It’s new, it’s smart, it’s Dame! And my gal Courtney has a column in it. That girl just makes me kvell. Check out Courtney’s profile of Ladies Who Launch, and keep an eye out for the paper version of the mag soon. The mag’s tagline? “For Women Who Know Better.” Nice.
While waiting for the feature movie, Enchanted, with my family this week in Yonkers (long story, will tell another time), I watched trailer for the movie Juno--another film that centers around an unplanned pregnancy. And it got me thinking….
The latest figures from the Guttmacher Institute find that in America, about one in five pregnancies end in abortion. Yet, as Carrie Rickey, film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, just noted, in recent American movies, every unplanned pregnancy is carried to term. What gives? Writes Rickey, turning to my number 1 favorite sociologist for a quote,
From Knocked Up to Waitress to Juno, opening Dec. 14, abortion is The Great Unmentionable, euphemized as “shmashmortion” (Knocked Up), “we don’t perform, uh, -” (Waitress), and “nipped it in the bud” (Juno), comedies in which pregnancy is the situation. Abortion is likewise obliquely referenced, if actually considered, in the drama Bella, now in theaters. “It’s as if there’s an ‘every conception deserves delivery’ policy being observed,” says Virginia Rutter, senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families, a Chicago-based organization of academics and public health professionals.
You said it, Rutter. And then, this nice bit from my favorite historian, Stephanie Coontz:
Perhaps when abortion is illegal, it makes a better story for filmmakers, says Stephanie Coontz, a family historian and author of Marriage, a History, in describing the motivating conflict behind Cider House, Vera Drake, and Four Months. “When you don’t have powerful stories about women whose lives have been derailed by unplanned pregnancy,” Coontz says, “there will be a tendency to sweep the subject of abortion under the rug.” Historically, she notes, abortions were common among respectable married women in the 19th century and were easier to obtain in the 1930s than in the 1950s.
How much do I love it when such smartie pants scholars are actually quoted in the press?! I’m looking forward to seeing both Stephanie and Virginia at the May 2008 Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago…but I don’t think I’ll be running to Juno anytime soon.
So as I gear back up for the week, a confession: I’m in proposal writing stage–the stage I find most unsettling, as a writer. I hate this stage. It makes me want to do anything else but write, though I know that write is often exactly what I need to do.
Since I know lots of other folks who are in this phase right now too, thought I’d share some wisdom from a writer who is new to me, Rebecca Solnit. A few tidbits from her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost:
“‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’…The question…struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.”
“[There’s an art] of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”
“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found.”
Um, here’s to being at home with being lost?! Anyone else got good some good quotes to share?!
I hope ya’ll had a fabulous feast!
Five things I’m feeling grateful for right about now:
1. My family and friends, who have embraced Marco and me with incredible warmth and love
2. Stuffing
3. Health
4. Central Park
5. That book you unwittingly come upon that gives you just what you need…!
So it’s the part of my Making It Pop seminar where participants are starting to really work on their book proposals. Thought I’d post the questions here that I urge folks to answer BEFORE sitting down to write, for those of you working on your props right now, too. Here we go:
1. In one sentence, what is this book about? (If you’re an academic or wonkily-inclined writer, be careful to phrase this in a way that will appeal to nonacademic readers)
2. What is your argument? (What is your thesis?) If you don’t yet have an argument, for now, answer this instead: What is the main question driving your book?
3. What’s new about this book? How is it different from existing books?
4. Why are you the person to write it?
5. Why is now the time to publish it?
6. Who is going to read it? Why will they find it appealing?
7. How will your book be organized? What is its structure?
Very likely however, you, like me, are thinking about turkey and stuffing right about now, and, in case I don’t get back here much over the next few days, I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!!!
(Image cred.)
I’m a little late to the table on this one, but interesting post by Susan Faludi over at Women’s Voices group blog, on Hillary and the gender card. Says Faludi, tying it all back to her recent book:
Keep in mind: The gender card is always played. It’s even played in presidential campaigns where all the candidates are men….Given the political culture — and for reasons embedded in our history — that card usually involves a morality play in which men are the rescuers and women the victims in need of rescuing….Hillary Clinton’s rescue of women departs from the previous male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men. In the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves. Understanding the distinction is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.
