Out of sheer luck of the calendar, this month’s Science Grrl falls on Veterans Day so I had to dedicate this month’s column to the Goddess of Science Grrl Veterans…Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper who has an entire conference named after her. Hopper entered the Navy under the WAVES program.

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Fellow GWPenner Lori mentioned Lise Eliot’s recent book Pink Brain, Blue Brain last month. In my reading of the book, I found Eliot’s balance between nature versus nurture commendable. Despite being a science grrl, I do find myself wanting nurture to win out since then it would be just darn easier to toss out the pink and blue crap.

I hate seeing toys that have no gender to them, like laptop computers, painted pink for girls and not-pink for boys. This country has a problem with the low number of students who want to study computer science, especially girls. I don’t think that having pink laptops will get girls to want to study computer science. But in my conversation with Eliot, she suggests that we hijack this pinkification of our girls world and give it to them, but be subversive too.

But how far do we allow it to go? The Discovery Channel is a great place to find science toys online, but even they separate out girls and boys toys. If you look at the toys offered, a very small number are stereotypical. I assume that they are buying into parents who will come to an online store and immediately look for the boys tab. But I think that the Discovery Channel would do a world of difference for girls in science if they simply had age segregation for their toys. Send a message to parents and gift-buyers that science is gender neutral.

We are shortchanging our girls by making all their things pink. It tells them that their things are different. Luckily the Discovery Channel gender-segregated toy store doesn’t house a pink microscope. So perhaps they are being subversive when a parent goes on and sees “Oh, a girl microscope!” and really it’s just a plain old microscope. I can’t only hope.

Pink Girl, Blue Girl is an excellent read and I believe if we followed Dr. Eliot’s recommendations as we raise our kids, we will see more girls in science.

Difficult Dialgoues

Get the latest on girls and girls studies this week at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia from November 12-15.  The conference theme is “Difficult Dialogues,” and we expect our largest event in recent history.  On tap: more than 1,600 feminist scholar-activists gathering to exchange ideas in more than 300 sessions.

You’ll hear analyses of girls’ lives and experiences, including sessions like “Girls of Color and Performance Ethnographies” and “Voices of Girls in Urban Schools.”

And if you can’t make it you can find updates on our Facebook page or after the conference on the NWSA site where we expect to make a podcast of the Angela Davis keynote address available.

Wimpy Kids

You can also hit the newsstand and pick up the latest issue of Ms. Magazine where you’ll find my contribution on Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series.  My daughter Maya is one of my expert sources along with Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown and Mark Tappan, who’ve just released Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes.

Follow the thread: The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation reminds us that women now make up half the workforce. And are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in 63 percent of families.

The report also reminds us that a lot of policy has not kept up with the definitive end of “separate spheres” and the caregiver/provider model of families. We all do market work, and we all need to find ways to care for our families, our children, and ourselves.

The report reminds us that now, more than ever before, we all need family friendly and more humane work policies. That issues like good (secure) jobs, adequate, affordable, and just health care, paid vacation, paid sick days, child care, and family leave aren’t women’s issues at all. They are human issues. They are workers’ issues.

How to get there? The word of the 1960s was plastics. The word for 2010 is unions. We don’t even have to invent them. They already exist. And they are changing. And there is opportunity just up ahead to help them change more.

A Center for Economic and Policy Research report released today, The Changing Face of Labor 1983-2008, documents that “over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically…. In 2008, union workers reflected trends in the workforce as a whole toward a greater share of women, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, older, more-educated workers, and a shift out of manufacturing toward services.”

As reported in the Associated Press this afternoon, “Women are on track to become a majority of unionized workers in the next 10 years, signaling their growing clout in the labor movement.” Women make of 45 percent of union membership–up from 35 percent in 1983, according to CEPR’s report.

Lead author, CEPR senior economist John Schmitt, connects the dots: “When you have a majority of women in the labor movement, issues like work-family balance, paid sick days and paid parental leave become more important.”

And Change to Win head Anna Burger makes the message concrete:According to AP, Burger says, “Because of women, we don’t just talk about raising wages, but about creating family friendly workplaces with sick leave, child care, and family and medical leave. We don’t just talk about out-of-control insurance costs, but about the fact that women pay more than men strictly because of their gender.”

