Since becoming a first-time mother 17 months ago over here, I’ve decided that PAMPERING OTHER MOTHERS can be a feminist act.  In that spirit, I share news of a new offering of mine:

Rejuvenate Your Writing Life!

A Restorative Mini-Retreat for Writing Mamas

With authors Deborah Siegel and Christina Baker Kline

Saturday, May 21, 9:30am – 3:30pm
Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture

For details (like, you know, how to register!) click here.

I’m thrilled to be teaming up with my fellow She Writer Christina on this one. In addition to being one of the most prolific writers I know, she’s a gifted teacher. Plus, two people have now said we look alike.  Which makes me smile.  A lot.  Come meet us in person and see if you agree 🙂

Many GWP readers know Christina from the anthology of personal essays she coedited called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror and the book she co-authored, with her mother, on feminist mothers and daughters called The Conversation Begins.  She also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow.  Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.  In addition to writing nonfiction, she’s also a novelist (Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water), Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and an on-staff editor and writing coach at the social networking site SheWrites.com.

Our first retreat is taking place in Brooklyn.  But Christina and I are also available to take it on the road.  To discuss the possibility of bringing this retreat to a locale near YOU, please email me at deborah[at]shewrites[dot]com.

When my dear friend and beloved colleague Gloria Feldt invited me to write a guest post for the 9 Ways blog in honor of Women’s History Month, I thought long and hard.  I wanted to do justice to Women’s History Month, while also offering, as her tagline suggests, “tips and power tools for No Excuses readers.”  But I was feeling at a loss for words.  I ended up beginning the post like this:

The other day I was riding the number 2 train home from the city, thinking about what I might write here in honor of Women’s History Month and feeling overpowered by current affairs. The tsunami, earthquake, nuclear disaster. Senseless murders in Libya. The gang rape of an 11-year-old girl. This month, I sense such widening circles of sorrow swirling, it’s easier, I confess, to shut off and just hold close those I love. If I pause long enough to truly let the world in, I fear I’ll be carried out on a wave, swallowed up by a sea of emotion from which there is no return.

And then something happened to me.  I witnessed an act of violence–against an older woman–in the subway car.  And suddenly I knew what I would write about: the tragedy going on right in our own backyards—that which lifts us out of our chairs and just kind of compels us, without thinking, to act.

You can read the full post here. And if you haven’t read it already, I strongly recommend reading Gloria’s book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power.  Two of the lessons she writes about come up, a bit, in my post: Know Your History.  Wear the Shirt.  Gloria has taught me a tremendous amount about the value of these lessons–and so much more.  It was an honor to write this for her.

Dear Girl w/ Pen readers,

You may remember that just before the new year, Deborah posted about some exciting changes coming in 2011. If you do remember that post, you may wonder whatever happened to those exciting changes! Well, they are coming slowly but surely, and I wanted to step in, introduce myself, and tell you a little bit about what’s going to be happening in 2011. My name is Avory, and I’ve recently come on board as Girl w/ Pen’s webmaster. I’ll also be writing a column called Relating Radically, and you can read more about me on my bio page.

We’re excited about changes to the blog in a few areas, and I’d like to take a moment to tell you about them:

1. Site Design. Bit by bit, I’ll be updating the site design to make it more attractive and easier to navigate.  If you enjoy the Girl w/ Pen site and would like to offer suggestions on how we could improve the site to make it easier for you to use, please let me know using the “Contact” link in the menu above!
2. Social Media. We want it to be easy for you to get the latest feminist research and our spin on current issues.  To that end, our social media streams are now active and ready for you to subscribe.  You can find us on Twitter @girlwpen or on Facebook via the Girl w/ Pen Facebook Page.  I’ll be updating those streams regularly with new Girl w/ Pen posts, and you can also Tweet us or leave a comment on our wall if you have something you think Girl w/ Pen readers should know about.  And as always, you can also subscribe to our blog using RSS.
3. New Content. In addition to my new column, Relating Radically, we’ll soon be looking for guest posters to write for a new monthly column featuring young scholars (under 30).  We’ll post the details about that opportunity soon, but in the meantime, if you know anyone who might be interested, ask them to follow Girl w/ Pen for updates!  You can also always contact us (see “Submit Your Ink”) above if you’re interested in writing a guest post.  Be sure to read the guidelines there to find out what we’re looking for.

