On Thursday 6/23 at 1-2pm ET, I’m hosting one of my favorite authors for a frank conversation about writing/life integrity on She Writes Radio from 1-2pm ET.  Here’s a description, and how to join in, plus a tweet — thanks for any help the word!

Recalibrating Writing/Life Balance in a Digital World: A Conversation with Dani Shapiro and Deborah Siegel (6/23, 1-2pm ET)

Bestselling author Dani Shapiro and Girl w/Pen’s Deborah Siegel contemplate the precarious balance of being a writer while living this social media-filled life.  How do you carve out time when Facebook and email beckon? Does your outer atmosphere reflect your inner writerly needs? Listen for thoughts from two wired authors, both currently between books, on the quest for quiet.

Listen online at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/s_w/2011/06/23/recalibrating-writinglife-balance-in-a-digital-world

Hope to “see” some of ya’ll there!

This week I sent a video of my daughter Maybelle to a friend who recently had a child with Down syndrome. In this video, Maybelle—who’s almost three—is reading word cards, signing and saying the words she sees. My friend responded, “That’s pretty impressive. Is that uniquely Maybelle, or is there some sort of emerging sense that kids with Down syndrome read precociously?”

Of course I was delighted to answer this question for my friend, and I’ll answer it for you: Kids with Down syndrome tend to be good visual learners, so they can often learn to read fairly early. (Downs Ed is a fabulous group in England that’s been leading the research on this.) Kids with Down syndrome may have difficulty speaking effectively, but they can often read quite well–ahead of grade level, etc–if they’re taught to read. This “if” is important, as illustrated by another conversation I had this week.

One of my best friends is an occupational therapist. She just started working with an eight-year-old who has Down syndrome and is in the life skills class at his public elementary school. The life skills class, for those who don’t know, is essentially the class for kids that the school system has decided can’t learn. It’s a segregated special education classroom where kids aren’t taught the kind of academic subject matter you’d learn in second grade; instead, they’re taught how to get dressed, how to sit quietly, how to interact with another human being. As an example of the kinds of academic challenges that are left out of life skills classes, this child is eight, and he can count to three. To three.

Maybelle is almost three years old, and she can count to ten, say the alphabet, and read more than 100 words. I share this with you and with other people in the world not because it’s “uniquely Maybelle.” She’s not a prodigy. She’s a child with Down syndrome who has been given the opportunity to achieve, and—like most of us in the world—when given an opportunity, she rises to meet it. I don’t mean to suggest that she, or anybody, will achieve every opportunity that’s presented, of course. But it’s rare for any of us to achieve without being provided with the space, the support, and the belief that make achievement possible.

Maybelle is one hell of a reader. I am incredibly fortunate to have friends who are speech therapists, early interventionists, and scholars of Down syndrome. These folks told me about high expectations and helped shatter my stereotypes about Down syndrome. I think about the eight-year-old that my friend is working with. His parents probably followed the advice of the authorities at the school, who perhaps haven’t been doing their jobs all that well and haven’t learned that full inclusion in typical classrooms is almost always recommended for kids with Down syndrome. I’ll bet good money that, if given the opportunity, this child would learn to count, to read, to perform fairly well in an inclusive classroom with his same-age peers. But if he isn’t provided with that opportunity, he isn’t going to achieve.

Thirty years ago educators believed it was impossible for people with Down syndrome to learn to read (click here if you want to hear some of my reflections on this). It’s long past time for our false beliefs and low expectations to be sad relics of an era we’ve moved beyond.

Update from Alison: I very quickly got feedback from several people about this post that has made me want to apologize and clarify. I’m sorry to imply that kids–any kids, with Down syndrome or not–should be performing in a certain way if they’re getting the “correct” opportunities. All kids are unique individuals, and their strengths and challenges are going to be specific to them. This of course has nothing to do with Down syndrome: some kids are going to be readers, some kids are going to be athletes, some are going to have artistic sensibilities, some are going to have the knack for fixing things that are broken, some are going to be beautifully attuned to other people’s emotions. Etc. And these strengths will emerge at various times in their lives. I know about one kid who really didn’t read at all until the Harry Potter books came out, and then–as a teenager–he learned to read, and loved to read.