(Change to Win is a federation of five unions: Teamsters, Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Farm Workers (UFW), and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). The AP article also interviews secretary-treasurer of  the AFL-CIO Liz Shuler.)

The hype is about how women will benefit unions–by bringing traditional women’s issues that are really about the well being of all of us into the mainstream. For more on how unions actually benefit women–in terms of wages, pensions, and health insurance–read this interview with John Schmitt from last year.

Next thread: EFCA (The Employee Free Choice Act). That’s how to turn the benefits that women bring to the union movement into benefits for all. Bring us some more good news, ya’ll.

–Virginia Rutter

In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich famously made the distinction between the institution of patriarchal motherhood and the experience of motherhood. I’ve always wondered to what degree this distinction bears out in other countries and cultures. According to a new book, Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment?, published by Routledge India and edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj, India also suffers from a gap between the cultural glorification of mothers and the actual treatment of mothers. Many thanks to writer and Feminist Review blogger Mandy Van Deven, who just told me about it! Mandy wrote a great piece for The Women’s International Perspective (The WIP) in which she interviews Veena Poonancha, one of the book’s contributors. Read her article, “Parvati’s Burden: Scratching the Surface of Motherhood in India,” over at The WIP.

Speaking of motherhood: I’m heading out to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta tomorrow, where I’ll be on a panel entitled “Globalizing Motherhood Studies” (and another one on “Feminist Publishing 2.0″)–and will be conference blogging (along with fellow Girl with Penner Alison Piepmeier) over at She Writes!

Impossible Motherhood is a new memoir by Irene Vilar, editor of The Americas series at Texas Tech University Press and a writer who uses the history of her life and the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother to highlight critical relationships between colonialism, sexism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. But this will not be the headline that captures the interest of the public. Vilar’s fifteen abortions in fifteen years, on the other hand, seems to be causing quite a stir of attention.

In many ways, this is a memoir about misery. Throughout the book, Vilar critiques the idea that her success on paper — early graduation from high school and a move from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, marriage to a Syracuse University professor, book publishing – has not kept her from suffering with severe issues of depression, abuse, self-mutilation, and addiction. Her marriage to a highly regarded, intellectual writer several decades her senior, who defines “independence” by keeping her forever at an emotional distance from him and insisting that the couple cannot have children together, triggers a downward spiral which culminated in twelve abortions in an eleven year relationship, followed by three others with another partner after the dissolution of her marriage. However, with intense therapy and a happy second marriage, Vilar overcomes her painful ambivalence toward biological motherhood and gives birth to two daughters.

The seemingly happy ending of Vilar’s tale of thwarted motherhood will still raise ethical and moral red flags in readers, causing us to squirm uncomfortably as we embark on the author’s lifelong journey of recovery.  Vilar does not go for pat answers or self-satisfied conclusions about her decision to repeatedly abort unwanted pregnancies rather than utilize birth control (which was available during her time in the U.S.).  Instead, this a complex, emotional account of one woman’s emergence from cycles of oppression into an acceptance of her unique identity and experiences.

Vilar’s unhappy childhood – a distant philandering father and a mother who committed suicide when Vilar was only eight years old – contributes to her feelings of abandonment and a need to please authority figures, if only to ensure her survival. Vilar is not claiming to be a representative for pro-choice or pro-life arguments, though she does offer this disclaimer in the prologue:

“This testimony… does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women.  Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice.  This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan ‘my body, my choice.’  In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose.  In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.”

