If you haven’t had a chance to tune into the debate started by Mona Eltahawy in the current issue of Foreign Policy, you should. “Why Do They Hate Us” takes a scathing look at the “real war on women” in the Middle East. Eltahawy makes an impassioned case for why misogyny in the Muslim world needs to be named and dismantled. Her controversial article has sparked a truly global debate.

After reading Eltahawy’s essay, check out Eltahawy’s conversation with Leila Ahmed and Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC. (Thanks to Samhita at Feministing for posting about this, and bringing her own valuable perspective to the conversation!)

It’s such a wonderful conversation that I’ve changed my whole lecture on transnational feminism for a class tomorrow so that I can show it.

What I love about this interview: Eltahawy’s eloquence and passion. Harris-Perry’s deep understanding and on-point questions. Ahmed’s deeply thought yet gentle critique.

Eltahawy: “What I’m trying to do is go straight for the jugular. I’m shaking people into having a discussion.”

“The issue I want to discuss is the misogyny, which plays out in different ways, but ultimately it’s a mix of religion, culture, and law in these various countries.  What are we going to do about that?  At a time of revolution, when everything is in flux?  Let’s jump in and turn this [into a] gender revolution.”

Harris-Perry: “As an academic, I love nuance. As a media personality, I know that sometimes it is the straightforward, loud voice that gets it heard.”

Ahmed: “You see the glass as half empty, and more than half empty, and I see it as half full. […] I am focusing on the extraordinary people who brought down tyranny, regimes, absolutely dictatorial regimes, these are young people who believe in justice, who believe in liberty, who believe in free speech, who are out in the square risking their lives […] and my faith is in them […] I see both men and women participating in this fight, I don’t see young men hating young women […] I think we do have a new generation, and my trust is in them.”

Ahmed’s critique is valid, as is her observation that some readers might find their Islamophobic and anti-Muslim feelings confirmed after reading the article. But Eltahawy refuses to stay silent despite this possibility. She insists that women’s rights should not wait until after the revolution—because then it will not be a true revolution.

Eltahawy is right. Consider the history of anti-colonial movements and civil rights movements, which reveals the following pattern: even though many women have participated in the fight for freedom, their rights are often subsequently ignored.

Eltahawy rejects the idea that Muslim women need to be “saved.” Many women continue to be active in protests. But she wants other governments to understand that “it’s our culture” does not give a pass to women-hating cultural practices that were not created by women. Among other things, Eltahawy wants Egypt to pass a violence against women act.

What this conversation also models—and why I want to show it to my students: Eltahawy and Ahmed eloquently and respectfully disagree. Where do we see this anymore? These women (all three of them) are my heroes.

National Poetry Month, or April, as it’s also known, prompted me to immerse myself in the newest work of renowned poet and feminist figure, Eavan Boland.  Cast over my reading was the shadow of the recent and sad news of Adrienne Rich’s passing. Rich’s work was an inspiration to so many within the field of poetry and beyond.  I was cheered to see her obituary prominently displayed on the front page of the New York Times. The wonderful series up at the VIDA site, “21 Love Poems to Adrienne Rich” riffs on her series of the same title and shows how deeply her influence was, how keenly her loss will be felt.



Years ago, when I was an MFA student in New York City, I had the chance to hear Eavan Boland read with Adrienne Rich.  I remember well the reverence in Boland’s introductory comments as she said that she would remember the honor of being paired with Rich, foremother to so many feminist poets, for the rest of her life.  I sat in the audience, amazed by her awe, as I thought of Boland as no less a radical figure, and realized how clearly each was offering a baton to the next generation to pick up and carry on.