I want us to live in a world with high expectations and lots of opportunities for all our kids. And I want us to appreciate our kids for their gifts, whatever they are, and whenever they emerge. You’re right to be skeptical of my assessment of the eight-year-old I haven’t met: a child’s ability to count, or speak, or read isn’t evidence of lack of opportunity. And it’s lack of opportunity that’s my concern, not the individual gifts and talents of any particular kid in the world.

Again, I apologize, and I appreciate the feedback!

The Arab spring took a different turn in Saudi Arabia with today’s #Women2Drive campaign.  Organizing via Facebook and Twitter, Saudi women hit city roads in protest of the ban on women’s driving.  Many of them asked their passengers to film their drives and uploaded the videos to YouTube, following the example of Manal al-Sharif, a single mother who posted a video of herself driving solo last month:

Manal al-Sharif was arrested and jailed, but this didn’t stop other women from taking the car keys.  The New Yorker has aggregated several of the videos from today’s campaign here.

The right to drive is one of several rights denied to women in Saudi Arabia, the only Muslim country in which women cannot drive.  In a powerful opinion essay about this act of civil disobedience, Farzaneh Milani argues that restricting women’s mobility is about more than driving cars:

It is about dominating, excluding and subordinating women.  It is about barring them from political activities, preventing their active participation in the public sector, and making it difficult for them to fully exercise the rights Islam grants them to own and manage their own property.  It is about denying women the basic human right to move about freely.

And while The New York Times reported that today’s protest was hardly earth-shattering—apparently only several dozen women drove—I prefer to think of them, as Milani does, as freedom riders heralding future change:

the women defying the ban on motorized mobility are in fact demanding an eventual overhaul of the entire Saudi political system. They want not just to drive but to remap the political geography of their country.

I would only add that I’m not surprised that Manal al-Sharif is a single working mother. You go, global mamas!

Pepper Schwartz and I are just wrapping up the 2nd edition of our book The Gender of Sexuality. My favorite part? Analyzing the changing status of men in sex scandals. And lo and behold, here’s a  sample of what we have been thinking about posted at CNN.com.

(CNN) — Whoa! I know more about Rep. Anthony Weiner’s private business than (I pretend) I’d like to know. Not just the bulging gray underpants, but also the understanding that all the texting, tweeting, and online lurid repartee is really about… what, masturbation? TMI, right?

One of the biggest developments in American sex scandals in our recent past is the rise in just this sort of “too much information.”

Read the rest at CNN: you’ll see how TMI has become a tool for making men look foolish without doing anything to modify the sneaky gender inequality that persists  in our social and sexual arrangements.

-Virginia Rutter

If you wanted to convince the remaining unconvinced populace that the F word is not so scary, Tina Fey would be the perfect conduit. In her new book, Bossypants, Fey, like a jocular Mary Poppins, gives readers many spoonfuls of sugar to make the feminist medicine go down. Coating incisive points about sexism with sweet comedic flare, her prose is easy to swallow, much like her infamous Sarah Palin impersonations, of which she writes “You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn’t even realize it because of all the jokes. It’s like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids’ brownies. Suckers!” (216-7).

In the introduction, Fey explains the book’s title, noting that as an executive producer people often ask “Is it hard for you being the boss?” to which Fey deadpans “You know, in the same way they say, ‘Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?” (5).

Many sections mock female beauty norms, as when Fey discusses “Twelve Tenets of Looking Amazing Forever.” In the chapter, she relates an embarrassing mother-daughter bra fitting story, admitting that “This early breast-related humiliation prevented me from ever needing to participate in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ in my twenties” (104). Here, Fey alludes to lots of big feminist ideas – the institution of motherhood and how mothers often enforce patriarchal norms that are detrimental to themselves and their children, the hyper-vigilance expected of the female body, and the mainstream media’s sexualization of women – all in a simple couple of sentences that most who have ever worn a bra can likely relate to.

Though a celebrity herself, Fey ridicules the cult of celebrity throughout, framing it as a ruse. In her typically understated tone, she advises “You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings” (122). Her section on magazine cover shoots reveals all the effort and artifice that goes into celebrification. Noting “at five foot four I have the waist of a seven-foot model,” Fey pokes fun at body ideals promoted in the media, offering a sort of ode to Photoshop, which she names “America’s most serious and pressing issue” (157). Acceding that “Retouching is here to stay,” Fey puts a comical spin on the inanity, arguing “At least with Photoshop you don’t really have to alter your body. It’s better than all these disgusting injectibles and implants. Isn’t it better to have a computer to it do your picture than to have a doctor do it to your face?” (161).

