It’s almost March, and to kick off Women’s History Month, this Saturday at 2pm I’ll be doing a fireside chat at the Alice Paul Institute in Mount Laurel, NJ. If in the South Jersey area, please stop by!
The Institute is housed at Paulsdale, Alice Paul’s birthplace and family home – a remarkable place. There will be hot chocolate 🙂
More info, and to register, click here.
This is my baby cousin, Lia, with a pen, and making her cyberspace debut. I just couldn’t resist.
(Got a picture of a girl with pen you’d like me to post? Send it my way!)
Attention historians: Glamour Magazine is seeking suggestions for “the greatest Mother-Daughter duos of all time” for their Mother’s Day issue. Any takers?
Nobel awardees Marie and Irene Curie and literary giants Mary Wallstonecraft and Mary Shelly already top their list. But what of great queens and stateswomen? Heroines and pioneers? Inventors and moguls? Literati. Artistas. Revolutionaries. … . and so on. They’re looking for mothers-daughters famed in their own right — who may have worked together or inspired (or even infuriated) each other.
If you’ve got a suggestion, please send your name and email (to be queried with similar women’s history questions in the future!) to Jessica Seigel at JS@jessicaseigel.com.
(Photo is Anna Magnani & Marisa Pavan playing mother and daughter in the 1955 film, Rose Tattoo. Clearly my head is still in movieland, coming off the Oscars last night. Kate Hudson and Goldie Hawn, anyone?)
A hearty THANK YOU to all you awesome guest posters last week! And to Urbanartiste, Pop Feminist, J.K. Gayle, and others for their comments. I can’t tell you how amazing it was to be out in rural Wyoming without interweb connection and know that GWP was chugging away! So many people responded to my request for guest posts, I’ll be posting the rest during this coming week.
Meanwhile, this here’s a pic of the sheep ranch where my father and I were staying. I attended my first 4-H Club meeting. I rode with the rancher, who is also a friend, on his horse-drawn sleigh to feed the sheep. I’m trying to find their website to share — will circle back with that soon!
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)
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: 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!