Boland, who holds several prestigious titles as a professor at Stanford University, has single-handedly changed the conversation about women’s position within the canon of Irish poetry (and outside of it) through her dedicated work over the past thirty years. Her latest contribution, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, picks up where her first nonfiction book, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time leaves off.  In Journey, Boland traces the genesis of her identity as a poet while growing up in and outside of Ireland, always aware of the heavy weight of canonical history which has relegated women to a far corner of the conversation and how its press informed her education and first attempts at writing. Her intelligence is diamond-sharp, her arguments are both original and complex, and her prose reflects her true sensibility as a lyrical writer.  Her characteristic gift for taut, clear statements, rendered with rhetorical force, is evident throughout the book as she makes her case for how women poets need to reapproach history and reappropriate tradition.

The title’s inclusion of the word “maps” is both metaphorical and literal — Boland explores the known territory of literary history she has been taught (and is still taught) to create a palimpsest which includes a feminist viewpoint that can permanently broaden what subjects enter into a poem, nevermind which writers enter the canon.

Divided into three parts, the first, “Journeys,” traces Boland’s personal path into her career.  She writes movingly of the masters — all men — offered to her throughout her education in England, America, and her home country of Ireland, and how she recognized there wasn’t room within these poems for a female presence who wasn’t decorative or objectified, and the effect this had on her emerging poems.

Gradually, as she outlines in the book’s next section, “Maps,” she finds a matrilineal legacy that connects with the subject matters central within her own life and that she no longer wants to deny.  This section leads with her tribute to Adrienne Rich, followed by Elizabeth Bishop, then Charlotte Mew, and then Sylvia Plath.  She also explores the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov, Anne Bradstreet, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  Most interestingly, Boland offers a chapter on the Irish poet Paula Meehan, and Boland’s attempt to translate an anonymous “dream-vision lyric” written in Latin, Foebus Abierat, presumably written by a woman, which has haunted her for years. Boland also signals her commitment to recovery of women’s voices within “Translating the Underworld,” a chapter that describes her intensely moving project translating the work of post-war female German poets, anthologized in her volume After Every War: Twentieth Century Woman Poets.

The book ends with the section “Destinations” which consists of just one chapter, “Letter to a Young Woman Poet” — a riff on the Rilke title of similar name, but is an address to the aspiring female writer. In this chapter Boland proposes that the young woman poet learn to change the past —”Not by intellectualizing it.  But by eroticizing it.” By this Boland means that women should claim a past that has traditionally excluded them.  Boland states:

After all, stored in that past is a template of poetic identity which still affects us as women.  When we are young poets it has the power to make us feel subtly less official, less welcome in the tradition than our male contemporaries.  If we are not careful, it is that template we will aspire to, alter ourselves for, warp our self-esteem as poets to fit.

Of the past she writes, “It is, after all, the place where authorship of the poem eluded us.  Where poetry itself was defined by and in our absence.  There has been a debate since I was a young poet, about whether women poets should engage with that past at all.” She recognizes this challenge, but continues, “We need to go to that past: not to learn from it, but to change it.  If we do not change that past, it will change us. And I, for one, do not want to become a grateful daughter in a darkened house.”

Her edict to rewrite, remap, and remake is constant throughout the book, as seen in variants of her exhortation:

Can a single writer challenge a collective past?  My answer is simple.  Not only can, but should.  Poetry should be scrubbed, abraded, cleared, and re-stated with the old wash stones of argument and resistance.  It should happen every generation.  Every half-generation.  In every working poet’s life and practice.”

Challenging tradition and refusing inequality underpins all of her work, as A Journey offers examples, models, and urgency to not believe this work has yet been fulfilled.

Correspondingly, Boland’s other touchstone throughout the book is how to admit more into the sphere of the poetry world — specifically themes, images, and ideas that allow women to write more fully about their lives.  Boland vividly describes living in a suburb, with two young children in a young marriage, and recognizing rituals within her life that were ordinarily excluded from celebrated poems.  She writes of inheriting the mantle of poetic tradition, yet:

The difference was that as a young woman I did so in circumstances which were relatively new … in a house with small children. With a washing machine in the background.  With a child’s antibiotic on a shelf with a spoon beside it.