Following the thread of Faludi’s new book, then, does that make Hillary, um, the girlfriend’s own inner John Wayne?
Just saw this article in Women’s eNews about that National Women’s Conference 30th anniversary conference at Hunter that I attended part of the other week. Again, while intentions were good, I found the whole thing kind of depressing, as this account kind of details:
Held at a high point of the women’s movement in the United States, Houston ’77 marked the only time the federal government ever sponsored a gathering of women for equality. With $5 million in funding from Congress organizers drew more than 20,000, including three first ladies–Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson.
This time only a few politicians made the event.
Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton sent her regrets from her campaign in Iowa.
Media coverage was thin, with most of the coverage going to comedian, television and film star Rosie O’Donnell. And the attention wasn’t on what she had to say on the subject of women. It was more about her losing the deal to host a talk show on MSNBC.
Houston ’77 served as a beacon that lit up the organized women’s movement of its time, and Freedom on Our Terms was designed to rekindle those sparks and galvanize activists across the generations.
“There has to be a re-energizing, a re-igniting between younger women, older women and women in between,” conference leader Liz Abzug said as the two-day event wound up. “I want you to spread the word: Feminism is alive and well and moving into the 21st century.”
Yeah, well, you already know how I feel about that. (Are you seeing the young women in this picture? Cuz I’m not. Though they were definitely in the audience. Hmmm.)
On the up side, participants agreed to develop a 10-point “feminist action plan” to present to the presidential candidates, who will be asked to commit to implementing it during their first 100 days in office. According to Women’s eNews:
Among the issues that could make the top 10 list: elimination of abstinence-only sex education; paid leave for family care; improved child care; ratification of the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; national single-payer health care; reform of the Federal Communications Commission to reverse media consolidation; changes in the tax code to put a value on labor spent for homemaking; and renewal of the fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, reintroduced into Congress this year.
All of it sounds pretty good to me, but do young folk know/care about the ERA? Would its passage at this point be a largely symbolic gesture, or would it actually change the quality of young women’s lives? I wonder.
So PunditMom asks a great question over at HuffPo today: Does Lifetime’s Every Woman Counts poll–which is geared toward increasing the participation of women in the political process by encouraging more women to vote and to increase the national spotlight on issues that are important to women–take women seriously? The poll’s questions include:
1. Which candidate would you rather receive a gift from?
2. Which candidate would you be most comfortable leaving your children with?
3. Which candidate would you most like to have dinner with over the holiday season?
PunditMom writes,
What do questions like this add to the “political dialogue” other than making politicians think that we care more about popularity contests than health care or the environment?…If we really want to count and be counted, let’s not provide any more ammunition for the politicians to think that we’re not serious voters.
And I’m with her. But I also wonder this: Since the pollsters are constantly asking men which candidate they’d rather have a beer with, aren’t questions 2 and 3 above really just the equal opportunity equivalent for women? To be sure, I’ve always thought the beer question was a stupid way to choose a President. I’m not sure the babysitter test is any better.
Do more “hook ups” mean less marriage? Well, the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family kind of points that way, but I wouldn’t base everything on one study. Still, according to the authors of an article titled “Of Sex and Romance: Late Adolescent Relationships and Young Adult Union Formation,” adolescents involved in romantic relationships at the end of high school are more likely to marry and to cohabit in early adulthood, while those involved in “nonromantic sexual relationships” tend to just shack up. But wait–aren’t we getting married later and later these days? And so I ask the sociologists out there: a study that ends in early adulthood isn’t going to tell us much about the longterm prospects for marriage, oui?
Shifting Careers guru Marci Alboher has an interesting post up today at her NYT blog, on the changing landscape of journalism. Says Marci, who attended a panel on said subject at the Columbia J-School last week,
“I left the discussion convinced that the future of journalism will rely on good storytelling coupled with an ever-increasing array of new technology, and that those of us who don’t embrace the new technology are not likely to survive.” Read more about it here.
Yet another plug for “learning” to blog, I say.
(Photo cred)
