intergenerational

I just got back from the National Council for Research on Women’s 25th anniversary conference at Spelman, in Atlanta. Very historically rich feeling to be on that particular campus–and to hear directly from Moya Bailey, one of the Spelman students behind the Nelly protests. The conference was deliciously rich too. I had big fun unfurling the “Milestones in Women’s Research” banner I’d been working on with NCRW, and giving a workshop on translating research for trade. To balance things out a bit, I went to see Knocked Up last night with my beau. Since I haven’t had time for a real post since coming back, I’m vicariously offering up the following tidbits in the interim:

The New York Times has a piece today on new shows including The Starter Wife by Alessandra Stanley, who has an interesting observation on female bonding/fighting:

The fact that nowadays women are allowed to like one another, even at the expense of men, is at the core of ladies-night hits like “Grey’s Anatomy.” So atavistic series like “The Bachelor” and “Desperate Housewives” that play down female camaraderie and instead showcase hissy fits and catfights have a naughty, contrarian tang.

Let’s hear it for the death of hissy. Bonding is in!

Over on HuffPo Courtney Martin serves up some intergenerational wisdom in her
review of Hannah Seligson’s new book, New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches, which, says Courtney, “speaks directly to this disappointed generation of highly ambitious and more than slightly unrealistic women” aka Gen Y:

The New Girl on the Job uncovers the new American Dream. It’s not the perfect house, the white picket fence, and the 2.5 kids — it is fulfilling work and respect. We don’t just want to make a good living and put food on the table anymore, we want to be professional creatives, entrepreneurs, inventors, visionaries, and influentials. Sure it is a tall order. Sure we’re a little entitled. But isn’t this what you raised us to believe was possible?

Seligson sees the intergenerational rifts and addresses them very matter-of-factly: “You shouldn’t fear that the arrival of a new girl will undermine your position, or write off the older women you work with as out of touch. There is room for all of us.”

Yes and yes.

And many thanks to Veronica Arreola at the Women in Science and Engineering Program at the University of Illinois-Chicago for calling my attention to CNN’s latest bit on GGW and porn that includes an uncharacteristically nice little bow (sort of) to the Suicide Girls.

More tomorrow for reals, promise!

Because tomorrow is June 1 — the day I always remember as “school’s out hit the beach” day — and because I was that lone geek who got sad when school ended because I missed my teachers, I’m re-posting that pop quiz. For all you other geeks out there. You know who you are. Answers below.

THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT FEMINISM IN 2007? TEST YOUR GENERATIONAL IQ

1. Betty Friedan was:

A. A pin-up model from the 1940s
B. The mother of American cookbooks
C. A columnist for McCall’s
D. The founder of the National Organization for Women
E. Author of The Feminine Mystique

2. In 2007, for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns:

A. the same
B. 84 cents
C. 77 cents
D. 56 cents

3. During the Miss America Protest of 1968, radical feminists did all but which of the following:

A. Crowned a live sheep “Miss America”
B. Burned their bras
C. Threw aprons and high heels into a Freedom Trashcan
D. Sprayed Toni home permanent spray inside the convention hall

4. In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 3%
B. 14%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5. “Postfeminist” is:

A. A term coined in 1919 by a group of literary radicals in Greenwich Village who rejected the feminism of their mothers one year before women won the right to vote
B. A term used in the 1980s to describe an era in which feminism was deemed unhip and unnecessary
C. A media-hyped label that irritates third-wave feminists more than Adam Corolla
D. All of the above

6. The Real Hot 100 is:

A. A new reality tv show
B. A list of the hottest women according to Maxim magazine
C. A campaign to redefine hotness by refiguring the standards to honor guts and not just glam
D. Hot sauce

7. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in:

A. 1923
B. 1942
C. 1969
D. 1971

8. In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities are women?

A. 7%
B. 16%
C. 20%
D. 50%

9. Title IX is:

A. The name of Britney’s favorite club in NYC
B. A piece of pro-woman legislation passed in 1972 now under attack
C. The name of a secret feminist cult
D. The sister band of L7

10. In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

11. BUST is:

A. A girlie magazine for men
B. A grrly magazine “for women with something to get off their chest”
C. A boxing move popularized by Laila Ali
D. A West Coast rapper

ANSWERS:
1 – C, D, and E, 2 – C, 3 – B, 4 – B, 5 – D, 6 – C, 7 – A, 8 – C, 9 – B, 10 – A, 11 – B

SCORE YOURSELF
11-8 = Superstar!
7-4 = Semi-superstar
3-0 = Hit the books, my friend. You got catching up to do.

Based on Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (available from Palgrave, June 12, 2007)

On HuffPo today (where I’ll soon be posting, too), Erica Jong calls for younger women writers to protest their ghettoization on the chick lit shelves:

Feminism didn’t change deep-seated priorities about what — or who — matters. I see deeply diminished expectations in young women writers. They may grumble about the chick lit ghetto, but they dare not make a fuss for fear they won’t be published at all. Their brashness is real enough, but they accept their packaging as the price of being published. My generation expected more. We did not always get it, but at least categorization outraged us. Where is the outrage now?

