Last night’s host at the New York Public Library event primed the audience for a fight. There was none, just good ‘n lively convo. So I settled in and found myself listening to the exchange between Leslie Bennetts and Elissa Schappell with an ear for marketing. (I’m working on talking points for my own book and am obsessed with framing – can you tell?) Leslie Bennetts is a master, a natural — I say that with genuine admiration.

Some highlights from the sound bite frontlines:

-ES on mommy wars: “It’s mom-on-mom violence!”
-LB on SAHMs being left and being unable to reenter the workforce: “It’s carnage out there.”
-LB laughing at her own poor paraphrasing of an expert she talked to: “He who brings home the bacon controls the bacon.”
-LB on structure: “What’s keeping women from reentering the workforce is that no one is taking them back in.”
-LB going counterintuitive: “Staying at home is high-risk behavior. I wouldn’t put my child’s welfare at risk that way.” “Working women aren’t validated as good mothers. No one ever says working women are being good moms, taking care of their kids, by working.”
-LB on motive: “I did not think this was a book about mommy wars or feminism. Boy was I dumb.” ES: “Dumb, dumb, dumb!”

It’s interesting data to learn that many people seem not to be fully understanding “The Feminine Mistake” as a pun on “The Feminine Mystique,” and instead think that Bennetts is calling SAHMs mistakes. (Jury’s still out over here on that one – still on Chapter 1…)

Be sure to check out Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker review of Bennetts. Good stuff, and balanced. (Thanks, Helaine, for that heads up!) Mead is generally laudatory (and man, talk about a gorgeously written review). Based on what I heard last night, I sense I’m going to agree with her critiques:

[Bennetts] is short on answers for women whose budgets do not stretch to hiring a well-chosen private surrogate. And she seems impatient with anyone who has failed to find, as she has, the thrill of work, particularly work that grants a certain degree of child-friendly flexibility.

Mead does a great historical tour of the title and offers a smart compare/contrast with Friedan. When I grow up, I want to be Rebecca Mead. (Don’t we all?!).

I ‘fess up: I struggled with the tone in my post below, as my live-in editor Marco, who I made read it twice before I hit “publish” can attest. My ethics dictate that I try (at least) to take issue without trashing, cause really, who needs more trash in this world. On that note, some of the best, aka most balanced, posts and commentaries I’ve seen so far: Joan Walsh on Salon and Mojo Mom , and an interesting bit about a review Mojo submitted to Amazon which Amazon wouldn’t publish.

PS. Leslie, if you are reading, I look forward to meeting you, and to engaging in conversation not only about the issues, but about reception — an issue that intrigues me, politically and personally and professionally, to no end.

Tonight I’m going to hear Leslie Bennetts interviewed by Elissa Schappell at the New York Public Library. Bennetts is also speaking at a salon I’m a part of, next week. So, to prepare for said events, I excitedly started reading her book, The Feminine Mistake — how can anyone who has written about Betty Friedan pass up a book with such a title? But the prologue itself gives me pause. Not for the reasons expressed by the “stay at home brigade,” as Bennetts calls them in her retort on HuffPost to the barrage of opening critiques she’s received from SAHMs, but on behalf of my generation.

Well-intentioned and heartfelt, Bennett’s writing nevertheless positions younger women as in need of cautionary tales. Some of us, no doubt, do, and Feminine Mistake is full of important information about what happens when opt-out wives get left. But many others of us clamor instead for tales of workplaces that have realized women (AND men) have families. Where are the cautionary tales aimed at corporations about how bottom lines suffer when they fail to retain their women? Or the cautionary tales aimed at young husbands about how miserable they’ll be if they opt out of time at home with the kids?

Thumbing ahead, Bennetts writes about the difficulties of reentering the work force and the penalties women pay for their time out (and the need for crucial changes in the divorce laws). But the tone set early on (and Leslie, please tell me I’m off – I want to be – I’m still in the early chapters) seems to focus on personal decision-making, rather than much-needed structural (aka workplace) change.

Wait – I’m switching to second person, so let’s go with it:

Leslie, you completely have me when you wrote that the real issues behind women’s work/life predicaments have nothing to do with words like “choice” and “values.” But then you write about the “willfully retrograde choice” of women who opt out on the very next page. If you ask me, the “feminine mistake” has been — to borrow a phrase from my elders — a focus on the personal at the expense of the political, the structural. I think you and I will both agree that words like “options” are meaningless until we are talking about viable workplace options — not the “option” to work or not.