Thanks for reading, and I’m glad to be on board with this amazing group of writers!

Women’s history month has led to the predictable school project in my home: interview a woman you admire.  I’ve reflected cynically about the value of such work in the past, but this year I’m taking a different view by thinking about women’s history on a smaller scale, within the course of a generation.

My mother, Louise Kimmich, is a retired teacher.  She stayed home with me, my brother, and sister until my sister entered kindergarten, and then she returned to work.  I remember her telling me many times about her limited professional options—teacher, nurse, and secretary—as a way of encouraging me to have big dreams about my own career choices.

But my mother modeled those ambitions, too.  She returned to graduate school while working full time and taking care of her family, earning Master’s degrees in early childhood and special education.  She took a page from the feminist activists’ playbook and went on strike at home, effectively engaging me and my siblings in taking care of some household tasks.

So here’s my own women’s history month project, an interview with a woman I admire.  My mom, Louise Kimmich, helped pave the way for me and all the daughters of feminism.  Her reflections illustrate how much feminism has achieved in a generation; they also point to some shortcomings that I’ll address in future columns.

Meanwhile, GWP readers, how do you take stock of feminists’ achievements and its unfinished business?

AK: Tell me about some of obstacles you faced as a woman.

LK: It was really the dark ages of womanhood if you were growing up in the 1950s!  You had a certain stereotypical set of occupations you could enter: teacher, nurse, and secretary.  You really weren’t encouraged to do anything else.  If I had it to do over again I don’t know if I would enter education.  I would probably choose something less stereotypical.

AK: How did feminism affect you?

LK: During the civil rights movement, I saw that people had the opportunity to participate, and make a difference.  It was an awakening.  I also remember Title IX.  I was a wife and mother by then, but I realized what had been missing for me in terms of high school sports.

AK: Tell me about a woman you admire.

LK: I admire all the young women of today, pursuing their dreams due to the feminist movement.  I also admire Hillary Clinton, who is my age, for rising to Secretary of State.

AK: What is an accomplishment of which you’re proud?

LK: My proudest accomplishment is being the mother of three wonderful adult children who are educated, responsible, kind, and caring adults.

Before I’m accused of self-serving pandering by including our last exchange (and really, she said that without  prompting from me!), I would argue that my mother’s reflections on the value of motherhood highlight an area where feminism has dropped the ball.  But more on that in the future.

Hooking up is getting lots of video and academic attention. Plus, it’s Spring — and Spring Break — so it seems timely to re-post the following (with permission from the Ms. Magazine Blog).

The days are finally longer. Birds are chirping and green leaves are starting to bud. This can only mean one thing. Spring Break! And with Spring Break comes hook ups.

Some folks are freaking out about this “new phenomenon” of hooking up, but I’d argue it’s hardly new — check the lyrics from those 1975 disco heroes, KC and the Sunshine Band:

baby, babe let’s get together
honey, honey me and you,
and do the things, oh, do the things
that we like to do.

oh, do a little dance, make a little love …
get down tonight…

Translation? Hey, shorty, let’s hook up.

The 1960s had Free Love. The 1980s was about the cazh (as in casual sex). Today we can knock boots, hit it and quit it, find an FWB or a ONS. Call it what you want, it’s still consensual sex outside of a committed relationship. And while the language may change, the moves remain the same.

What is new on the sexual landscape are debates about whether casual sex is all about fun and free will, or if hooking up is linked to sexual assault and women’s objectification.

The fact is that young adults ages 18 to 24 who have casual sex do not appear to be at higher risk for psychological fall-out compared to their partnered peers. In so many words, Score! says Jaclyn Friedman of Yes Means Yes. Research from the University of Minnesota “reveals the truth that neither Hollywood nor the Religious Right want you to know: Casual sex won’t damage you emotionally. Not even if you’re a girl!”