After long struggle, Boland came to realize, “… the fact is the words of poets and canon-makers — but more canon-makers than poets — had determined the status of my machines and my medicine bottles. … They had made the authority of the poet conditional upon a view of reality, which then became a prescription about subject matter.  They had debated and subtracted and reduced that relation of the ordinary to the poem so that it was harder than I thought proper to record the life I lived in the poems I wrote.”  Boland writes, movingly, of wanting there to be an ownership within the poem so that “whatever I lived as a woman I could write as a poet,” to hold within her writing “a way to have the child’s medicine and … darkening room in the suburb” sanctioned within the canonical poetry world.

Through this fusion, Boland finds a way to join her voice as a woman and as a poet; through her activism and commitment she has fostered change within the academy and rewritten a relationship to history.  In her insistence, she holds the door open wide for other women to pass through.

Boland closes the book by thanking the women poets in the generation before her whose strength bolstered her when she started out.  She writes, “But I believe words such as canon and tradition and inheritance will change even more.  And with all that, women poets, from generation to generation, will be able to befriend one another.  And that, in the end, is the best reason for writing this letter.”

It is deeply pleasurable, nevermind galvinizing, to feel the weight of Boland’s strong intelligence and deep conviction. Her contributions have been invaluable. In the early summer of 2011 I again had the chance to hear Boland read, and again, her insistence on feminist activism within the literary world and insistence on a new legacy for women writers radiated just as strongly as when I heard her years ago.  She concluded by reading her beautiful poem, “Anna Liffey” which ends with the speaker’s simple phrase “I was a voice.”  The reverberations of this phrase for Boland’s poetry and her feminist commitment will be far-reaching for generations to come, and have made an essential and inspiring difference.

The Council on Contemporary Families just released the 5^th edition of Unconventional Wisdom. This collection of plain-English research abstracts and ideas has pieces you’ll want to know more about, some you’ll argue with, and many that will, as the title suggests, surprise you. This is a heads up to you: don’t miss this nice work, a volume edited by Stephanie Coontz and Joshua Coleman.

Two pieces grabbed my attention. Sociologist Wendy Manning from Bowling Green State University wrote about premarital cohabitation and divorce risk. Old news = cohabitation was associated with higher odds of divorce. New news = that stuff about cohabitation and divorce is old news. In particular, writes Manning, “when we looked at couples married since 1996, we found that this older association no longer prevails. For couples married since the mid-1990s, cohabitation before marriage is not associated with an elevated risk of marital dissolution. In fact, among a subgroup of women facing the greatest risk of divorce, cohabitation with definite plans to marry at the outset was tied to lower levels of marital instability.” Check it out. 

Meanwhile, in a grounded, empirical, and de-facto retort to recent much-ado about mothers and the dignity (or not) of work, demographer Suzanne Bianchi (UCLA) reports that “Mothers today work during pregnancy more often and return to work much sooner after the birth of a child than did mothers half a century ago…. More dramatic [is] the change in the speed at which women returned to work after the birth of their child…. By 2001-03, 42 percent of such mothers were back at work three months after the child’s birth. The majority of first-time moms (55 percent) were back at work six months after the birth, and almost two-thirds (64 percent) had returned to the job by the child’s first birthday.”

You see, the “dignity of work” that Mitt Romney talked about a few years back is beside the point. So is the notion that we need to honor women’s choices. Work and family are about all of us, and not special category for women, or women who are mothers, or whatever. It is just not that optional nor is it about character or values nearly so much as about culture. If there are puzzles about work and family, they aren’t about women, the puzzles are about how we structure work, and how we support families. Keep looking for the evidence, like that provided by Bianchi and Manning, and you’ll see that unconventional wisdom gives us the new conventions.

–Virginia Rutter

Next weekend I have a unique opportunity to reflect on how I’ve grown since my graduation from Muskingum College—now University—in 1991. My husband Nikhil Deogun and I will be delivering the undergraduate commencement address.

Needless to say, it’s an honor and a privilege, but also a big responsibility. After all, we want to impart wisdom, right?