A personal postscript: Raised to be my own person and divorced at 35, I have never for a moment expected that a husband would support me for the duration. These young women who keep appearing in print are certainly not the majority. As I thought Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic Policy Research rather convincingly documented, the “opt out” phenomenon named by Lisa Belkin back in 2003 was not hard evidence of a generation bailing on work but rather a dip in women’s labor market participation due to a recession. Why do young mothers, instead, keep getting castigated, warned, and blamed? (I’m thinking of other books here…more soon.)

Attention heavily degreed women-with-babies: I love this. Caroline Grant, movie columnist for the blog Literary Mama, is coming out with a book called Mama, PhD, about, what else? Mamas with PhDs. Keep an eye out for more about it on MotherTalk.

After a successful pilot with the National Women’s Studies Association, Girl w/Pen is hitting the streets with a new training series: “Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade.”

Here’s the why:

Public debate lacks a sensitive discussion of the complex forces shaping the lives of women and girls. Researchers, nonprofit workers, and savvy writers everywhere have the opportunity to frame public debate about these issues. Too often, however, important work fails to reach an audience outside the academic and advocacy worlds. Writing a trade book is one way to join the debate. To sell a book in today’s competitive publishing climate, one must be able to write engaging, accessible prose that will appeal to a wide audience.

 These skills can be learned.

And the what:

5-WEEK TELESEMINAR
Girl w/Pen offers an interactive tele-seminar series designed to help researchers and others cross this bridge by learning about the key elements involved in writing a book for “trade.”

A “trade book”—one written the intelligent, general-interest reader and carried by bookstores—is different from an academic book sold primarily through university presses. Participants will learn from exchanges with New York City-based agents and editors why it’s essential to think about audience and market in a different way, and why you need a book proposal. We’ll explore the differences between popular and academic writing, why a dissertation or a monograph is not a trade book, and how to write an effective book proposal—meaning one that has the best chance of being sold.

Participants will be expected to read assigned material (including sample book proposals and a book, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published), engage in an ongoing online exchange, and participate in a weekly session with the full class and instructor at an established time each week.

1/2-DAY, 1-DAY INTENSIVES
A tailored on-site version that condenses material covered in the teleseminar. Additional topics for consideration include writing articles for magazines, blogging, and op-eds.

UPCOMING SESSIONS:

May 5, 2007 – “Taking Research Public,” Council on Contemporary Families Annual Conference, University of Chicago

June 2, 2007 – “Making It Pop: Trade Books, Popular Magazines, Blogs,” National Council for Research on Women Conference, Spelman College

July 1, 2007 – “Publishing in Women’s Studies: Public Voice,” National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, St. Charles, IL

If you are an academic association or department or a nonprofit organization (or a member of said association, department, organization) and would like further information, please contact me directly at deborahsiege@gmail.com.

Just a quick one on this snowy Friday on the Upper West Side: HuffPost has an interesting post by Leslie Bennetts about the reception of her book, The Feminine Mistake, proving once again that sisterhood is noisy whenever one writes about women’s choices and predicaments these days. As usual, I hope that Leslie’s many important points make it through the din.

I’ve added a list (scroll down, it’s on the left) of forthcoming books by savvy feminist scholars to watch out for – and will continue to try to list em as I see em going forth.

Did you catch that front page story in Sunday’s New York Times on “amazing girls”? My gal Courtney Martin has a whole book on the topic (and much more) coming out April 17. It’s called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. (Courtney and I are teaming up to do some joint speaking this summer about feminism’s daughters. Stay tuned…) For a great counterpoint to the article, though, check out Courtney’s post on feministing.com and Patti Binder on What’s Good for Girls.

The other book I’ve listed comes out around Mother’s Day and promises to clear up a lot of the annoying myths about “opting out.” Penned by sociologist Pamela Stone, it’s called Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Stone’s revealing study adds an important counterpoint to Leslie Bennetts’s forthcoming The Feminine Mistake.” I’m not sure yet how it’s a “counterpoint” (I need to read it!), but I urge people to check it out. It looks at what really happens to women who opt out of the workplace and their careers for the sake of their families and sheds light on new research about the American workplace. (Hint: The dirty little secret of today’s work world is that it is not providing work-committed women with the support they need to keep working once they become mothers.)