But Occidental College professors Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman might disagree. Their forthcoming article, “Friends with Benefits, Without the Friendship Maybe?” points out that college hook-up culture often involves drinking — a known factor in sexual assault. Young women and men alike say the sex is often unpleasant and meaningful connection is elusive. Many students offer harrowing descriptions of assault, sexually transmitted infections, emotional trauma and gendered antagonism. Yet hooking up — with its risks, missteps, and possible mistakes — is still a chance to explore sexual boundaries.

Determined to get to the hot-and-bothered heart of the matter, Heather Corinna from Scarleteen.com is launching a new study on multigenerational experiences with casual sex. Corinna hopes to find “a more diverse, realistic and non-prescriptive picture of people’s sex lives and ideas about sex.”

Yet, according to Salon.com’s Kate Harding, “the problem that needs solving isn’t hook-up culture, but the intense pressure on girls and women to focus on getting and keeping a guy, rather than on getting and keeping whatever they want.” Documentary filmmaker Therese Shechter of The American Virgin gives a nod to this point:

What’s actually bad for women and girls is treating us like victims who need protecting [and] ignoring that our sexual experiences, good or lousy, can contribute to our growth and development as human beings.

“I’m all for sexual freedom as long as you’re safe,” says Jacob Levy, an 18-year-old student at California State University, Long Beach. “[But] there should be a warning label on hooking up,” adds 20-something Stefaney Gonzalez. “Something like WARNING: proceed with caution.”

As Nancy Schwartzman documents in her gripping film, The Line, there is potential for both pleasure and peril with sex, casual or otherwise. Hooking up doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of crime rates that show one in six women (and one in 33 men) statistically likely to face sexual assault in their lifetime.

Hooking up also has a gendered hue when girls are taught that being sexy is about performing instead of about self-pleasure and expressing what feels good. It’s what philosophers call “illocutionary silencing” — when girls and young women fail to say what they want. As Heldman wrote in Ms. magazine, self-objectification has serious impacts on girls’ political efficacy and sexual pleasure. Getting off becomes tied to seeing oneself through the eyes of someone else, or through the lens of an imaginary porn camera.

The issue isn’t imaginary porn cameras, though; there are lots of items that clutter the sexual imagination. But here’s a thought, and it’s not a new one: Reducing sexual harms like assault, coercion, and slut shaming means maximizing sexual pleasure. Let’s kick forced power disparities and nonconsensual objectification out of our everyday lives in the bed and beyond. That’s when the girls will really go wild. On our own terms.

Photo courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaelx/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me, and me to the world.

–Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young

I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days,
Halleluia!
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
Sit at the welcome table, one of these days.

–Traditional spiritual

“The Welcome Table” is a song that my daughter has been able to sign along with for months now. As many readers already know, Maybelle has Down syndrome. She was born in 2008, into a cultural moment that was ready for her in ways it would not have been even a few decades earlier. In one of my classes recently, a student shared that forty years ago, her sister was born and her mother was told to institutionalize her. A few decades later, shortly after Maybelle was born, I was told, “The College of Charleston is starting a college program for people with intellectual disabilities!” It’s a very different world.

And yet it’s still a world in which many people have a hard time seeing my daughter as fully human, and a world in which many people believe they ought to have prenatal testing so they can be sure their pregnancies won’t result in the births of people like Maybelle. As Harriet McBryde Johnson notes, it’s “a world that by and large things it would be better if people like me [and Maybelle] did not exist.” I know that the stigma surrounding—and, indeed, creating the meaning of—disability persists. I’m aware of it now in a way I wasn’t before Maybelle entered my life. Watching her sign this song recently, I felt how much I want Maybelle to be part of a community where, as one young feminist scholar puts it, “We [can] bring our whole selves to the table.” I want her to sit at a table where she’s welcomed, recognized as a valid and valuable person, and fully included.

I’ve just finished teaching Johnson’s memoir, Too Late to Die Young. Every time I read this book new parts jump out at me, and as I prepared for class last week, the passage quoted above got caught in my head and hasn’t left. Johnson explains that her “fight has been for accommodation.” She makes this point as she recounts an extended dialogue with Peter Singer, a philosopher who argued—kindly, but distressingly and persistently—that people with disabilities, people like Johnson, live lives that are “worse off” and therefore they should be eliminated before (or shortly after) birth, or allowed to commit suicide later. When many of Johnson’s activist cohort criticize her for talking with Singer, she notes that he’s not any more a monster than most of the people she encounters in her life.

