Straight from the gals at Broadsheet comes this annoyingly newsworthy tidbit: There has not been a woman author of a Shouts and Murmurs piece in The New Yorker for over three years. The last one was in 2004. Reports Catherine Price,

[W]e just found a link to a blog post from the World’s Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: “Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That’s 12.782%.” To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.

Love that it was an academic who did the calculations. Hate that it’s true. Wonder if , in addition to other (ahem) factors, women are submitting in smaller numbers, as they do when it comes to op-eds? That’d be interesting to find out. If anyone finds that out, please send a shout and a murmur over to G w/ P and we will broadcast the news far and wide.

Are you a scholar (or someone with their fingers on the pulse of current research about women or girls) seeking to enter the blogosphere and give blogging a try? Read on! Hey, if my grandmas (left) can do it, you can too.

Submission Process
Email me a 1-paragraph overview of the post you’d like to propose. When I greenlight it, please send the full post to me at deborahsiege AT gmail DOT com at least one day before you ideally would want me to run the post. Depending on how many submissions come in any a given week, I may not be able to run every post right away. But I will certainly do my best to try. Submissions should be pasted in the body of your email or attached as a MS Word document.

GUIDELINES FOR POSTING ON GIRL WITH PEN

SUBSTANCE. Girl with Pen is about bridging feminist research, popular reality, and the public. Posts should generally fall under this rubric. The best posts are those that are timely, unexpected, passionate, and somewhat personal.

LENGTH. The strongest blog posts read like mini, hypertexted op-eds. Op-eds are generally 700-1000 words; posts on Girl with Pen (and most blogs) are shorter (300-700 words max) and are very quick to get to the point.

TIMELY. Posts must have a news hook. A news hook can be new research (your own, or someone else’s), an interesting news item, an event, an upcoming holiday or anniversary, a happening from pop culture, a popular assumption that’s the subject of current media coverage, or another article that is currently in the news. The news hook must come at the beginning of the post, to capture the scanning web reader’s attention.

UNEXPECTED. Go for the counterintuitive, that little known reality that is the opposite of what we all think! There are so many myths out there about the lives of women and girls. Set us straight. Clarify reality. Go beyond the obvious. Surprise us.

PASSIONATE. Tell us what you really think. If you care passionately, others will. Take a stand. Be controversial. Go out on a limb.

PERSONAL. Personal stories keep us reading. Include a personal anecdote or, if you aren’t comfortable writing about yourself, include an anecdote about someone else.

LINKS. Posts should include links. When submitting a post, if you’re comfortable using the html code for links, please use it to embed your link in the text. If not, please include the link in brackets following the word(s) that you’d like to see in hypertext. Put the word(s) that you’d like to hypertext in bold.

EXAMPLE (w/o hypertext): Take the sentence “Please visit my website for more.” If I wanted the words “my website” to take the reader to my website’s homepage, I would write: Please visit my website [http://www.deborahsiegel.net] for more.

PICTURE AND BYLINE. Be sure to send a jpeg or gif (either a photo of you, or another relevant image related to the post) that you’d like to run with the post, along with a byline that includes your affiliation and anything else you’d like readers to know.

Questions? You can always post ’em in the comments section of this post, because chances are, others will be wondering the same thing. I’ll run additional tips and tidbits in response.

And speaking of heros, Naomi Wolf has a new book out called The End of America: Letter to a Young Patriot. As Naomi recently asked on HuffPo, “Is it still America if the president ignores or deliberately eviscerates the Constitution?”

Along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, MoveOn.org, and
True Majority, Naomi is spearheading a new grassroots and grasstops democracy movement, the American Freedom Campaign, and has asked us all — as well as each of the presidential candidates — to sign the American Freedom Pledge. The pledge reads:

“We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people’s phones and emails without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power.

“I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President.”

Now if a candidate can’t sign that, then I for one sure as hell can’t vote for her (ok, ok, or him). I heard on MSNBC the other day while on the treadmill that the campaign has already had 20,000 hits. Go Naomi, and go America. The America that believes in the Constitution, that is.

Join us in signing the pledge!