We’ve had fun thinking back on the people we were 21 years ago, and the unexpected paths we’ve followed. We want to give the graduates advice about how to navigate those unexpected turns themselves, about how to find love, follow their professional dreams, and make a difference.

For me, the question of making a difference has also come from some unexpected places. Here’s a sneak peak at some of my thoughts for the Class of 2012:

I’ve learned that through mothering I can make my mark on the world as much as—and maybe more than—at work. Let me be clear: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association and find it meaningful. Highlights of my working life include planning a yearly national conference that features cutting-edge feminist scholarship. I’m also a leader in conversations about women’s issues outside of higher education: in 2010, I organized a meeting at the invitation of the White House Council on Women and Girls to discuss how feminist academics could help shape policy initiatives, and I recently attended a Department of Education-sponsored discussion about applying classroom learning in community settings.

Yet I’ve discovered that motherhood can sometimes be richer ground for expressing my feminist values, and for cultivating parts of myself, than the workplace. Our children, Maya—who’s 11—and Sameer, who’s 9—really want to make the world a better place. More important, they take action to make a difference. For example, Maya teamed up with friends to sell hot chocolate at our local sledding hill to raise money for a neighborhood soup kitchen. Sameer has spent time serving meals in a Newark homeless shelter. Of course, they’re normal kids who sometimes spend too much time watching Teen Nick and absorbed in their iPods. But when they notice inequality they ask questions and they want to do something about it.

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned: while you’re busy building your career, don’t forget about opportunities at home, whether those come in the form of parenting or other non-work pursuits. It really is true what you’ve probably heard from faculty already: you want to be a well-rounded person.

Now GWP readers, what advice do you have for the class of 2012? What unexpected discoveries have you made looking back on your life over five, ten, or 20 years?

Gw/P welcomes Holly Grigg-Spall, a features journalist who writes for feminist blogs and whose work on the birth control pill has been cited in mainstream newspapers in the U.S. and U.K.

How many of us read the inserts included in a packet of pills? How many decide not to take the pills on the basis of the information enclosed?  The rapidly reeled-off list of side effects stated at the end of a televised advert for a new drug has more comedic value than serious consequence to most. If we do have doubts, many of us will rely on the reassurance of a doctor, and then take the pill anyway.

I recently wrote a piece for Ms. Magazine Blog outlining the FDA reappraisal of top-selling oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin. It was discovered that drugs such as these containing drospirenone held a significantly higher risk of causing blood clots. Research by the FDA and other bodies suggested this conclusion was definite, while research funded by the pharmaceutical company behind these billion-dollar products, Bayer, suggested the opposite conclusion to be true: that there was no increased risk evident. A team of experts, some of which had financial ties to the company, voted against having the pills taken off the market when presented with the question of whether the risks of taking these pills outweighed the benefits.

Bayer is facing 11,300 lawsuits from women who have been seriously injured and family members of women who have died after taking one of the company’s bestselling hormonal contraceptives. They have settled the first 500 addressed with a total of $110 million in payouts. When discussing this process with a lawyer representing many of the women I was told that Bayer would do anything to avoid a trial wherein the full spectrum of their marketing strategies would be revealed.

The FDA came to the decision to add into the insert included with these drugs a statement of the discovery of “conflicting” research that suggested the pills had a higher risk of causing blood clots  (up to three times higher) – acknowledging the discrepancy of the research funded by Bayer and giving it equal standing as that performed by other bodies including the FDA itself.

Prior to this decision being announced a number of women’s health groups got together to write a letter to the FDA asking that they look again at the question put to the board of experts. They argued that the correct comparison for the board to consider would be between drospirenone-containing contraceptives and other oral contraceptives, and not between Bayer’s drugs and unwanted pregnancy. In the final sentence, they remarked that they believed that “lives will be saved” if the pills were no longer on the market. They met with the FDA and one representative asked that the FDA strongly reassess its acceptance of Bayer-funded research. Another asked that the drugs no longer be prescribed and that the FDA “get back to the arc of history and progress that protects women while supporting their contraceptive needs.”

