And speaking of the 1970s (I’m on a roll here with linking this week’s posts!), the median age of marriage for women in 1970 was 21; for men, 23. These days, according to the Census Bureau, the median age of marriage for women is just shy of 26; for men, 27. The age goes up with advanced degrees. So it comes as little surprise that more and more of us are meeting our matches (or mismatches as the case may be) on the job. A 2007 Careerbuilder survey reveals that almost half of all American workers will date a colleague at least once.

And this week, a new book called Office Mate hit the shelves. I know one of the authors, Helaine Olen, and she has a very feminist-y sensibility, so I’ll be interested to see how that comes through in the book. Read more on the subject (and a quote from Jessica Valenti) in this San Francisco Chronicle article by Helaine’s coauthor, Stephanie Losee.

And more on Office Mate here.

So this Saturday I spent some time at the Freedom on Our Terms conference, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the National Women’s Conference in Houston back in 1977. A few great quips from the afternoon plenary:

Rosie O’Donnell on the Bush Administration: “What they’re feeding you is McDonalds. It gives you diarrhea and ultimately it kills you.”

Rosie on Mos Def: “Mos Def said the best line on Bill Maher: ‘From Bush to Clinton to Bush to Clinton, they’re passing around the Presidency like a party joint.”

Rosie on the solution to it all: “Ingest art.”

Liz Holtzman on Bella Abzug in Congress: “They made her take her hat off, but they couldn’t shut her up.”

The spirit of Bella infused the afternoon. It was moving. The goal of the conference was to create “a 21st century agenda for action,” updating the planks from 1977. Two young women, Lala Wu and Kate Collier, coauthored a fabulous-looking document for the conference, called “The National Plan of Action: Then and Now.” It’s a great status report. Tons of younger women were in attendance. But I was frustrated by the lack of real intergenerational conversation during the bits that I saw.

It’s easy to be a critic, and I know how much goes into planning this kind of event. So hats off to the organizers, and I know that hearts are in absolutely the right place. But it bothered me that the line-up of younger women at the afternoon plenary were left with only a few minutes each to talk about their organizations, and that there was no time left for them to dialog amongst themselves, or with older feminists. The reason for the time crunch? From what I could tell, the movement veterans slated to speak–and there were many of them–had used up all the time and things were running late. But maybe there was another reason too? Maybe Rosie showed up late? (I came midway through her speech.) In any event, it was frustrating not to hear more from the young women on the stage at the end.

The media panel I went to, on the other hand, was fantastic–Laura Flanders, Emily McKahnn from The Motherhood, Sonia Ossioro (Pres. of NOW-NYC, which recently landed a media coup of their own), and Lauren Brill, a kick-ass young stringer for the WNBA. The room was so full, we were sitting on desks and window sills. The crowd spanned the ages, and the discussion could have gone on for hours. I kind of wish it had. I would have loved to have heard more from some of those in attendance–Shelby Knox was there! I’m looking forward to more of this kind of discussion at this year’s Women, Action, and the Media Conference, on March 28-30, at MIT.

(Photo cred. Check out this and some great photos from Houston 1977 here.)

Steven Heller has an interesting bit in the NYT Book Review on a new book that explains the 1960s to kids. Writes Heller,

“The ’60s are often portrayed now as a permissive, hedonistic moment when sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll reigned supreme. Though all that is true, they were also an incredibly volatile period when youth culture challenged politics and society in ways that continue to exert influence. The decade was more than a mere freak show of baby-boomer rebels. It was a time when young people acted positively, as individuals and en masse, to redress a slew of grievances. So it’s about time that today’s kids were introduced to the period in a manner that is not simply a reprise of camp clichés.”

The titles under discussion are a new book version of Puff the Magic Dragon and a book called America Dreaming, by Laban Carrick Hill. Full disclosure: my not-quite-hippie parents sang me Peter, Paul, and Mary songs and I still remember every single word.

A new book by Laura Pappano and Eileen McDonagh, Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, challenges the popular perception that since girls now play soccer, all is now equal when it comes to women and sports.

Says Pappano in an interview at the publisher’s website, “The biggest challenge is that women are often afraid to challenge the status quo for fear of losing what “progress” has been made. The problem is that we have codified a system of organized sports which places male athletes at the center and female athletes at the periphery.”

And what about Title IX?: “Title IX opened doors for females to play sports, but it opened sex-segregated doors, effectively limiting women’s athletics to second-class status. Title IX never demanded equality – only improvement – and it is not well-enforced and budgets for female sports dwarf spending on men’s sports, particularly football. Ticket prices for women’s events are lower than comparable men’s teams- even when a team (like the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team) far outperforms its male counterpart on the national stage. Publicity, television and print exposure for men’s teams remain the primary focus of college sports offices. This is not fair, particularly at institutions receiving federal funds. We need a wholesale re-thinking of the way organized sports are structured and supported.”