Feminists used to say the personal is political. I think we need to consider that message again now. We will never give peace a chance until we start paying as much attention to women as to war. Unless we value the bonds of love as much as male territoriality, we are goners.

I would like to see the talented new breed of American women writers — my daughter’s generation — protest their ghettoization. We need a new wave of feminism to set things right. But we’d better find a new name for it because like all words evoking women, the term feminism has been debased and discarded. Let’s celebrate our femaleness rather than fear it. And let’s mock the old-fashioned critics who dismiss us for thinking love matters. It does.

But younger women ARE protesting, and publishing outside of chick lit too. A notable example of course is Elizabeth Merrick’s anthology, This Is Not Chick Lit. And there are more like these in the works. They’re coming, Erica! Keep faith.

(And check out Elizabeth’s post on HuffPo back in April 2006, on her title.)

Since I use “Grrls Gone Wild” in my subtitle, I keep getting asked what I think about Girls (minus the rr, which has a whole ‘nother meaning) Gone Wild. Here tis: To my mind, slinking around a pole or writing about it is not the pinnacle of real-world empowerment, but nor are the women who do so and feel empowered being duped. I have no doubt that the women who flash their boobs for the camera on GGW feel powerful. In many ways, they epitomize the dilemma of our (Gen X *and* Y) generation: caught between the hope of a world that no longer degrades women and the reality of a culture that is still degrading. It’s confusing to be girl these days–or for that matter, a lady–in a world only half-transformed.

But for much more on the subject, check out this piece by Lisa Jervis on Girls Gone Wild as symptom of our culture’s stunted view of female sexuality. Jervis is responding to Garance Franke-Ruta’s proposal to curb young women’s participation in these televised boob-flashing-fests. With characteristic savvy, Jervis writes:

The trick is to help young women navigate and respond to the barrage without patronizing, faux-feminist posturing; reinforcing outdated virgin-whore ideas about what kinds of girls lift their tops; sighing over the outlandish behavior of kids today; or discounting or denying girls’ behavior as simple false consciousness—all of which is happening way too much, both in feminist circles and elsewhere. If we can’t widen our analytic lens enough to see this, then we’re going to be stuck in Joe Francis’s world forever.

There’s just too much bloggy goodness going on today around the blogosphere and elsewhere for this girl to take in. So here’s my quick round-up of cheers, props, and commentary:

Cheers to Marc over at Feminist Dad for spreading the TRUTH about the opting-out (non)phenomenon. And props to Marco for his beautiful post (yes, I’m biased) over at Hokum today, which is part of MotherTalk’s Dangerous Boy Friday – a blogging bonanza in which bloggers are posting in response to that #6-on-Amazon phenomenon, The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Academia still seems to be dangerous for grown up girls seeking tenure. Caryn McTighue Musil sounds off over at Ms. on the hurdles facing women in academe, including “The Baby Gap”(women with babies are 29 percent less likely than women without to enter a tenure-track position, and married women are 20 percent less likely than single women to do so), and The Today Show this morning actually had a nice little chirpy segment on how working mothers get screwed when returning to work, facing significant salary cuts over time. But finally, there are solid messages out there now about how companies can do better – check out Sylvia Hewlett’s new book, Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, and Lisa Belkin’s piece yesterday in the New York Times on the “opting back in” revolution, where she reports on corporate programs designed to recruit seasoned women with names like The Opt-In Program, as well as the new businesses cropping up to service this population, like HR Opt-In, MomCorps, and Flextime Lawyers.

Moving from work/life to writing/life, since I’m obsessed by the reception of books on feminism (personal interest, yeah, as well as professional and political yadda yadda), I’ve been following the coverage of feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism with baited breath — and pretty much want to throw up. I’m sure I’ll be in for it too. Some publicists say, no such thing as bad publicity. Maybe, but my heart goes out to Jess who I hope KNOWS that she has written a fantabulous book (which is doing well, thank you very much, as far as Amazon rankings are concerned – and I urge you to buy it! buy it!). Anyway, Jill Filipovic over at Feministe has posted a passionate defense of both Jessica and her book, which has spawned over 100 comments. Here’s Jill:

Jessica wrote her book in a very particular way: She wrote it to make feminism accessible to women who might otherwise reject it. That is her purpose. Railing against capitalism and telling women that feminism is a movement which will not make your life any better doesn’t really seem to further that goal, does it? Neither does blathering on about how awesome high heels and pornography are. Jessica does neither….We need feminists like Jessica who do the very tough work of reaching out to women who are otherwise uninterested in feminism — feminists who are patient and generous, and who listen to the concerns and experiences of younger women without branding them stupid or not feminist enough.
What does Jessica get for doing that? She gets branded stupid and not feminist enough. She gets mocked by other feminists.

Amen, sister.