The new labeling will state the “conflicting” findings and advise that women speak to their doctor if concerned. The official statement on this decision, relayed through the media coverage, reminded women that when compared to pregnancy the risk of development of a blood clot was insignificant. They also asked that women currently taking the drugs not stop doing so. Despite the FDA studies suggesting the blood clot risk is particularly high for women under 30, the statement compounded the understanding that the issue is only relevant to those over 35,  those overweight, those that smoke, and those with relevant medical history.

Is this additional text in an insert enough? Cynthia Pearson of the National Women’s Health Network has given an unqualified no as her response to the decision.  If no is the answer, then what needs to happen next? At this time I’ve seen no coverage outside of news reports that has shown the response of the wider feminist, or just female, community.

When I heard that the FDA was asking for a comparison between pregnancy risks and the risks of Yaz and Yasmin, and that the women’s health groups were calling for, in their letter to the FDA, a comparison between these oral contraceptives and other brands not containing drospirenone, I immediately wanted to know why the comparison was not between using these pills and not using them — as in using other forms of non-hormonal contraception with similar effectiveness. This would produce the biggest gap, and put the statistics in starker relief.

There is too much dependent on the FDA not acknowledging the efficacy of non-hormonal contraceptives or admitting that research funded by the pharmaceutical company producing the drug is not reliable. These were for some years the most popular oral contraceptives. It is important that it is believed that there truly is an “arc of history and progress that protects women.”

Even the women’s health group representatives appear to understand this as a blip in an other uninterrupted history of outstanding service. To my mind, such behavior by the FDA should raise some serious suspicions of their motivating force. They advise that women should discuss this with their doctors – doctors who probably know less than I do, due to time constraints, inclination, as well as doctors that could well be directly or indirectly benefitting from backing Bayer.

If it’s taken this long to get a tentative admission of the blood clot risk, what do we not know about the other side effects of these pills? What were the benefits, outside of preventing pregnancy, of Yaz and Yasmin that the FDA saw as so important to women?

The reaction of the women’s health groups suggests an attempt to work within the system, rather than against it.  Does the FDA see itself as protecting the freedom of the millions of women who decided to take Bayer’s oral contraceptives, the millions that made it a bestseller? When a corporation can and will do anything to sell its product in ways that even the most cynical consumer would find shocking can we uphold the notion of informed consent?

We live in a very different time to 1970 when the result of the Nelson Pill Hearings was the inclusion of an insert in birth control pill packets. Then, the other noise of advertising – both overt and hidden – was not loud enough to drown out the message. We are now far happier with corporations telling us what to do than we are with being dictated to by the government. Consumer-driven choice keeps women on the pill – with doctors swapping them between the many brands as side effects appear. Laura Wershler and I put together a guide to a birth control rebellion. We live with a culture that stresses there is no alternative – to the pill or the system that supports it.

To quote a recent New Yorker piece by Margaret Talbot, by the way of Karl Marx, perhaps we must admit that – “Women make their own circumstances but not under circumstances of their own making” – and work from there.

This guest post is was originally published in re: Cycling and is posted here with the author’s permission.

As the Presidential campaign heats up (what you think it’s hot now?) the rhetoric about the “War on Women” will continue to escalate. Even though the GOP will continue to replay Hilary Rosen’s unfortunate “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life,” quote, we need to refocus on what I believe Rosen was trying to focus on. The fact is that Ann Romney has never had to worry if her paycheck would stretch to the next payday, if she would get assigned enough hours at work or if taking a day off from work would result in being fired. Those are the issues I would hope we focus on as the United States decides who will lead them for the next four years.

Back in the lab, mothers in science have similar issues to contend with.

In the recent issue of  “American Scientist” the married social scientist couple of Williams and Ceci offer up the theory that perhaps the reason why there are so few women in science and engineering is that women want babies. BABIES! Oh, those cute, plump little beings that bring women’s work to a standstill (well except for changing diapers, feeding, clothing, rocking to sleep, but that’s not work, work, right?).

