Young women think empowerment means short skirts and high heels! They are so entitled!

Older women can’t let go of their leadership positions and they’re so damn judgmental! It’s like they don’t even want young women to succeed!

Sound familiar?

With all the important work to do, it is time that women of all ages talked and listened to one another instead of rehashing the same cliquish complaints in isolation. It is time that we reopen a dialogue about women’s lives, power, entitlement, and empowerment from a generational perspective.

The four of us–Kristal Brent Zook, Gloria Feldt, Courtney E. Martin, and Deborah Siegel—are taking it on the road to spark just this discussion and we figured this would be a great online home for all of our thoughts, fights, and insights.

We are four diverse, feminist authors representing generations from Generation Y to pre-Baby Boomer and we want to ask the tough questions:

• Are young women really opting out of the workforce?
• Do older women really think of their employees as [overly?] entitled?
• How can younger women express gratitude and learn from their elders and visa versa?
• How can older women listen and cede power to the next generation?
• What do power and empowerment look like to women of different generations?
• Does liberated sexuality equal Paris Hilton? Madonna? Bisexuality?
• What is the major unfinished business for women in the workplace today?
• How do we keep our eyes on the prize of equality and opportunity for all?

Stay tuned for our intergenerational explorations of these issues, and so many others. And by all means, join in! Here’s to women who have ideas and aren’t afraid to use them…

Girl with Pen’s first Guest Scholarblogger post comes to you from a researcher who happens to be a dear old friend. Introducing Rebecca London, Ph.D., Director of Research at Stanford University’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Rebecca lives on California’s central coast with her husband and two school-age daughters. She’s frequently quoted in the press as an expert on poverty, youth, and working motherhood. She makes a mean strawberry margherita. Here she is!

Mom and Dad Are Busy: Schooling Our Schools
By Rebecca London, Ph.D.

Summer is dwindling, days are getting shorter, and parents everywhere are sighing in relief as their children return to school. I was contemplating this freedom when I realized that this year, with my younger daughter headed to kindergarten at our local public school, I will have this and my older daughter’s 2nd grade class in which I’ll be expected to volunteer. (I say “I” here because it is my experience that the mother is expected, but in my family my husband and I tend to share this responsibility.) Between my nearly full-time job and my hour-long commute that can only be done off-hours, how in the world am I going to manage this?

“Parental involvement” in school is the new way of characterizing the activities performed by the PTA and room mothers from our childhoods. Now, in addition to organizing bake sales and class picnics, schools and teachers want and expect all parents to contribute, especially with their time in the classroom. There is actually a good reason for this. Several years ago the National Research Council compiled research on the characteristics of youth-serving settings that turn out the most well-developed adults (for the executive summary, click here). A key to success, it turns out, is placing youth at the center of the intersection of family and school (and also community, a topic for another post). But for this to happen, family and school need to meaningfully intersect. In many cases, they don’t.

As challenging as it is for me – with my professional job and long commute – to find time to volunteer in my daughters’ classrooms, imagine what it would be like if I had a low-wage service job with no flexibility. Or if I didn’t speak English very well or knew that my education level was lower than that of every teacher and staff member at the school. What if I felt like I was never good at school and didn’t want that to rub off on my own kids, or heaven forbid, someone else’s? These are the challenges faced by parents and schools in many disadvantaged neighborhoods, where schools struggle for lack of funds and facilities, and parents struggle to provide these same life essentials for their families. If youth are to be at the center of family and school in these communities, we need to tear down the power differentials that shield the school from its parents and create opportunities beyond helping with academics, beyond being present during school hours, and beyond contributing through fundraising. Schools need to think outside the box on this one and learn from their parents what works.

As for me, I’m thinking I will run for the school site council, a body of teachers, parents, and administrators that make governing decisions for the school. I figure that because it meets after school hours, I might actually be able to manage my service without doing time during my workday. Hopefully it will count in the race to place my own kids at the center of their intersection with family and school. And for all the other parents with less flexibility and fewer resources, may their schools figure out more feasible ways for them, too, to be involved.

Email Rebecca at rebecca_london@yahoo.com

(A note from Girl with Pen: If you are a feminist-y researcher and interested in guest blogging opportunities on this space, please email me at deborahsiege@gmail.com with a few sentences describing your idea for a post.)

You MUST check out this piece by Kristal Brent Zook over at the Women’s Media Center, titled “Hillary Gets Down.” Seriously, it’s too good to miss. Go read it – go read it now!

Kristal is an award-winning journalist and author of Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain. Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, I See Black People: Interviews with African American Owners of Radio and Television, which will be published by Nation Books in February 2008.

I can’t wait to hit the road with Kristal this March. The two of us, Courtney Martin, and Gloria Feldt are becoming a traveling foursome that I’ve started referring to in my head as the womenladygirls. Marco thinks we need a psychedelic sisterhood bus and, of course, a logo. More on that soon.

Do check out the MotherTalk bloggers’ reviews this week of a book called Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity by Susan O’Doherty. Here’s the schpiel: At the age of 42, O’Doherty, a practicing psychotherapist, chose to confront the cultural demons who had been telling her all her life that the only “important” writers were men. She offers tools for managing the stress of trying to do serious creative work while holding down a job and, often, caring for a family. Sounds like, perhaps, a modern lady’s A Room of One’s Own?

Brought to you by GIRL with Pen. There. I just wanted to see if I could use women, ladies, and girls all in one post – there’s an interesting yet familiar debate going on on one of the listservs I’m on about the politics of calling ourselves girl. Dude, I’m fine with it. But I also understand the objections, and how frustrating it must seem to see younger women returning to the diminutive second-wave feminists fought against.