Later, in the same vein, she laments “I’ve never understood why every character being ‘hot’ was necessary for enjoying a TV show” (193), admitting “I personally like a cast with a lot of different-shaped faces and weird little bodies and a diverse array of weak chins, because it helps me tell the characters apart” (192).

Perhaps my favorite section is “Dear Internet” in which Fey answers some of the more insulting missives directed at her online. To “jerkstore” who claims “she completely ruined SNL” by virtue of being too celebrated because she’s a woman, Fey sarcastically agrees “Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long…I want to hear what men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days?”

Her mantra “Do your thing and don’t care if they like it” (145) coincides with what she titles her “Bossypants Managerial Technique”:

“I hire the most talented of people who are the least likely to throw a punch in the workplace. If this is contributing to the demasculinization of America, I say hold a telethon and let me know how it goes. I don’t ever want to get punched in the face over a joke – or even screamed at” (175).

Lamenting that women, especially comedians, are labeled “’crazy’ after a certain age” (270), Fey offers the following theory on Hollywood’s infamous inability to write roles for females ‘of a certain age’: “I have a suspicion that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

Fey is particularly astute about how the media (and society) is more critical of women than men, relating “There was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was ‘mean’ when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of ‘going too far’ in their political impressions. You see what I’m getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. Too imply otherwise is a disservice to us both” (234).

Neither is Fey the overbearing ball buster indicated by her title “Bossypants” – it is just that our society, as her book so humorously reveals, still likes it women in certain types of boxes – and the boss box  isn’t one of them. But, and let me put this in my bossiest tone, “Do yourself a service! Read this feminist comedic treat!”

There are rare moments when I read an article or listen to a recording and can’t form words to respond. Today is one of those moments and it is because you really should just listen to this recording for yourself. It’s that perfect.

The NYTimes invited four women who are at the top of their respective fields of science in for a roundtable discussion. They shared their thoughts about:

Differences between men and women in science:

TAL RABIN: Even when we do make it to the conferences, I think that there is still something different about the way that we promote ourselves.

I remember standing next to one of my co-authors, and he was talking to some other guy, and he was telling him, “I have this amazing result. I just did this, I just did that.” And I was sitting and thinking there, what result is he talking about? Until he got to the punch line. It was a joint result. It was a result of mine also. I would have never spoken about my result in the superlatives that the guy was speaking about it.

MS. KOLATA: What would you have done?

DR. RABIN: I would have said, you know, “I have this very interesting result, and we achieved very nice things.” But not “This is the best thing since we invented the wheel, and here it is.”

Having a family:

MS. KOLATA: It must be exciting for your children to grow up with a mother who has such passion for what she does.

DR. APRILE: It depends on the child. The second of my daughters used to say, “Mommy, why can’t we have dinner at 6 p.m. like everybody else?” They finally accepted these crazy hours that I had to live with.

Asking where the women are going:

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

What they would say to their daughter about going into science:

DR. RABIN: The truth is that I feel differently. I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs.

This is the type of conversation I would have KILLED for as an undergraduate. The one faculty member I tried to have this conversation with rebuffed me. She was pretty old school, couldn’t go to Harvard with the men and it took me awhile to figure out why she wouldn’t address the gender issue. I don’t blame her either. When you build up a defense mechanism, it is hard to let it go.

What I love about the conversation are the differing opinions. As I tell my students, there are no firm answers. You gather up all the data you can and make the best decision you can. From this conversation, one can see that difference decisions all lead to some awesome science making.

Here’s some useful evidence that unions matter for women’s upward mobility. But quality of life is about security and justice as well as economics, and Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center on Economic and Policy Research, explains how so in a recent Guardian post, “Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the union maid.”

Fact is, DSK attacked a member of a labor union. She has protections that U.S. workers without a union do not. Without the protection of a union, would she have had the confidence to come forward? Here’s how Baker poses the question:

Housekeepers are generally among the lowest-paid workers at hotels, often earning little more than the minimum wage. It is a high turnover job, meaning that any individual housekeeper is likely to be viewed as easily replaceable by the management. If this housekeeper did not enjoy the protection of a union contract, is it likely that she would have counted on her supervisors taking her side against an important guest at the hotel? Would she have been prepared to risk her job to pursue the case?