The premise Williams and Ceci present is that most, if not all, institutional discrimination has been dealt with. Let’s go with that for the sake of non-argument, ok? Their hypothesis is that “the hurdles women face often stem from a combination of several factors, including the decision to have children and cultural norms that place the burden of raising children and managing households disproportionately on women.”

My first reaction (besides laughing, but I said let’s assume no other discrimination is taking place, right?) is that change does not happen this quickly. Even if we could say that equity had found its way to how women in science and engineering operate (fair shake in the grant, publishing and tenure processes) in the last ten years (to be generous), how quickly do we believe it will take to get a change in the landscape? Do Williams and Ceci believe that once the equity horn was sounded that women would hightail it out of the lab into the bedroom to start reproducing? That women who fled to other careers would run begging to be let back into their abandoned labs? Let’s give it a generation before we focus in on just motherhood as the root cause.

On the other hand, let’s go with Williams and Ceci. Let’s say that everything is hunky-dory except the whole mommy thing.

Let’s deal with why the mommy thing becomes the biggest challenge…

Sue Rosser recalls her own challenges with being pregnant and in graduate school. How people immediately expected less of her despite any decline in her work. She even reports that an adviser suggested that she have an abortion because her second pregnancy would interrupt data collection.

Rosser also outlines the systemic challenges to combining motherhood with a career in academic science – mainly paid leave after having the adorable career ending package, er, baby:

Although the National Institutes of Health offers eight weeks of paid leave to postdoctoral fellows who receive the National Research Service Award, recipients can only take the leave in the unlikely situation where every postdoc at the university is also eligible for eight weeks of paid leave. A study conducted by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley documented that of the 61 members of the Association of American Universities (the top elite research institutions), only 23 percent guaranteed a minimum of six weeks paid leave for postdocs and only 13 percent promised the same to graduate students.

Academic science is not your typical workplace. Experiments do need to continue, but much like a law firm, there are other bodies in the lab that can carry on the work. We just need a system that supports this model of respecting that scientists are human beings and as such we get pregnant, have babies, get sick and have to take care of our families.

Rosser ends her piece with some amazing advice for women and men who want to combine parenthood with a career in academic science. The one I repeat over and over to my students is PICK YOUR LIFE PARTNER CAREFULLY! This continues to be the biggest choice women have to make. Will your partner understand when you have to stay late to make sure an experiment doesn’t explode? That you do need a month on the open sea collecting fish? Or need to travel to Africa like Rosser?

In many ways, I wish that Williams and Cece were correct. That the question of why women aren’t staying in science is all about babies. Because we can fix that. We can build child care centers, we can pay women to stay home in order to heal from the birthing experience and bond with their bundles of joy. Sadly, I think it’s not the only reason. But maybe we need to start acting as if it is the reason and start changing the structure of how science is done. Because in the words of Ann Romney, we need to respect the choices women make and, for me, that means having institutions created that support women in those choices. Because it’s not much of a choice if there isn’t a way to act out that choice, now is there?

Crossposted at The Pink and Blue Diaries.

I honestly think parents judge each other too much. So far be it for me to judge the expectant parents in yesterday’s New York Times article, “A Boy or a Girl? Cut the Cake”. But let’s just say, as a researcher, if I were going to judge the concept of a gender-reveal party, here are 5 things I might say:

1. The stat in the article regarding the percentage of people who find out the sex of their fetus through amnio or ultrasound is at odds with other stats I’ve read. The percentage is more like up to 80, not 50.