An extremely off the mark, nudge nudge wink wink article on the so-called collapse of feminism (“At Times Like This, It’s Better to Just Be One of the Boys”), by Magnus Linklater, appeared in the Times Online (UK) last week. Writes Linklater,

“Sometimes it’s a relief to be a man. Watching, at a safe distance, the collapse of feminism is a bit like seeing a huge chunk of melting glacier falling into the sea. You know it’s a sign of something serious going on, but you’re glad not to be anywhere near when it happens.”

The commentors in the comments section are doing an excellent job setting ole Magnus straight. My favorite is from “PN,” from London, who writes:

“This article is based purely on two feminist thinkers [Fay Weldon and Germaine Greer] who have made comments in the last week which have been jumped on and to some extent distorted by the media. Strangely enough, I don’t think my only choices of feminist icon are Anne Hathaway or Diana purely because Germaine Greer happens to have said something about them.

There are things to be said in defense of both Weldon and Greer, but I think the more important point is that the opinions of these two people hardly constitute the collapse of feminism. Perhaps you need to get on the internet and investigate some of the blogs and comments on feminist sites which seem to have missed the newsflash that their movement has collapsed.”

Aside from the comments, the most interesting tidbit I gleaned here was that Germaine Greer has a new book out called Shakespeare’s Wife. One of my all-time favorite moments in literature is Virginia Woolf’s speculation about Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own. (He didn’t have one, but Woolf imaginatively speculates about her fate nonetheless. What if she had wanted to write?) Anyway, back in real life, apparently men from James Boswell to Anthony Burgess had all assumed that Anne Hathaway (aka Shakespeare’s wife) was either “a lustful, scheming woman who lured Shakespeare into a loveless marriage, or an ugly harridan who drove him away by making his life a misery.” Greer takes a new look. The book sounds intriguing.

Now, if only Greer and Weldon (heros, truly!) could stop commenting all over the place that feminism is dead among young women long enough to get themselves online and to a bookstore and take a new look themselves, perhaps they’d reconsider. Or maybe not. Either way, though, it would make for a much fresher article. Then again, Magnus may not be the person to write it. He’s too busy dreaming of ice chunks and thanking god (or whoever) for having made him a man.

A quick shout out of gratitude to the folks who are posting their favorite blogs by women scholars in the comments section of the post below! Keep em coming! Meanwhile, I’m rushing off to go hear some of my favorite city girls (including Lusty Lady Rachel Kramer Bussel) read at McNally Robinson in celebration of a new anthology from Seal (hi, Laura M!). Come join me, if you’re here in NYC… Here’s the deal:

Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Seal Press)

Monday, August 27, 7 pm, Free
McNally Robinson Bookstore, 52 Prince Street (SoHo, between Lafayette and Mulberry), NYC

The popular media give us shoe shopaholics, ditzy desperados, and wannabe brides forever making cow eyes at The Bachelor. But what do single women have to say about their own lives? In the myth-busting tradition of anthologies like The Bitch in the House, the impressive roster of writers of Single State of the Union set the record straight about the experiences of single women in America. Rachel Kramer Bussel is a popular writer and teacher of erotica and the editor most recently of erotica anthologies Caught Looking and Cross-Dressing. Lynn Harris is the author of the smart New York mystery Death by Chick Lit. Judy McGuire is an advice columnist and author of How Not To Date. Susan Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up and most recently Only As Good As Your Word. Join us for a discussion with these and other smart single (and formerly single) women that will give you a new perspective on the single state.

Dear readers: I need your help! I’m compiling a list of interesting blogs by women scholars (you know, like BitchPhD, Feminist Law Professors Blog, CultureCat, Baxter Sez, Afrogeekmom…) as part of my mission to entice even more women scholars to bring their perspective and analysis into the blogosphere. I’m looking in particular for examples of blogs that balance astute cultural, social, or political commentary with a-day-in-the-life. If you have one to suggest, please comment here. I’ll post the resulting list here on G w/ Pen soon.

Guidelines for Guest Scholarblogging are available here.

I’m excited and delighted to be part of this panel.