This is no outlier. Today, the New York Times reports about a similar attack at another “high end” New York hotel:

The supervisor of a housekeeper at the Pierre hotel was suspended on Tuesday after she failed to report to the police the housekeeper’s complaint that she was sexually assaulted by a prominent Egyptian businessman, causing a 15-hour delay in the investigation.

As Baker mentions via a link to this New York Times article without union protections, hotel housekeepers recognize that they  “simply have to accept sexual harassment and even sexual assault as “part of the job”.

Baker has another agenda in his article worth noting.

The IMF has also urged western European countries to eliminate or weaken laws that prevent employers from firing workers at will. These laws, along with unions, are seen as “labour market rigidities” that prevent labour markets from operating efficiently.

So, workers can get fired at will. It is only “efficient.” Where’s the bias? Dean Baker is reminding us that hotel housekeepers can tell us.  You think efficiency arguments and “textbook” economics don’t serve the interests of power? Do the math.

–Virginia Rutter

It’s been a long while since a book kept me up at night — both because I compulsively had to finish reading it, and also because it invaded my dreams. Home/Birth, recently published by 1913 Press did both.

Co-written by two poets I much admire, Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg, the book’s subtitle, A Poemic offers a first cue to the passion and conviction the authors infuse into this original, collage-like work. Interweaving their personal narratives about their home (and initial hospital) birth experiences, they also include the voices of home birth providers (midwives, doulas, supporters), as well as layer in statistics about the safety of home birth and the dangers of the hospital experience — both physical and emotional.  Quoting largely from Jennifer Block’s book Pushed, there is no attempt to portray a spectrum of opinions about birthing.  Their position is focused, their zeal is clear — staying at home is the best option for a woman to have an experience that is empowering to her, causes her to trust in her body, and to holistically bring her child into the world.

For Zucker, a trained doula, and Greenberg, (soon to leave her tenure-track job for a move to Maine and a possible transition to birth education work) clearly, this is a topic around which they feel a deep sense of mission, both in terms of changing the received notions about the safety of home birth, as well as doing political advocacy to overturn restrictions which have limited the scope of midwifery and “normalized” medical intervention.  Greenberg is explicit about how her first home birth (in Illinois) was actually illegal and the limitations this placed upon her care, as well as the demands caused by her sudden second home birth — fleeing the state to temporarily move to Maine so she could be attended legally by a midwife practice.

The medicalization of what is a natural process, (once left entirely in the hands of women, both literally and spiritually) has long been a topic of hot debate, as Block outlines here. Recent movements have (controversially) named “birth rape” as a phenomenon some women experience after acts of obstetric violence have been inflicted upon their bodies during childbirth.  Suffering PTSD after birth has also more recently been acknowledged as an aftereffect of a traumatic birth experience. Then there’s the recent news about how Disney has been barging into the delivery room, another way in which birth has been co-opted for corporate gain.

It’s impossible to not be moved by the testimonies offered in the book — women robbed of a sense of their body’s power, nevermind a profound moment with a new child.  Yet, I am certain many will approach this book with deeply entrenched resistance and even feel enraged by the staunchness of the authors’ position.  A refrain the two insert throughout the text is “What if something goes wrong?” no doubt a line each has been asked continuously.  I found myself wanting to hear this more directly answered, rather than just offered as a rhetorical question.  The stories relayed about home birth don’t all end happily, and the book concludes on a deeply poignant note that offers through example an answer to this question — yes, things can go wrong, but “holding the space” for a woman to meet her child within a sense of connected power is still worthwhile.

It is most difficult to critique Home/Birth as a poem. Collaborative writing doesn’t have a strong tradition within the U.S. and there were moments I wished for more clarity and shape around the narrative(s).  Attention to the line is found most strongly in the interstices between chapters — where the two take phrases previously included and collage them into more precise lines, as in this excerpt:

Never thought this would —

dreamed of —

be my story.

Every child. Changes. You

feel sane, like a witch with her silky moonlight or goddess.