2. Gender – and therefore gender stereotyping – begins in utero. How do we know? Because in 1986, around the time that amniocentesis first allowed pregnant women to find out fetal sex, sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman asked 120 pregnant women to describe the movements of their fetuses. “Women who’d learned they were having a girl gave answers such as ‘very gentle, slow, more rolling it seemed than kicking,’ ‘moderate, reassuring but not violent,’ ‘quiet in the mornings and afternoons,’ ‘lively but not excessively energetic.’ Mothers who knew they were carrying a boy described ‘many somersaults and very vigorous movements,’ ‘rolling from side to side and little kicks and punches up and down,’ ‘a constant jabbing under my ribcage,’ and ‘a saga of earthquakes.’ Tellingly, the responses of women who did not find out the sex of their fetus showed no such stereotypical patterns.” (Lots more about this in Annie Murphy Paul’s meaty chapter on sex and sex selection in Origins)

3. This story about gender-reveal parties is the antithesis of last year’s stories about Pop and Storm – kids whose parents didn’t divulge their child’s sex, for months after they were born. I wonder what that says about us as a culture, or a zeitgeist, in terms of how we feel about young children and gender.  Thesis, antithesis, anyone?

4. I realize that finding out the sex is a threshold moment. It’s the thing that makes a pregnancy feel real. Sex transforms a fetus from an abstract “it” into a specific “he” or “she.” But don’t most enlightened parents these days act with shock and glee regardless of which sex is announced? So why all the fuss?

5. Shouldn’t we be a tad more concerned with “Who will it be?” than “What will it be?” in the end?  I’m mean, if I’m going to get all lofty about it and all.  And why, for that matter, are these called “gender-reveal” parties and not “sex-reveal” parties, which is what they actually are?

Lastly, a personal story:

When I was mentally preparing for the great reveal, lying on the table waiting for my ultrasound at week 20, I thought back to my grandmother who was pregnant with my mom and her twin sister back in 1941. Grandma Pearl, an orthodox Jew, assumed she was carrying boys—or, rather a boy. She didn’t even know she was carrying twins until the doctor suspected a second heartbeat in the seventh month and ordered an X-ray. My grandparents didn’t bother picking out girl names. Their sons would be David and Jonathan. When David and Jonathan turned out to be baby girls, my grandparents ended up naming them after two Catholic nuns who took care of my grandmother on the maternity floor: Sister Rita and Sister Renee.

I’m not sure what all this means, but I find it damn funny somehow. I mean come on, it was an act of irony destined to make even a stern Old Testament God crack a smile.

PS. Did anyone else find the photo below incredibly creepy?

I’m SO late to the table on this one (as usual these days) but hey, I’m still a mama with a pen.  And I couldn’t refrain from weighing in.

Every few years, the question—“who’s the next Gloria Steinem?”—seems to recycle itself in the mainstream media.  But it’s media, and not the women’s movement, that abhors a vacuum.

In “Gloria Steinem, a Woman Like No Other” (New York Times, March 18), Sarah Hepola is at it again.  The piece, while thoughtful in many regards, has a logic problem. Feminism is a living, breathing movement, always in evolution.  To name a sole leader now is like trying to push a tree back into a seed.  I’m pretty sure Gloria–a reluctant spokesperson herself, famously anointed by a media hungry for stars–would agree.

Hepola is right to note a lack of a singular voice, or face, today.  But there has never been unity in the women’s movement, and look what feminists have accomplished.  To be sure,  “two feminists, three opinions” might not be the most effective formula for a movement intended, among other things, to effect legislative change.  Still, feminism has since become, for many, as much culture as cause.  That signifies progress, you could say.

Yet progress, more generally, seems to be what’s really at issue.  Perhaps more compelling than the question of the movement’s public face is one more fundamental: Have we come a long way, baby, or just maybe?  It’s a question I find myself pondering daily.

As the Times article rightly points out, the Komen kerfuffle and Limbaugh’s most recent slur are simply the latest in a steady stream of events demonstrating the need for continued vigilance and response on the part of those who care about women’s health and well being, not to mention advancement.  For better or worse, the questions our feminist foremothers asked are ones younger women are asking still.

In my opinion, we need more focus on the unfinished work of feminism–for there is so much left undone–and less on the question of the movement’s brightest star.

French feminist Elizabeth Badinter thinks so. I’m not completely convinced—though I think she’s dead on about some larger trends, including the way that natural mothering has increasingly become doctrine in certain circles. I review her forthcoming book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women along with an older book, Chris Bobel’s The Paradox of Natural Mothering, in the spring issue of Brain, Child magazine. Check it out!