NEW OPPORTUNITY ON GIRL WITH PEN!: If you are a scholar who shares our mission of bridging feminist research and popular reality, is interested in blogging, and would like to try your hand at it, Girl with Pen is your place. Please contact me at deborahsiege@gmail.com for guidelines and parameters.

An amazing Stanford researcher who focuses on various issues around poverty, motherhood, and youth is going to be our first Guest Scholar/Blogger. She’ll be guest posting in this space very soon. She’s got the goods. Stay tuned!

I’ve been thinking all week about that recent New York Times article by Shira Boss, titled “Wedded to Work, and in Dire Need of a Wife.” Does anyone remember an article by Judy Syfers in the premier issue of Ms. magazine, called “Why I Want a Wife?” Yes, well, that was back in 1971. Things haven’t changed that much. Except maybe our consciousness about it all.

Syfers’ article was a bit of a satire. But Jessica over at feministing has an excellent, and serious, point about the meaning of “wife” when she writes,

Now, I know the [Times] article is trying to make a point, but framing support for a spouse’s job and chores at home as “wifely” duties is not exactly the best way to hold men (remember them?) accountable for their role in the domestic sphere.

We need some new lingo. I tried to get past the old formulas in an article I wrote for July’s Psychology Today called “Two People, One Breadwinner.” After interviewing couples who could afford to have one parent staying at home with their kids while the other worked, and talking to a slew of couples counselors and psychologists for that piece, here’s what I surmised:

Breadwinner wives—still often expected by their mates to act as social director, housekeeper, and meal planner—resent stay-at-home husbands who are lax about household upkeep. Househusbands (for lack of a better term) adjusting to their new domestic roles often resent wives who tell them what to do. Primary earners of either sex can feel trapped by work, resentful that they didn’t have the choice to stay home. And primary earners can also feel let down by partners who, once professionally ambitious, now relish their domestic identities to an alienating degree.

Bottom line: regardless of who is at home and who works, tensions and resentments around the breadwinner / domestic caretaker dynamic are hardly gender specific. Of course, in the majority of American couples, both partners earn. Most of us are still trying to figure that out. But as Jessica points out, and regardless of whether couples are living off of one income or two, getting past the equation of “wife” with “domestic maid” would be an excellent place to start.

…for my jazzy new logo. I’m so excited! Do ya’ll like?!

This year’s Book Festival in Edinburgh seems to be inspiring a number of “dead feminism” articles in the UK press. There’s one in The Herald (Thirty Years on from the Glory Days of Feminism: How Have We Changed?) and not one but two in The Scotsman (“Feminism is Dead for Most Women Today, Says Its High Priestess” and “We Gave Men a Hard Time”). I don’t know about you, but that photo attached to the Festival’s logo up there sure don’t scream “postfeminism” to me….

Memoirs by movement veterans Lynne Segal (currently professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck University, London) and writer Michele Roberts along with comments from writer Fay Weldon seem to be sparking the not-so-novel headline. Says Roberts in The Scotsman,

“There isn’t a public feminism supporting women in the way there was, because feminism has become discredited as a sour-faced, curmudgeonly set of ideas. Young women don’t want to be associated with it. I don’t think the culture as a whole represents the strength and beauty of female friendships and how those relationships save you from going mad. Women are portrayed as sitting around giggling together in wine bars. I’m not saying that that’s what young women are like, but that’s what the culture is describing: you’re allowed to have female comrades but only if you’re discussing stilettos.”

These women have excellent points, but the emphasis of these articles is just so, well, predictable. Over and over, the death of feminism seems a juicier story than stories about its life. But don’t people get tired reading the same ole story? Don’t journalists get tired of writing them? For vibrant signs of life among our sisters across the sea and other tales yet to tell, of course, see The F-Word and the women’s page of The Guardian.

One more on men this morning, cuz I just can’t resist. Charles McGrath of the New York Times speculates on what Scott Rudin and Disney are going to do with the movie version of The Dangerous Book for Boys, which they’ve bought the rights to. Writes McGrath,

A report in Variety suggested that the plot of the movie is likely to involve fathers who struggle to balance their instinctive need to protect and their offspring’s craving for adventure, even though the evidence mostly suggests that these days it is the sons who are risk averse, unwilling to unplug themselves from their iPods, and the parents who are eager for their offspring to go outside and have some old-fashioned fun.

Anyone got other ideas for Disney and Rudin? Who should star? And while we’re on the subject of sneak peaks, of course, don’t forget to preorder your copy of the Daring Book for Girls, which, in an amazing act of daring speed on the part of our ladies of MotherTalk, comes out October 30!

(Thanks to Marco for the heads up on the boy movie.)

In the wake of all that semi-silly media interpretation of a new scientific study of how masculinity in male faces is perceived, I recently learned about a resource with what sounds like a little more (forgive me) balls: Shira Tarrant’s forthcoming anthology, Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power. An interview with Shira is currently up over at The Feminist Pulse (a blog connected to Girlistic magazine). Shira is an assistant professor at CSU Long Beach. Looking forward to reading the book when it comes out. And for the goods on the science behind the man face study, check out the post by my savvy friends over at Broadsheet.

Speaking of feminist man books, I’m sorry I missed Jackson Katz, author of The Macho Paradox, who I heard was maybe going to call in on The Lisa Birnbach show last Friday when we were on. If you’re out there reading this Jackson, keep on keepin on! I’m all for the “no man left behind” school of feminism. Can someone get Jackson and all those guys in Shira’s anthology a “Feminists Dig Me” t-shirt please?