriel Sullivan, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben
Gurion University sullivan@bgu.ac.il, +972 86472056

(Image cred)

Are you sick of turning on the TV, tuning in the radio, or opening a newspaper and asking yourself, where are the women? The Women’s Media Center created Progressive Women’s Voices, an intensive training and support program to develop a new class of women to take on the media, and I’ve been a beneficiary by participating in the first class. Applications are now available to take part in the second class.

The WMC is looking for, in their words, “talented, informed, progressive women who are willing to speak out about the issues that matter; women who are interested in joining an amazing group of dynamic, engaged women who are interested in changing the world as we know it through the lens of the media.” In case you’re wondering, they’ve delivered, connecting their participants with decision makers in the news industry who can help make our voices heard – from the opinion pages of the nation’s top newspapers to the producers an reporters at the national news networks.

So, whether your expertise is war or peace, leadership, health care, or technology, chances are you follow the news, and realize that progressive women’s voices, like yours, are missing. Click here to learn more about the current class of Progressive Women’s Voices and how you can apply (http://www.womensmediacenter.com/progressive_womens_voices.html).

And please pass it on. If everyone who reads this passes the application along to at least one other great woman whose voice we all should know, just think how things could change.

But wait–is it a good thing that this is dragging out? I’m doing a little happy dance over here this morning, though Marco is down in the dumps. Ah, the joys of being a house divided. We both, however, have serious Election Fatigue Syndrome (EFS) and are more than ready to rally behind whoever becomes the nominee. That said, I’m still doing the happy dance and have regained hope for my girl.

Some great quips from other nail biters, all of us looking ahead, nervously, to the national election:

Lynn Harris at Broadsheet, “Women and Clinton: Damned If They Vote, Damned If They Don’t?”–there’s so much great stuff here you just gotta read it, but a favorite line: “We all know about ‘shrill.’ Which to me, for the record, describes John McCain.”

Gloria Feldt quoted over at Women’s ENews: For women, McCain would be “disaster in a nutshell.”

Kavita Ramdas at The Nation: “The next President needs the ability to demonstrate the inner courage and conviction that comes from owning his or her ‘otherness.’ As a woman and a mother, Hillary Clinton could bring insights and perspectives no other President in US history could have brought to the negotiating table of war and peace. As the stepson of an Indonesian Muslim and the son of a Kenyan and a white woman from Kansas, Barack Obama manifests what it means to be a global citizen. What is at stake in this election is not merely the historic first that would be accomplished if either a black man or a woman became the next US President. What is at stake is the fragile future of our shared world.“

(Thanks to Purse Pundit for that last one!)

In celebration of Women’s History Month, Women’s Voices. Women Vote is honoring women in the blogosphere, through a Women’s Voices Making History contest.

Nominate your favorite female bloggers through March 21, after which WVWV will list the top 10 female bloggers at www.wvwv.org and then they’ll ask everyone to vote for their favorite.

Nominating form available here.

(Thank you, Catherine Morgan, for the heads up, and, well, for your know what!!)

GUEST BLOGGER: Elline Lipkin PhD was recently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Beatrice M. Bain Center for Research on Gender at UC Berkeley. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was published by Kore Press. She recently moved to Los Angeles and is in search of feminist community. I met Elline this summer at an NWSA conference and then again at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, where we discovered we had a dear dear connection in common. If you are in LA and are connected to feministy activity at large, you should contact her because she is AMAZING! Here’s Elline! -GWP

Gottlieb and the Single Girl

For the past few days it’s been impossible to ignore the vitriol electrifying the e-waves over Lori Gottlieb’s article in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Entitled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” Gottlieb argues that a woman shouldn’t hold out for marriage based on a Big Romantic Connection, but instead should settle for Mr. Not So Bad, primarily so that she has a partner in the trenches, as she puts it, of homemaking and child-rearing. Instead of thinking of a partner as a soul mate or someone with whom to embark on a passionate adventure, she suggests, imagine him as a partner in a “small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit,” which is another way she characterizes running a household together. She gives more insight about her position in an Atlantic interview, this recent NPR piece, and on The Today Show.

Her evidence is anecdotal, her stress level as a new single mother sounds high, and her impatience with her friends’ complaints about husbands who don’t pull equal weight with parenting is worn out. There is much to take issue with in her argument, (as others who have done real research into these issues have), based as it is on her seemingly middle-class and often privileged friends. In my view, one of her serious missteps (and where she incurred the most wrath) is her first assumption that all women want to get married, as she writes, “To the outside world, of course, we call ourselves feminists and insist… that we’re independent and self-sufficient… but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.” The piece continues on in its belief that a woman is always better off with the financial and physical help of a husband (never mind walking sperm bank on tap!), no matter how bland, boring, or eventually bald she might find him. Gottlieb even says that since one of her married friends’ chief complaints is that they never see their spouses, likeability shouldn’t really even be an issue. In today’s issue of the LA Times, columnist Meghan Daum takes Gottlieb roundly to task over her assumption that all women want children.