One of the moments of real controversy to disability activists is when Johnson sits down beside Singer for a meal. This is during her visit to Princeton, and they dine with students who ask Johnson questions about, essentially, why she deserves to exist. At one point Johnson’s elbow slips, and she’s unable to feed herself. She needs an adjustment. She writes, “Normally I get whoever is on my right hand to do this sort of thing. Why not now? I gesture to Singer. He leans over and I whisper. ‘Grasp this wrist and pull forward one inch, without lifting.’ He looks a little surprised but follows my instructions to the letter.” Some disability rights activists saw this as a flawed endorsement of the humanity of a genocide advocate. Johnson, though, recounts this moment in her book with a kind of wry tenderness.

Interestingly, Singer himself reminisces about their meal, and about his assistance to Johnson, with a similar tenderness in the eulogy he wrote about her for the New York Times. He writes that Johnson’s description of their meal “suggests that she saw me not simply as ‘the enemy’ but as a person with whom it was possible to have some forms of human interaction.” And he identifies her as a person whose “life was evidently a good one.” What happened at their meal was that Johnson brought her whole self to the table, and by doing so, she endorsed Singer’s full humanity, as well. Having a meal together, sitting side by side at the same table, made that possible.

Early in my career at the College of Charleston, Johnson sent me an email, alerting me to the fact that the Women’s and Gender Studies Program I was directing was hosting an event at a venue that was inaccessible to people using wheelchairs. I was a good enough feminist that I recognized the need for a basic level of accommodation, so I made the change. It was a first step for me, a moment when I committed to spaces that were accessible: we’ll have plenty of tables for everybody!

Now, six years later, I’m moving beyond that initial understanding of accommodation. I want accommodation to mean that we are reimagining our communities in significant ways, that we are conceiving of our world as made better—richer—more wonderful by the inclusion of all kinds of diversity, including the diversity of physical and intellectual disabilities. I want us to bring our whole selves to the table, one table that everyone has the chance to sit at, a table where we’re all truly welcome.

Rango opens with our lizard hero accompanied by a headless, legless, one-armed Barbie as his female companion. Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) imagines himself as a suave leading man instead of the googley-eyed lizard he is, draping his arm around Barbie and asking “are those real?” Ah, the joy of objectifying sexist jokes in kids films. What fun!

As you can imagine, this opening did not bode well for my hopes that this film might just be the one that has equal female and male characters (in numbers as well as in narrative arc) and maybe, just maybe, a representation of femininity that goes beyond the princess, witch, dead mother meme stamped on our psyches by Disney.

Thankfully, the film moved beyond dismembered Barbie, introducing us to a key female character – Beans (voiced by Isla Fisher) – a rebellious, smart, and outspoken female lizard trying to save her farm as well as discover the truth behind her town’s water shortage. Alas, she is not the hero, Rango is. He has to mosey in with his Depp swagger to save the town – and, in the end – to save Beans as well, with the obligatory blossoming romance between Rango and Beans closing the film.

Yawn, you might be thinking.

But wait — even though the representation of females is problematic (not to mention the stereotypical depiction of the one Native American character who is – surprise surprise – a noble warrior type of few words), the film itself is a visual treat with the dessert dwelling animal protagonists vividly portrayed, the action scenes expertly paced, and the narrative itself offering a lovely blend of adventure, mystery, and humor.

Yet, I don’t want to like this film, damn it!

Yes, I like Johnny Depp, yes I appreciated the updating of the western genre with the tongue in cheek critiques of corruption, consumerism, and our apathy towards the environment, but NO NO NO I don’t want yet another film that has scant female characters and for the billionth time relies on the damsel in distress being saved by a plucky male hero. Puke.

It’s true that in a key escape scene, Beans does the driving and she is the one (yes ONE!) woman to join the group setting out to save the town, but is this type of paltry tokenism really enough? Why not make her Rango’s EQUAL? Why not nix the romantic, hetero-monogamous ending? Why not cut the horrid cat-fight scene between Beans and one of the few other female characters, a fox named Angelique, in which Beans and Angelique call each other “tart,” “tramp,” and “floozie”?