Reproductive justice movements, particularly in the U.S. and its territories, often have a tumultuous history with communities of color.  But many readers will likely approach the book with little, if any, background knowledge of reproductive justice movements in Puerto Rico. So how did colonialist policies and a U.S.-driven abortion counseling, abortion services, and abortion outreach contribute to these decisions?  In an interview with The L.A. Times, Robin Abcarian observes that:

“Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects. Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation.  These feelings of powerlessness — born of a colonial past, acted out on a grand scale or an intimate one — are the ties that bind the women of Vilar’s family.“

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How did the pro-choice movement fail to help a survivor of abuse like Vilar?  Is there a theoretical and activist disconnect between three major intersections — martial strife/violence, psychological trauma, and reproductive justice?  Pro-choice communities would do well to examine books like these and form outreach for women who have experienced multiple abortions.  Vilar understands the stigma which confronts women who have had multiple abortions and does not shame these women, but tries to provide a lens of her own experiences with repeat abortions as a way to personalize this sensitive issue.  In a 2006 Salon.com Broadsheet post, Page Rockwell notes that:

Liberal message-makers would probably have an easier time if repeat abortions were rare, but the truth is, they’re not: According to a report (PDF) released last week by the Guttmacher Institute, which we found thanks to a flare from the Kaiser Foundation, about half of the women who terminated pregnancies in 2002 had previously had at least one abortion. (The report notes that because many women do not accurately report their abortion experiences, these findings are “exploratory.”) Rates of repeat abortion have been on the rise since Roe v. Wade, and ignoring that fact isn’t doing women who need multiple procedures any favors.

In the anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that, “[W]omen of color strip off the mascaras [masks] others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses.  We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered ‘inner faces,’ attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces…. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras [faces].”  This is one of those books that rips out the metaphoric stitches and exposes Vilar’s process of multilation and healing, addiction and recovery, for readers to examine.  This is not an easy or light book; it will trigger and it will probe and it will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been punched in the stomach, repeatedly.  But it also has the power to transform and expose previously hidden oppressions.

The outer face of Vilar is a brave one and so is the inner face.  Impossible Motherhood is a book for any pro-choice believer who wants a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding reproductive rights in the U.S. and its territories in the twentieth century.  This is also a book for people who believe in the power of personal redemption.  It will leave readers aching, hopeful, and perhaps a little more empathetic to Vilar’s life.

We have a chance for Girl-with-Pen’s Courtney Martin to be the Washington Post’s “Next Great American Pundit.” In her own words,

I may not have a Nobel Prize, but I did manage to work the phrase “inaugural orgy” into my column.

So, check out Courtney’s website, and then cast your vote online at the Washington Post now through Mon. at 3 p.m.

On October 27, the World Economic Forum released its 2009 Global Gender Gap report, which ranks countries according to four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Who wins? Iceland, with the world’s smallest gender gap. Who loses? Yemen, coming in at 134^th place. But lest we point fingers, the U.S. dropped four places, to 31^st place, owing to minor drops in the participation of women in the economy and improvements in the scores of previously lower-ranking countries. (Though we’re top of the heap for educational attainment, we’re #61 for political empowerment. Ouch!)

The authors, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, and Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, have put together an accessible and informative report. Among many other issues, their report suggests how motherhood can, in a word, kill. Consider a few of the statistics surrounding maternal health in many parts of the world:

Annually, more than half a million women and girls die in pregnancy and childbirth and 3.7 million newborns die within their first 28 days. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)

Approximately 80% of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternity and basic healthcare services. (Appendix E, “Maternal Health and Mortality”)

The need for paying greater attention to maternal health has been underscored by Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column and his recent book Half the Sky, co-authored with Sheryl WuDunn. And while plenty of criticism has been levied against Kristof’s book, succinctly and fairly voiced by Katha Pollitt in her review in The Nation (thanks to my colleague Amy Kesselman for bringing her review to my attention!), Kristof deserves kudos for bringing media attention to the health issues that needlessly affect mothers in many developing countries, such as obstetric fistula.

The Global Gender Gap report provides other glimpses into how the experience of motherhood varies from country to country. Consider what Ricardo Hausmann, Ina Ganguli, and Martina Viarengo have to say about the relationship between marriage and motherhood, and their impact on the labor force participation gap between men and women:

…while the education gap has been reversed in quite a few countries, the employment gap has not. This gap is related to the compatibility of marriage and motherhood with a lifestyle where women can work.

(Here, the U.S. has a dubious distinction: of those countries where the employment gap has been rising, it has seen the biggest increase.)