On a related note, and in case anyone missed it, a special March issue of The American Prospect grew out of an October 2006 work/family research conference sponsored by the Council on Contemporary Families and looks at “Why Can’t America Have a Family-Friendly Workplace.” The issue includes articles by the creme de la creme on this topic: Joan Williams, Kathleen Gerson, Heather Bousey, Janet Gornick, Scott Coltrane, Tamara Draut, Jodie Levin-Epstein, Ellen Bravo, Ann Friedman. These people are all doing amazing work and, like Pamela Stone, merit increased visibility for their solid and grounded research.

The other week, Slate hosted “Memoir Week”, assessing the state of the modern memoir and posing the following question to a group of memoir writers:

How do you, as memoirists, choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them—or do you not alert them at all? If you do, do you discuss the book with family members and friends while the work is in progress? How do you deal with complaints from people who may remember events differently than you?

These are questions I get asked a lot as I travel around talking about our book, Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. When Daphne and I were inviting writers to contribute to our anthology, some told us they wouldn’t be able to write anything about their parents until they were safely 6 feet under. But not me. In fact, the things I wrote about my mother in my essay for the book were things I had already told her. Or rather, wrote to her. I started writing her letters when I was still living under her roof, at age 16. They were love letters with an ultimatum: “If you want to continue to have a relationship with me, pay attention,” they’d generally begin. My mother still has these letters tucked away somewhere in her nightstand drawer.

But still, people who read my essay in Only Child generally to want to know how my mother “took” my essay. And then there’s that other question: “What did your ex-husband think?”

In answer to both: As I finished writing the piece, I decided that ongoing relationships with both Mom and ex were more important to me than any piece of writing. So I made the decision to show them both the draft and give them the opportunity to ask me to make changes before I went to print. Writer friends thought I was nuts to open up my draft to editorial input from the leading characters in my drama. Granted, I was not prepared to completely revise, nor was I willing to let certain details or particular turns of phrases go. But each (Mom and ex) asked for one or two emendations around details that were important to them to mask. I honored their requests.

My mother—like Sean Wilsey’s—agreed that I had the right to tell the truth, and she actually, bravely, agreed with my version of truth when it came to my characterization of her, and of our earlier and often painful dynamic. My ex, for whom wounds were perhaps more fresh, may have told the story a different way, but he, too, told me he saw the veracity in my account. I give these two characters in my drama extreme kudos. They each proved big enough to let me own my experience, my tale. Mom remains my biggest fan (love ya!), and yes, to many people’s surprise, my ex and I wish each other nothing but deep happiness and are still, if at a remove, in touch.

I’d be eager to hear how other contributors to our book have experienced the aftermath of writing about their families — or how anyone who writes personally has dealt with these particular challenges.

Well, March came and went, but hey, it’s never too late for a Women’s History Month post, right?

So first, my congrats to the 2007 honorees of National Women’s History Month. Very cool, I thought, that the theme was “Generations of Women Moving History Forward,” and that Third Wave Foundation’s Executive Director Monique Mehta was among the honorees.

And speaking of history, last week I contacted the scholars behind this terrific online resource called “The Second Wave and Beyond.” Check it out. It’s still under development. Lookin forward to seeing it grow.

Point blank, women need to write more op-eds. So if you’re in NYC, check it out!:

“Voicing Your Opinion”

Op-Ed pages are a powerful forum for public discourse, and a well-written piece can affect social change. But with limited page space, editors tend to favor the powers-that-be. Enter the Blogo-sphere and on-line citizen journalism, opening the field to a broader range of voices. Media opinion-makers explore the impact of this new phenomenon.

Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Tunku Varadarajan, Editorial Features Editor, Wall Street Journal
Matt Stoller, political activist/blogger
Sheryl McCarthy, Columnist, Newsday; Board of Contributors, USA Today
Andrzej Rapaczynski, Editor and Director, Project Syndicate
Catherine Orenstein, contributor, New York Times, Washington Post (moderator)

When: Wednesday, April 4, 200706:30 PM – 08:00 PM
Where: NYU Steinhardt Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, at 10th Street)
Go to http://www.cencom.org/ to register. The event is free.