In case anyone is wondering where we got our name, it was inspired by the line from the Country and Western song by Ed Bruce (who also wrote such other classics as “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies to Grow up to Be Cowboys”) that goes like this, “There’s girls, and there’s women and there’s ladies. There’s yeses, there’s no’s and there’s maybes.” It makes me laugh every time I hear it. Here’s the whole song; it’s a good example of the C and W storytelling that endears itself to my Texas-born heart in spite of my feminist soul:

There was only me and her and him
The bar was giving last call so I thought I’d move on in
And I was slick and feeling like a man so I took the stool between ’em
And ordered one more round for me and her and him
I placed my arms across the back of her barstool
And I don’t remember what I said but at the time it sounded cool
She pushed her drink away and never looked at me
She just paid her tab tipped the man and left me sittin’ there alone with him
And he said there’s girls and there’s women and there’s ladies
There’s yes’es and there’s no’s and there’s maybe’s
There’s teasin’ and pleasin’ they start learnin’ when they’re babies
There’s girls and there’s women and there’s ladies
Well he pushed his old straw hat back and he grinned
And he said ain’t they all a mystery ha ha sonny it’s a sin
They’re all sittin’ on the world they’re tryin’ to win
Ah but you know I love a mystery
So let’s drink another round to you and me and them
He said there’s girls…There’s girls and there’s women…He said there’s girls…

Language usage is one of the most important elements of any conversation about women in the world today. When Hillary Clinton recently said about herself, “I’m your girl”, she stirred up a little dust. I tend to think we women have simply matured past the need to rail against the word once we had made it our own little joke and/or sign of mutual affection. We took its power back from men who in the past used it as a way to demean and infantilize us. I don’t know whether Hillary’s use of “girl” was contrived, but it strikes me as a bit of self-deprecating humor of the sort that candidates need to use from time to time to show they are human.

What do others think?

The movie version of The Nanny Diaries opened last week, and my good friend and fellow traveler Heather Hewett, Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at SUNY-New Paltz, has an extremely smartypants op-ed on it all today in the Washington Post titled “Who’s Your Nanny?”. Muses Heather,

I can’t help noting how little the story has to do with reality — either with the situation of parents like me, who depend on nannies and babysitters to care for our children, or with the lives of most women who work as caregivers.

She goes on to contrast reality (the feminization of migration) with the nanny fantasies that currently abound in pop culture — not only The Nanny Diaries, but a slew of so-called reality tv shows and plays. I find Heather’s op-ed an excellent example of accessible writing that surveys the latest theory and pop thinking on the subject and makes us all think. GO HEATHER!

There’s an interesting trio of articles in the current issue of the New York Press: “By the Numbers” by David Crone, “Working Girls” by Marin Resnick, and “Who Needs Work?” by Gaije Kushner. I find the headline on the cover (“City’s White Collar Women Shatter the Glass Ceiling) to be at odds with the emphases of the articles (glass ceiling not so shattered). I’m all for celebrating progress, but the cover message sends an inaccurate message, one that is debunked in the issue’s very pages. What gives?

On another note, I love what they’ve done with the Rosie the Riveter image, updating her to represent the more ethnic face of New York. But wait – isn’t she wearing a blue collar, though the headline is all about white? Now I’m double confused.

(Thank you to Marco, always on the hunt for visuals, for pointing me to this cover.)

I feel like I have been blessed with some of the most amazing mentors a girl could ask for, but I have also–to be down-and-dirty honest–had some really horrifying experiences with older women. Think body image expert not eating her own birthday cake, a thesis adviser who only pretended to read my blood, sweat, and tears work, and a racist, chain-smoking Devil Wears Prada boss.

When I was in my young 20s, I often took the bad to heart (waaaaay to heart), and though I think it made me stronger and more resilient, I also want to prevent that from happening to the next generation of youngins. Sure there are bad eggs everywhere, but the more that women can “out” some of our most toxic intergenerational thoughts, the less of them there will be.

Plus, we just have so much important work to do. And so much outrageous fun to have. I can assure you I am already having an absolute blast collaborating with Gloria, Debbie, and Kristal. Who knew work could be so fun?