Overall, however, there are some signs of positive change when examining the “motherhood gap” within labor force participation globally:

Motherhood has not been a universal obstacle for female labour force participation. In almost half the countries we studied, women with three children work at least as much as women with no children. However, in other countries, especially in Latin America, the motherhood gap is very large, with Chile exhibiting the largest gap. But there is good news: the motherhood gap has been falling in almost two-thirds of the countries, with the biggest reductions shown again by Brazil and Greece, accompanied by Austria and Bolivia.

There isn’t room in this report to explore all the complexities of paid work and mothering–such as who cares for children when mothers work in countries that don’t support working mothers, the working conditions mothers face, and so on–not to mention the wide spectrum of how women experience motherhood according to identity (class, ethnicity, religion), educational background, and geographical location (whether mothers live in a village or an urban environment). Even so, the report provides some broad brushstrokes that help situate the many different kids of gendered gaps in the world.

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Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. They railed against the board game “Battleship” for depicting a father and son at play while an apron-clad mother and daughter washed dishes in the background. (One outraged mother even sent the cardboard game box to the editors of Ms. magazine to prove her point.) They questioned why pretend kitchens were fashioned out of pink plastic, when the majority of professional chefs were men. And they urged puzzle-makers to depict women piloting airplanes and fighting fires.

One of the youngest toy activists was a seven-year-old from New York City named Caroline Ranald. In 1972, the second-grader wrote a letter to the Lionel train company admonishing them for their boy-dominated ads. “Girls like trains too,” she explained. “I am a girl. I have seven locomotives. Your catalog only has boys. Don’t you like girls?” Caroline’s short letter made a big impression. Not only did the toy train makers feature girls in their subsequent catalogs, they also circulated a press release with endorsements touting the psychological and cognitive benefits of train play for girls.

Fast forward to 2009…and we have to ask: what happened to the gains feminists made in toyland? I literally did a double-take when I read that the Toy Association’s “Toy of the Year Awards” offer separate prize categories for “Best Boy Toy” and “Best Girl Toy.” Sure, they slot some contenders into gender-neutral categories like “Best Outdoor Toy” and “Best Educational Toy.” But they don’t even try to airbrush the fact that when it comes to selling toys, gender divisions—and gender stereotypes—still reign.

In case you’re wondering, the “Best Boy Toy” of 2009 went to the Bakugan Battle Brawlers Battle Pack Action Series. These intricately wrought orbs of plastic snap open into dragon- and vulcan-like shapes when they are hurled onto corresponding magnetized cards. Bakugan isn’t just a Manga-inspired action toy, it’s an entertainment brand, complete with a website, television show, and other paraphernalia. According to the Toy Association’s website, Bakugan beat out the Handy Manny 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck, the EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, and a few other trinkets for the top boy toy honors.

My own boys, ages 8 and 11, can’t seem to get enough Bakugan spheres, priced around ten dollars a pop. When I asked my younger son why he thinks girls aren’t into Bakugan, he replied that “they don’t like to fight and brawl the way boys do.” Maybe so, but when toy companies are so explicit about developing toys for gender-specific markets, we have to ask the proverbial chicken-and-egg question: do boys like Bakugan because it taps into some innate affinity for competitive, militaristic play—or because they are being socialized and culturally conditioned to prefer those forms of play?

For the record, the Best Girl Toy of 2009 was the Playmobil Horse Farm, a plastic play-set complete with stables, ponies, and equestrian figurines. (In 2007, the honor went to Hasbro’s FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony—which raises the question of why a horse-related toys have become so feminized in recent years.) Runner-ups for Best Girl Toy include a Pedicure Salon activity kit, a Talking Dollhouse, and Hannah Montana’s Malibu Beach House—toys based on stereotypes of beauty and domesticity so blatant they speak for themselves.

Although most elementary-school boys probably wouldn’t beg for a kiddie pedicure set, children display more variation and boundary-crossing in their play than the toy industry might care to admit.  Decades after the heyday of second-wave feminism, few parents would bat an eye at a girl playing with StarWars action figures or a boy weaving a potholder on a loom.  But for the purveyors of playthings, pink and blue don’t make purple; they make green.  Toy makers have a vested interested in selling to a gender-bifurcated market, because they can make double the money selling twice as many toys.