Feel grateful like a feminist, like an activist, like a friend and

the truth is when you saw what you could do —

women watching over —

it changed everything and was safer and feminist

all the drawers and doors and windows

at once and the low noise we make

opening, opening.

I almost longed for Zucker and Greenberg to write a nonfiction book about their experiences rather than knitting the threads of so many others voices together.  Their use of the word “witch” is intriguing, but unclear — is this a straightforward reclamation or modern reconstitution of the word?  Likewise, this is clearly a political topic for both, one that affects a range of women’s health issues, yet I wished their desire to tie this to the feminist movement had been more explicit.  They intersperse T-shirt and bumper sticker slogans about home birth throughout to show both the popular embrace of this movement and counter attitudes to its resistance.  While the phrases are clever and sound lighthearted, (“Childbirth is a natural procedure, not a medical event” “Yes, I gave birth at home.  Now ask your silly questions” and “Peace on earth begins with birth”) they reveal the flame this movement ignites (the countervailing, “Home deliveries are for pizza”).  They serve as poetic tropes of sorts, but I would have liked more rendering of these messages in the poets’ own voices.

Greenberg and Zucker offer a unique pastiche, a chorus of female voices, sometimes speaking simultaneously, sometimes in fugue, as they layer facts, scraps, nuances, and feelings about this topic.  The result is profoundly affecting, and their invention of word “poemic” is the right refraction of polemic, serving as an invented form that allows them to bring their poetic talents to bear about this deeply felt topic.  The book’s opening epigraph by Muriel Rukeyser, “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” can also serve as its parting invocation as both authors advocate for remembering what has always been known.

Guest poster Amber Cantrell is a student at the College of Charleston, majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies.  The research project she discusses is partially funded by a Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the College.

Although this might be somewhat disappointing, rather than Alison Piepmeier authoring this blog post, it is in fact her undergraduate research assistant. However, I am writing a lot about her, so perhaps that will be a small consolation prize. My name is Amber Cantrell, and I’m a junior at the College of Charleston eagerly benefiting from working with a feminist scholar like Alison.

This summer Alison and I are working on a project about prenatal testing. Initially, we’d thought prenatal testing was going to be one chapter in Alison’s book project about the intersection of feminist disability studies and parenthood. As we’ve begun to explore all the different topics that Alison and I find interesting about prenatal testing, the information gathering stage seems to have exploded rather than becoming focused and topic specific. As the person who is primarily doing the research that Alison requests, I have delicately pointed out that this chapter on prenatal testing may really a book project on prenatal testing.

Our plan for the summer was to talk with parents of children with disabilities, particularly Down syndrome, because we wanted to hear their stories. How did prenatal testing function as part of their pregnancy, if at all? How did these prospective parents make their decisions about prenatal screening, diagnostic testing, and potentially terminating their pregnancy?  In particular, what sorts of narratives—stories from their doctors and families, stories from pop culture—shaped their decision making processes?  These questions are intensely personal and potentially upsetting to those who might have chosen to terminate a fetus that they had anticipated with excitement until they found out about a particular disability. Alison and I hoped we could secure 12 interviews, but we thought this might be ambitious; we thought that perhaps only a few people would consent to talk about their stories.

When Alison contacted some of her own friends and acquaintances as well as posted our interview request on her blog, we received 9 responses in the first 24 hours. Within the next 12 hours, we had our total of 12 people who had contacted us with their desire to participate in this project.  And people keep responding.  People who Alison has never even met have agreed to be interviewed—people from around the country, some who are living happily with large families, some who are dealing with the death of a child with disabilities, some who are pregnant again and considering testing from a new perspective.

Their generous willingness to talk about their experiences is something that Alison and I are finding overwhelming (in a good way).  Why do so many people want to be a part of this project?  We think this is evidence that we haven’t developed a cultural space for women and their partners to talk about prenatal testing, which many have come to consider an inherent part of pregnancy. As a society, we need a space to grapple with the implications of choice and what it means, especially when statistics show that upwards of 85% of pregnancies with Down syndrome are terminated.  Alison and I are both pro-choice feminist scholars, but we recognize that although the word “choice” implies something easy—a quick decision—in the case of prenatal testing and disabilities, the process is anything but easy or quick.

We’re eager to hear these stories, to start collecting and examining the complexities and paradoxes that these parents are sharing.