To keep with the “all women are catty sluts” message, there are also a handful of saloon-hall prostitutes in the background. Why place women front and center when you can instead place them on the side, all tarted up and ready to claw each other apart? At least Beans is closer to the center of the film – too bad she has an affliction where she freezes up, going all catatonic at the most inopportune moments. How feminine of her!

I can hear the groaning right about now – why do you have to be so picky? Can’t you just enjoy the film for what it is – a crazy take on the western genre with several metatexual components, a great voice cast, and jaw-dropping animation? Well, yes, I can, and I did. Yet, I can also, like Rango, call for a “paradigm shift” – one that stops representing the world as if it was 90% male, 7% slut, 2% silent/catatonic female, and 1% headless Barbie.

Choices, not discrimination, deter women scientists

So read the headline that summed up a few weeks of articles, blog posts and opinion pieces on Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams’ article, Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science. And that’s the conclusion I would come to as well if I didn’t understand that you can’t examine the issue of underrepresentation of women in the sciences by comparing women and men with equal resources to each other. Because part of the issue with the lack of women in the sciences is that resources are not distributed equally.

It’s Women’s History Month and for the past few years women in the sciences has received a lot of attention during this month. First Lady Michelle Obama mentioned the shortage of women in the sciences and the Smithsonian Channel included comic books to their Women in Science programming this year. After 15 years of studying and working on this issue, if it were that easy, I’d pack it up and move on to a new puzzle to solve.

But let’s look at the “choices” Ceci and Williams claim are at the real root of the issue:

If not discrimination, what is the cause of women’s underrepresentation? Today, the dearth of women in math-based fields is related to three factors, one of which (fertility/lifestyle choices) hinders women in all fields, not just mathematical ones, whereas the others (career preferences and ability differences) impact women in math-based fields. [1] Regarding the role of math-related career preferences, adolescent girls often prefer careers focusing on people as opposed to things, and this preference accounts for their burgeoning numbers in such fields as medicine and biology, and their smaller presence in math-intensive fields such as computer science, physics, engineering, chemistry, and mathematics, even when math ability is equated. [2] Regarding the role of math-ability differences, potentially influenced by both socialization and biology, twice as many men as women are found in the top 1% of the math score distribution (e.g., SAT-M, GRE-Q). [3] The third factor influencing underrepresentation affects women in all fields: fertility choices and work-home balance issues. However, this challenge is exacerbated in math-intensive fields because the number of women is smaller to begin with. [Numbers in brackets were added by me.]

Let’s take these one at a time:

1] Career choice. Girls just like working with people better. I’ve wrestled with this issue for years. I almost bought into it too at one point, but I came to a different conclusion. Parents, educators and career/college counselors are terrible at teaching kids, boy and girls, what “good” comes from math-based careers such as computer science and engineering. For the most part, I would agree that women are attracted to careers that appear to benefit humanity. It’s easy to see that connection when one looks at medicine and biology, especially with the abundance of shows about doctors saving lives on TV almost every night. The CSI franchise is moving that view towards chemistry. Now to work on computer science! Which is why I love that my campus has a good number of women faculty members in the computer science department.

2] Are we really going to revisit the Larry Summers debate? Really? Do I really need to state again that one does not need to be a genius to be a rocket scientist? Yes, smart…but if we restricted math-based careers to just the top 1%, I think we’d have a shortage of computer scientists. Oh, wait, WE DO!

3] The fact that fertility coincides with the tenure clock is discrimination. It impacts women far greater than it does men. The fact that the academy has dragged its feet to alter the tenure system to retain intelligent women in all fields is at bare minimum biased towards a masculine way of promoting workers and thus smells like discrimination.

We can no longer hide behind the idea that women choose to do X when all the social forces in her life is choosing for her. When we settle the question of inequality with “but women choose” we let ourselves off the hook and place the entire burden on individual women. When we don’t encourage our girls to embrace their intelligence, we choose for them. When we tell them that being an engineer isn’t helping humanity, we choose for them. When a woman faces the “choice” between buckling down to get tenure versus starting her long awaited family, we choose for them.

