Not sure how I missed this one but Katha Pollitt did a nice piece on Alternet after Sharon Lerner’s “The Motherhood Experiment” ran last month in the New York Times, linking low fertility rates (more only children!) to governments waking up and smelling work/life conflict as a cause.
Writes Katha, invoking Lerner,

[F]ertility rates — the average number of children per woman — have fallen below replacement level in ninety countries, including such Catholic stalwarts as Ireland (1.9), Spain (1.3), Italy (1.3) and Portugal (1.4). Even the much-trumpeted increasing US population is mostly a product of immigration (the actual fertility rate is 2.0). While politicians in Japan (1.3) seem fatally drawn to chastising women as recalcitrant “baby-making machines,” European governments have started asking if making life easier for working mothers might do the trick….[It wouldn’t] be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason.

Population implosion leading to paid parental leave? Hey, we’ll take it. Happy Mother’s Day, all you (paid and unpaid) Moms!

(That’s “shameless” as in “shameless self-promotion.” Please feel warned.)

The first review is in for Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women and Grrls Gone Wild — and it’s a starred one. I’m here in Chicago, at my parents’ house, repressing an urge to jump up and down on their bed.

Composure, Deb, composure.

Yesterday I went to a panel on working across generations, sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women’s Corporate Circle. Entering Weil Gotshal’s shiny headquarters at the bottom of Central Park, I had one of those many moments where I wonder why I went academic instead of corporate. Oh those lunches (seared tuna and roasted vegetables).  And oh the fact that some of these firms are really talking about generational differences and have programs like “Reverse Mentoring”. (That would be Merrill Lynch.) There are those here who are genuinely trying to reframe workplace flexibility from employee benefit to something that managers can’t afford not to have. If all of corporate America looked like this particular panel, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat and come join their team. In fact, hmmm…But I digress.

Ellen Galinsky of Families & Work Institute was on the panel and served up a number of interesting tidbits from an earlier study called Generation and Gender in the Workplace, such as:

-Boomers are more likely to be work-centric than other generations, and Gens X and Y more dual-centric (meaning, they place the same priority on their job and family) or family-centric
-younger men are spending more time with their children
-men report more work/life conflict than in the past
-dual-centric and family-centric workers are actually LESS stressed than work-centric worker bees

And my personal favorite:

-if there are tensions in the workplace, they’re NOT primarily between women with kids and women without, as the media loves to overblow; the REAL tensions are between people in high-status jobs vs. those in low-status jobs – which means, I take it, that the real collisions have to do class and generation

And speaking of, I came across an interesting book the other day: When Generations Collide: Who They Are, Why They Clash, and How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work. Along with Kara Jesella’s Sassy book, this should be great airplane reading for tomorrow. I’m off to sweet home Chicago for the Council on Contemporary Families Anniversary conference, where I’m on a panel with the divine Miss Virginia Rutter. We’ll be talking to researchers and clinicians about pitching and translating research. Off to make my handouts…

So much to write about today I don’t know where to begin!

First, a launch near and dear to my heart: The Scholar & Feminist Online goes live today with an issue called Blogging Feminism. The issue is edited by Gwendolyn Beetham (a founder of the Real Hot 100) and Jessica Valenti (see posts below for scoop on Jessica’s smokin new book) and features essays by feminist academics and some of today’s most popular bloggers — including Samhita of feministing.com, Bitch PhD, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, Clancy Ratliff of CultureCat, Morgaine, and Chris Nolan of Spot-on.com — sandwiched by a foreword from Salon’s Rebecca Traister, and an afterword from yours truly. This is SO the issue we envisioned when we started SFO — interactive, crossovery, and on the mark. Can’t wait to see it go live later today.

The accompanying group blog can be accessed here:
http://bloggingfeminism.blogspot.com/

For one week after the edition launches, the blog portion of the
edition will be live, giving both the contributors and the readers a
chance to discuss the issues online. Add it to your blogroll! Come leave comments! I’ll see you there.

Just back from a reading of Only Child upstate. Daph and I spoke to a group of 40 women in Chester, New York – the sisterhood of a synagogue out there on Sunday (thank you, Paula!). They were an incredibly warm and responsive audience. I kept looking out and seeing my mother, who, actually, was thousands of miles away in Istanbul that day. After reading out loud the part from my essay that paints her in a, well, somewhat critical light, I felt this overwhelming need to tell the sisters “I love my mother! I love my mother!”

Talk about Jewish guilt.

Be sure to check this out: an armchair discussion between Ellie Smeal and Rebecca Walker, hosted by Women’s Way. And if you go, send me a comment or email and let me know how it was!

The enterprising, fearless ladies over at MotherTalk have invited me, along with hundreds of other women, to blog today about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless. So here we go.

My father taught me if not to be fearless, then to die trying. He taught our golden retriever how to swim by throwing her off the pier, and he taught me how not to fear sailing by taking me out in a storm. I learned to love rain after my father dragged me outside to watch the lightning roll in over Lake Michigan and straight into our backyard. Together, we learned not to fear skiing by staying out during a mountain blizzard in Wyoming, yodeling fearlessly at the top of our lungs all the way down.

But none of this prepared me for the courage it took to leave a marriage at age thirty-five. I wanted kids of my own, and I knew that leaving the marriage — corrupted as it was — would postpone that dream, if not vanquish it. Up to that point, I had led a comfortable life. Leaving would leave me financially insecure. But I did it. I left. And I didn’t die.

With that leave-taking began a new life — one more thrilling than a sail in a storm, more charged than lightning, more exhilarating than a Wyoming blizzard. Leaving put me in touch with my truest instinct for self-preservation. And life will never be the same again.

The National Book Critics Circle has started an online petition to protest the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s decision to eliminate its book editor job (and with it Teresa Weaver). Oy. We NEED book reviews. This is BAD. But hopeful – forward the link! More commentary can be found here. (Thanks to Daph for sending it around.)

The seminar on blogging last night was FANTASTIC and I learned a ton of shiny new tricks. But man it’s hard to focus when you’ve got your laptop in front of you and you’re online. (How do students do it these days? Oh wait…) So, during the two moments when I wasn’t RIVETED by Sree’s presentation, I checked out who else on the web is a “Girl with Pen” out there….

Imagine my surprise at finding Ladies of the Pen.

Ahem. But back to girls with pens and brains – and not just bods. Check out coverage of the new book on Sassy on NPR yesterday. I love that this kind of feminist material history is seeing the light of day — and in popular book form, too. Those girls had some serious pens, I tell you.

Ooh nooo! I’m cat blogging!

Actually, I’m sitting in a blogging seminar (sitting next to Helaine Olen) at Columbia School of Journalism with Sree Sreenivasan (the tech guy on WNBC-TV) testing some new stuff out…Bear with me. And in the meantime, enjoy this shot of Amelia Bedelia, my semi-perma-foster cat.