Yet, (and this is the tricky part), I think Gottlieb has a point. What troubles me is how her poorly chosen rhetoric is allowing her argument to be twisted into anti-feminist backlash and sounds suspiciously close to a regressive longing for the all-holy strictures of the nuclear family. As a woman of the same age, I see Gottlieb’s argument borne out of a pragmatism which doesn’t disavow romance as much as it asks women to drop the Hollywood-ending scales from their eyes. As a self-proclaimed quirkyalone whose motto was always “Never settle!” as well as a recent newlywed I think the Atlantic deliberately framed her message as one that only inflames the stereotype of single-woman-as-desperate and then lights it on fire.

Retitled something far more pragmatic such as “Your Priorities Will Change as You Get Older” her article wouldn’t have incited the blogosphere, yet could have carried across what I see as her essential message. Don’t count out that shy five-foot-six guy with a heart of gold hanging out in the corner at a party when you always said you would only date men who are at least five ten seems to be one way to sum up her core advice. Think about the qualities that make for a great life partner on all fronts, including the unromantic day to day, and don’t confuse superficial romance novel notions about passion with character and qualities that will last for the long run. She references the “motherly advice” we’ve all heard and disdained now coming back to haunt her — think about “the bigger picture” a potential spouse represents rather than his short-term libidinous appeal. Gottlieb admits that it’s a fine line between “settling” and “compromising” and that every woman has to determine where this wavers, and surprisingly, at the article’s end confesses that she will probably never will settle, although she wishes she had. In all of this, I think she is absolutely right.

Last year I wrote in Salon about my own travails in the dating world, and I know how hard it is to meet someone with whom you can simply carry on a decent conversation for an hour, never mind a lifetime. I had spent far too long in a long-distance relationship that went nowhere (except gathering frequent flier miles) and I had sworn I’d never do that again. At age 38, when I first met my now-spouse, who lived a short plane ride away, I remember saying, “I’m too old and too picky to count out someone who seems this good.” If I had been ten years younger, or for that matter even five, would I have made the effort? Probably not. I see Gottlieb as coming from a place the dating-weary often reach: a far shore of loneliness when you think meeting someone of substance is just never going to happen. That her values have changed as she entered her fourth decade, altered with the birth of her son, and sobered up to the reality that the dating pool shrinks substantially the farther one goes into one’s thirties, doesn’t seem so wrong.

Yet a moment I think Gottlieb misses the mark is when she assumes men don’t suffer from the choices they’ve made, only women do. As I wrote in Salon, I was amazed at how many men regretted not marrying younger and awoke to wanting children later in life, only to realize it probably wasn’t going to happen for them. For many men it wasn’t biology that would limit them, but a ticking social clock that counted them out past a certain age as well. What seems sad is that Gottlieb can only celebrate for a scant moment the choices she had the privilege to make, namely to have a child on her own, despite its hardships. Her hindsight (and lack of sleep it sounds like) is what drives her rear view mirror exhortation to younger women to avoid her path and take on a partner, not just any old partner, but one seen through the tempered vision maturity brings.

You can contact Elline at elline.lipkin@yahoo.com

That’s all. Just biting going on over here. More in the AM, when we have some real info!

I wrote this column for the American Prospect Online on my generation and narcissism–a big topic of conversation among frustrated employers in the workplace, disillusioned young people, and everyone in between. It seems that despite the fact that some research confirms that we are more self-focused than previous generations, new research disputes that finding.

I may late to this one, but just had to share this awesome takedown, complete with (surprise!) facts, of that awful backlash porn last month in The Atlantic called “Marry Him!”, via Bella DePaulo recently at HuffPo. Writes Bella:

Gottlieb buys into just about all of the myths about singles that I debunk in my book, Singled Out. She believes, for example, that singles are interested in just one thing – getting married. She warns that even if they have great jobs, their jobs won’t love them back. She thinks that if single women wait too long, the available men will all be “damaged goods.” Most of all, she seems to believe that single people are miserable and lonely, and that the cure for what ails them is to get married.

Science demurs. A study in which thousands of people have been followed for 18 years (and counting) shows that people who get married enjoy, at best, a brief and tiny bubble of happiness around the time of the wedding (a honeymoon effect); then they go back to being as happy or as unhappy as they were when they were single. Moreover, only those who marry and stay married experience the early blip in happiness; those who marry and then divorce are already becoming less happy, not more so, as the day of the wedding draws near. (See Chapter 2 of Singled Out.)

The words “lonely” or “alone” occur a dozen times in “Marry Him.” Gottlieb seems to be channeling Bridget Jones’s fear of ending up “dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian,” only without the humor. I’ve studied the scientific research on loneliness in later life (Chapter 11 of Singled Out). It shows that no group is LESS likely to be lonely in their senior years than women who have always been single. Gottlieb also believes that mothers who settle, regret that they did, and then divorce, will still be better off financially than if they had never married. The science does not support that, either.

So there.

(Thanks as ever CCF for the heads up.)