Until women and girls can truly make free choices, we must look hard at the system we operate in and ask, “What is wrong? Where can we help women make the choice they really want versus the choice that seems to fit best?” Now that’s a choice I can stand behind.

Women’s History Month should be a time of celebration.  Sadly, when it comes to maternal health, there’s not a lot to celebrate this year.

Just one year ago, this wasn’t the case. In April 2010, maternal health was making headlines—with an encouraging story.  Research published in the medical journal The Lancet found glimmers of hope in the downward direction of the global maternal mortality rate.  Though certain parts of the world had experienced rising maternal mortality rates (including eastern and southern Africa, due to HIV-AIDS), the overall picture looked promising.  These trends were supported by data in another report, Trends in Maternal Mortality, researched and written by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fun, the United Nations Population Fund, and the World Bank, which found that the number of women who died due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth had decreased by 34% between 1990 and 2008.

In 2011, the Republican budget in Congress is targeting women’s health programs at home and abroad for deep cuts, with serious consequences for mothers and children.  How much money will these proposals actually save, and at what cost to the lives of women and girls?

Let’s revisit recent history.  In 2000, world leaders came together at the UN to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which identified eight anti-poverty goals to be accomplished by 2015.  The fifth goal was maternal health: to reduce by 75% the maternal mortality rate, and to achieve universal access to reproductive health.  In 2010, while much work remained to be done, the data suggested that most maternal deaths can be prevented, and that the safe motherhood movement was truly making an impact.  Celebratory headlines in newspapers like the one in The New York Times declared “Maternal Deaths Decline Sharply Across the Globe.”  This article quoted The Lancet’s editor, Dr. Horton, explaining that the data should “encourage politicians to spend more on pregnancy-related health matters”:

The data dispelled the belief that the statistics had been stuck in one dismal place for decades, he said.  So money allocated to women’s health is actually accomplishing something, he said, and governments are not throwing good money after bad.

At the same time, U.S. activists were becoming increasingly alarmed at rising domestic death rates.  Amnesty International issued a report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the U.S.A., that raised concerns about the two-decade upward trend in the numbers of preventable maternal deaths.  Amnesty International observed that “women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 49 other countries, including Kuwait, Bulgaria, and South Korea” and called for a legislative agenda that made maternal health a priority.

Who could have guessed that one year later, we would be retreating even further from making maternal health a priority?

Most of us know about the proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood, which provides a wide array of sexual and reproductive health services to women, many of whom cannot afford to go elsewhere.  Proposed slashes in funding to global women’s health are just as serious.  Ms. blogger Anushay Hossain explains what’s on the chopping block globally, and why this is such a big deal:

House Republicans not only proposed to cut U.S. assistance to international family planning funding, they also want to completely zero out any funds going to the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, the largest multilateral source of reproductive-health assistance in the world. The U.S. currently provides 22 percent of the UN’s overall budget, and UNFPA is the only agency within the UN that focuses on reproductive health.

At the recently concluded 55^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, listed the three main challenges we must face in order to improve maternal health globally: empowering women and girls to claim their rights, “including the right to sexual and reproductive health”; strengthening health services everywhere “to deliver an integrated package of sexual and reproductive health services”; and ensuring “adequate financing.”  He also spoke about girls’ education as “the most important intervention to avoid maternal deaths.”  I was inspired to read UNFPA’s mission, which reflects an understanding of health in the context of human rights and equality:

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity.  UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.

This struck me as fairly comprehensive and visionary.  Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen this picture of UNFPA in the mainstream U.S. media.  Nor have I seen the following question asked—or answered: how might the proposed cuts affect maternal mortality rates, at home and globally?  I would also like to see politicians address this issue.  I was glad to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detail the devastating effects of the elimination of funding to UNFPA; her testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Relations is posted on Feministing.  She observed that the quality of women’s health and empowerment in the developing world not only has an effect on their families and their communities, but also on our own security: “This is not just what we fail now to do for others.  It’s how that will come back and affect our own health here at home.”