The Council on Contemporary Families recently released a virtual symposium entitled “Is the Gender Revolution Over?” In it, CCF fellows from around the United States offer their commentary on a discussion paper prepared by David A. Cotter, Joan A. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman. The press release, which I wrote with CCF co-chair Stephanie Coontz, offers a summary of key findings.

So, what do Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman see as the status of women and the gender revolution? Key findings include:

• A SLOWING OF WOMEN’S ENTRY INTO NEW OCCUPATIONS AND POSITIONS. Barriers to women’s opportunities in traditionally male jobs have declined since the 1960s-for example, the 1970s and 1980s saw a 20 percentage point increase in women managers. Yet during the next two decades there was only a five percent increase in women’s representation in management. Working-class occupations are nearly as segregated today as they were in 1950 and have become more segregated since 1990.
• MORE EDUCATIONAL DEGREES FOR WOMEN, BUT CONTINUED SEGREGATION OF COLLEGE MAJORS. In some fields, women have even lost ground since the mid 1980s. In 1970 only 14 percent of computer and information sciences degrees were granted to women. By 1985 women’s share had increased almost threefold, to 37 percent. But by 2008 women accounted for only 18percent of degrees in the field.
• SOME SIGNS THAT THE RAPID CHANGES IN TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES TOWARD WOMEN BETWEEN 1977 AND THE MID 1990S HAVE COME TO AN END. From 1977 to 1996, the percentage of people who believe women are less suited to politics than men fell by half, to around 22 percent. However, despite the attention to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, there’s been no change over the past two decades, and almost one-fourth of Americans still hold this view. In addition, since 1994, there has been some slippage in support for egalitarian marital arrangements.

Cotter and his colleagues conclude that “the gender revolution has not been reversed,” but “it is stalled on several fronts – and there is still a long way to go.” Other scholars provide different points of view on the subject. An index to responses can be found here.

COHEN, GALINSKY, JONES: LOOK AT THE LABOR MARKET University of Maryland demographer Philip Cohen elaborates on the minimal progress women have made in management, in “What if Women Were in Charge?” and points to the long-run implications for working women. Work and Family Institute President Ellen Galinsky argues that men’s support for more egalitarian family practices has not stalled, in “Gender Evolution Among Employed Men.” She suggests, however, that the transformation of family life may yet stall if we do not abandon our work-centric definitions of masculinity and develop more family-friendly workplaces.

Labor market researcher Janelle Jones of the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes in “Divergent Revolutions for Blacks, Latinos, and Whites” that there is a smaller gender wage gap among African Americans and Latinos than among whites. But she notes that this is partly because men have been losing ground in the workforce.

MORE RESPONSES: GAINS IN SOME AREAS, STALLS IN OTHERS In “No Stall in the Sexual Revolution,” Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell link draws on his research on American attitudes about family diversity to document the remarkable expansion of support for gay and lesbian couples and families during the past decade.

But that leaves two other scholars–Paula England from New York University and Barbara Risman from University of Illinois-Chicago-presenting different viewpoints on what has and has not changed.  In “In Sex and Romance, Not So Much Gender Revolution,” CCF senior fellow Paula England notes several trends in personal behavior that remain remarkably resistant to change. But CCF executive officer Barbara Risman is more impressed by the radical transformation in girls’ self-confidence in “The Beat Goes On.”

In “Revolutions Seldom Revolutionize Everything,” CCF co-chair and Evergreen State College family historian Stephanie Coontz also sees the hangovers from the past that England and Risman discuss. She goes on to explain that the movement for gender equity has become more complicated now that sexism is no longer a monolithic system, imposed by outright exclusion and legal enforcement of inequality. In their rejoinder Cotter et al concede that a real revolution has occurred but note that counter-revolutions, or at least reversals of gains, are not uncommon.

Check out the dialogue. And weigh in with what you think.

–Virginia Rutter