In the spirit of feminist toy activism, perhaps it’s time, once again, to argue the point. If there are any little boys out there who have a thing for horses, maybe they can e-mail the folks at Playmobil and set them straight.

Last week U of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan argued on the NYTimes Economix blog that paid sick days are an incentive for people to stay out of work–shamming sick days is the suggestion. Paid sick days, the argument goes, encourages people to stay out from work. Well, sometimes people can’t see the forest for the ideology, but help, alas, was on the way the day Mulligan posted.

CEPR senior economist John Schmitt, co-author of a report on paid sick leave in the US and Europe earlier this year, said not so fast! At noapparentmotive.org, Schmitt took issue in two ways: first, as his CEPR report, Contagion Nation, pointed out, the current system of no paid sick leave in the United States provides incentive for people to go to work sick. You see, if we measure cost, we have to measure the cost of a policy of no paid sick leave as well as the cost of some paid sick leave. You can read more about Contagion Nation at girlwpen here.

If that isn’t bad enough, Schmitt catches Mulligan on another sleight of hand. Mulligan, it seems, left off all the countries in the data set he was using that didn’t conform to his thesis that paid sick days are an incentive to stay out sick. As Schmitt explains, “Denmark, Germany, and seven other countries with more generous statutory paid sick days policies all have lower sickness absence rates than the United States. A really interesting question is: how is it that these countries are able to provide both guaranteed paid sick days and lower sickness absence rates? (And why didn’t Mulligan include these countries in his graph?)”

Andrew Leonard discusses the Schmitt response at Salon. He concludes, “Of course people, given an opportunity, will abuse generous benefits. But what explains the situations where they don’t?”

Over at Mother Jones, Nick Baumann was not so cagey in his post Economic Dishonesty. In response to the question, why the selective use of data?, he simply says, “Um, because he was being dishonest?”

I think that making working life humane for all people is a feminist issue, as the Shriver Report recently reminded us. To my mind, rebutting simplistic supply and demand arguments about work/life issues is a feminist act.

Weirdly, the New York Times has not run a correction. What a shame.

PS 11/3/09. NYTimes reported today on the concern among public health officials that lack of sick leave may worsen flu pandemic: “Tens of millions of people, or about 40 percent of all private-sector workers, do not receive paid sick days, and as a result many of them cannot afford to stay home when they are ill. Even some companies that provide paid sick days have policies that make it difficult to call in sick, like giving demerits each time someone misses a day.”

-Virginia Rutter

On October 20, 2009, I became a mother.

Since it’s all far too big to digest, I’m starting with a small bite first: the hospital, where mothers are made, not born.

I’d always thought I’d cry in the delivery room or, as happened to be in my case, the OR. The way I pictured it, I’d hear the wail of a healthy baby (in my case, two) and I’d be so overcome with relief and beauty and gratitude, moved by the sheer spectacle of it all, the tears would flow and flow and flow. Because that’s what mothers, and fathers of course, do. But to our surprise, neither Marco nor I cried. Surprising, since both of us consider ourselves gushers.

Instead, it was more a feeling of frozen awe.

When Anya and Teo were pulled from my open belly 14 days ago and I first heard their newborn gasps for air, in stereo, I felt numb. Literally, figuratively, emotionally. Eventually I cried, when we brought them home and laid them on our bed and together with my parents sang a Shehechiyanu, the blessing of gratitude for having reached this season. But I shed not a tear in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I felt relief and beauty and gratitude. But I mostly felt surreal.

Me? A mother? Of two? In all honesty, it still hasn’t sunk in. And I’m thinking maybe that’s ok. When I spoke to a dear friend, a mother of two, about this feeling of disconnect between the love I feel for these two new beings and the sense of myself as someone’s “mother,” she told me she still felt that way–and her oldest is now four.

I get that mothers are of woman born, but do all women immediately, naturally think of themselves as mothers at the moment of that becoming? I’d love to hear your experiences, your thoughts.