As one of the truisms of globalization goes, we’re all connected.  Indeed—the security of women everywhere appears to be threatened by the proposed cuts and policies in the U.S. Congress.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Girl w/Pen friends — it’s been too long!  In keeping with today’s theme so wonderfully explored by Debbie Siegel, here’s my review of my shero Peggy Orenstein’s latest.  This review originally appeared on the Ms. Magazine blog and is re-posted with permission.  For more of Orenstein’s thoughts read my interview with her on SheWrites.

If you’ve been within 50 feet of a 4-year-old girl in the past decade, you can’t have escaped the fact that princess is a booming industry. From T-shirts emblazoned with “princess” to the fad for “makeover” parties to “princess potty seats”, there is no shortage of products with a tiara theme offered to girls. In her excellent new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes as a journalist, a mother of an elementary school-age girl and a former girl herself to investigate the explosion of pink “girlie-girl culture.”

Common wisdom would have it that the demand for pink is simply hardwired into girls. Orenstein evaluates this by consulting with neuroscientist and Pink Brain, Blue Brain author Lise Eliot, a proponent of neuroplasticity–the idea that “[inborn traits], gender-based or otherwise, are shaped by our experience.” Eliot’s research shows that, in fact, when kids are tiny, “[they] do not know from pink and blue.” She argues that children don’t begin to label behavior or toys as meant for girls or for boys until between ages 2 and 3, as kids come to understand there are gender differences. It’s also the exact time when they’re handed toys that are gender-specific. In other words, Orenstein writes, “nurture becomes nature.” Boys are blued; girls are pinked.

So if not nature, what’s the force behind all the pinking? The easy answer is money. As one example, the ever-more-present Disney Princesses line grossed $4 billion dollars in 2009. The “father” of that line, Andy Mooney, tells Orenstein, “I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy.” A sales rep at the annual Toy Fair has a more direct answer when Orenstein asks if all this pink is necessary: “Only if you want to make money.”

But even if cash-hungry marketers are pushing pink to rake in profits, there’s another piece to the puzzle: parents who buy the toys for their kids. Orenstein has a deep empathy for the competing pressures they face. She herself doesn’t want to restrict her daughter from choosing her own mode of self-expression–even if that’s a poufy princess dress–but worries that all the marketing itself constricts her daughter’s choices. Instead of the entire rainbow, girls only get to see the pink slice.

Orenstein’s sympathy extends to parents participating in the most extreme “girl-ification”–the pageant parents portrayed on the TV show Toddlers and Tiaras. Visiting a pageant held deep in the hill country of Texas, Orenstein leaves the tiara-fest more ambivalent. She’s not ready to dismiss the parents’ oft-repeated credo that pageants boost their girls’ self-esteem and that it’s okay to tell your daughter that she’s special. She also sees how much much participating in pageants can mean to a family. But it’s clear from her observations that Toddlers and Tiaras is doing its share of harm.

Orenstein mentions how exposés of the show have featured “psychologists who (with good reason) link self-objectification and sexualization to [a] host of ills previously mentioned—eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, impaired academic performance,” often rebutted by the pageant moms, who then defend their actions. And within the book’s first pages Orenstein references the well-respected American Psychological Association’s Report of The Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls which offered hard evidence that an overemphasis on beauty and sexiness made girls vulnerable to problematic behaviors linked to self-objectification.

So how can parents balance these pressures in order to stem the tide of pink? Orenstein leaves the question open, which might frustrate some readers. She muses as she researches, reflects as she consults, and ends the book optimistic but uncertain about how root-level change can be achieved. On her website she’s just launched a “resources” section which offers suggestions of books for kids and parents, recommended shows and films, even a clothing line. Lisa Belkin of “Motherlode” in The New York Times has also responded with a solid list of suggested reading in her column “The Princess Wears Plaid.” Additionally, the Ms. blog offers a list of contemporary retellings of fairy tales and myths from a feminist perspective. All ask readers to chime in with further contributions.

Orenstein has a final, crucial piece of advice: Just say NO to the overpinking. That might seem pat to a frustrated parent–saying no reaches beyond appeasing a demanding child to refusing cultural edicts that seem to whisper and shout from every side. Awareness is your best line of defense, Orenstein insisted in dialogue with Lori Gottlieb at a recent L.A. talk, as she repeated, “You just say NO.”