(The pic is Zoe Fairlie, daughter of my bestie on the west coast, Rebecca London.)

Paul Raeburn had a great post the other week up at HuffPo on older dads on the campaign trail. Yep, Sen. Christopher Dodd, 63, has two daughters, age 6 and 2, with his second wife Jackie Clegg Dodd. And Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, 65, has two toddlers with his second wife, Jeri Kehn.

What exactly do we read in these tea leaves?, asks Paul. First, that these two candidates mirror a demographic trend. Older fathers are on the rise. That’s not too surprising. But here’s the rub: the children of older fathers face particularly high risks of schizophrenia and autism. Drrr. On a personal level, I hate hearing that stuff. But do check out Paul’s post. Paul is a journalist who writes quite smartly about various permutations of contemporary fatherhood. I keep trying to get him to guest post here, and sense that one day soon, he will!

Also on the dad front, check out Judith Warner’s response to Charlie LeDuff’s essay in Men’s Vogue, which she titles“Daddy Wars,” and which begins like so:

“One of the more pleasant outcomes of the slowly growing trend toward highly involved fatherhood has been, I’ve found, the ability to plainly see that total ninnyishness is not a uniquely female thing.” Read more.

(Photo cred)

This just came to me via the Council on Contemporary Families:

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenage sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies. The report is being released today by the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. A spending bill before Congress for the Department of Health and Human Services would provide $141 million in assistance for community-based, abstinence-only sex education programs, $4 million more than President Bush requested. The study – conducted by a senior research scientist at ETR Associates – says that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex-education programs were having “positive outcomes,” including teenagers “delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use.” ETR Associates developed and markets several of the sex-education curricula reviewed in the report.

Come on kids. Are we surprised? Read more about it in this past Wednesday’s Arizona Daily Star.

Ok, I credit this post to having gotten “engaged.” Yesterday, my friend Daphne trusted me (trusted ME!) to hang out with her toddler, Talia, while she went to an event. This here’s a very blurry picture of said toddler, outside the dog run in Washington Square. Pretty darn cute, huh? And I neither tipped her stroller, nor let her get eaten by a dog. Feeling pretty proud of myself today.

The seventies are IN! In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the First National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas 1977, The Bella Abzug Leadership Institute and Girls Speak Out are sponsoring a conference at Hunter College this weekend called the National Conference for Women and Girls, Freedom on Our Terms: From Houston 1977 – NY 2007. The schedule is posted here.

A very breathy and ambitious (and I’ll admit, inspiring) description of it all is posted here (scroll down to the program summary). In a nutshell, participants will examine the 26 planks that resulted in the original National Platform for Action established in Houston back when I was, um, 8 years old, which dealt with all aspects of women’s lives. The goal of the weekend is to “boldly strategize to update the platform to the present, and identify and target goals for the future.” Sounds good, and my hope is that the feeling there will be authentically intergenerational.

Well now this is interesting–and on a continuum, somehow, with the National Organization for Women’s late 1960s protests against sex-segregated help-wanted ads in the New York Times. As Lynn Harris reports over at Broadsheet, my local NOW chapter (NYC-NOW) has scored a homerun with their anti-human trafficking campaign. Specifically, New York magazine announced this week that it would no longer be running ads for sexual services, including escort agencies and suspicious “massage.” And according to the New York Post, it’s the 15th publication to do so this year.

Writes Lynn, in good third-wave feminist style,

To be sure, not every “Punjab Princess” advertising in New York is doing “bodywork” against her will. And it’s hard to imagine that Pink Orchid is going to close up shop just because it can no longer snare New York readers pretending to be looking for the Approval Matrix. But those are hardly good reasons to shrug and keep running the ads, or to dodge an opportunity to make a move based on principle. One of NOW’s stated goals is to “shed light on how the trafficking industry is a part of the local economy and identify the legitimate businesses that do business with traffickers.” At very least, it’s a necessary reminder that women and men are trafficked not just in Bangkok, and not just in hidden brothels, but right next to our own crossword puzzles.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers often express mixed feelings about publicists–their own, and others’. (If you’re reading this, Cheryl, I love you. I honestly truly do!)

Yesterday, Marci Alboher of NYTimes blog Shifting Careers fame posted an excellent list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for publicists–aka other authors’ publicists–who seek her attention. Marci is my hero. It’s really a very good list.

(Note: Marci’s post is inspired by Wired magazine editor and book author Chris Anderson’s, which has inspired much ado. You see, Anderson very publicly published a list of e-mail addresses of publicists he never wants to hear from again.)