And to end this roundup on an up-note, if you happen to be in the Apple next week, be sure to check out:

A Reading with Girls Write Now
Thursday, May 24, 7pm
at 520 Eighth Avenue (b/w 36th & 37th sts.) on the 20th floor

Come out to hear girl writing mentors Pooja Makhijani, Maggie Pouncey, and Terry Selucky read their own fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus special mentee emcees Phantasia Johnson, Lindsey Romain, and Briana Wilson.

GWN is a fantastic organization that nurtures and nourishes a future generation of women writers by hooking them up with mentors. The org is run by a group of women in their 20s and 30s who are unstoppable. If you can’t go to the reading, at least stop by their website and check them out. (Congrats GWN, on your new online home!)

Think You Know About Feminism in 2007? Test Your IQ

1. Betty Friedan was:

A. A pin-up model from the 1940s
B. The mother of American cookbooks
C. A columnist for McCall’s
D. The founder of the National Organization for Women
E. Author of The Feminine Mystique

2. In 2007, for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns:

A. the same
B. 84 cents
C. 77 cents
D. 56 cents

3. During the Miss America Protest of 1968, radical feminists did all but which of the following:

A. Crowned a live sheep “Miss America”
B. Burned their bras
C. Threw aprons and high heels into a Freedom Trashcan
D. Sprayed Toni home permanent spray inside the convention hall

4. In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 3%
B. 16%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5. “Postfeminist” is:

A. A term coined in 1919 by a group of literary radicals in Greenwich Village who rejected the feminism of their mothers one year before women won the right to vote
B. A term used in the 1980s to describe an era in which feminism was deemed unhip and unnecessary
C. A media-hyped label that irritates third-wave feminists more than Adam Corolla
D. All of the above

6. The Real Hot 100 is:

A. A new reality tv show
B. A list of the hottest women according to Maxim magazine
C. A campaign to redefine hotness by refiguring the standards to honor guts and not just glam
D. Hot sauce

7. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in:

A. 1923
B. 1942
C. 1969
D. 1971

8. In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities are women?

A. 7%
B. 16%
C. 20%
D. 50%

9. Title IX is:

A. The name of Britney’s favorite club in NYC
B. A piece of pro-woman legislation passed in 1972 now under attack
C. The name of a secret feminist cult
D. The sister band of L7

10. In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

11. BUST is:

A. A girlie magazine for men
B. A grrly magazine “for women with something to get off their chest”
C. A boxing move popularized by Laila Ali
D. A West Coast rapper

ANSWERS:
1 – C, D, and E, 2 – C, 3 – B, 4 – B, 5 – D, 6 – C, 7 – A, 8 – C, 9 – B, 10 – A, 11 – B

SCORE YOURSELF
11-8 = Superstar!
7-4 = Semi-superstar
3-0 = Hit the books, my friend. You got catching up to do.

Based on Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (available from Palgrave, June 12, 2007)

Last week a reporter called me to talk about why Hillary is such a polarizing figure, especially among women. And now, turns out, Katie Couric is too – or at least, among viewers male and female, according to a New York Times article today:

[A] recent Gallup poll reinforced the notion that Ms. Couric had become a polarizing figure: 29 percent of respondents said that they did not like her, as opposed to 51 percent who said that they liked her. (Her competitors at ABC and NBC both had negative scores under 20 percent and positives around 60.)

Not surprising of course that Couric has endured exceptional personal scrutiny:

She was criticized for wearing too much makeup or too little….She was criticized for being too soft in her initial newscasts, and too hard in an interview with the presidential candidate John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, after they revealed that Mrs. Edwards’s cancer had returned.

So here comes CBS president Sean McManus, weighing in:

“Maybe we underestimate the huge shift this represented,” Mr. McManus said. “It was almost a watershed event to have a woman in that chair.” He added, “There is a percentage of people out there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman.”

Watershed indeed. And maybe if there were MORE women delivering hard news across the networks and on the air, Katie wouldn’t have to represent everything to everyone. Kind of like Hillary, you might say.

PS. On a generational sidenote, Couric’s ratings, while still usually third after ABC and NBC, are most competitive among younger women. Guess we’re ready to get our news from a girl.

According to my lame but stalwart built-in thesaurus, OPT (v) means “to choose something or choose to do something, usually in preference to other available alternatives.” Pamela Stone’s Opting Out? Why Women Really Quite Careers and Head Home is the book I’ve been waiting for.

Instead of focusing reductively on women’s “choices” (who has choices when alternatives are limited?), Stone charts the institutional obstacles and cultural pressures that leave even the most advantaged women feeling pushed out. Stone writes as a sociologist, a scholar of women’s careers, and a mother. But here’s why I love this book: Instead of blaming women, imploring us to “get back to work” (a la Linda Hirschman) or warning us (Leslie Bennetts-style) that we’re all making a dastardly mistake, her message is one that, as a Gen Xer staring into the crosshairs of burgeoning career and potential motherhood, is far more palatable to hear.

Stone lets her subjects — mothers in their 30s and 40s who “time out” from professional careers — describe their trajectories in unstructured interviews, giving voice to a group we have heard much about but have not heard. She lambasts the media for sensationalizing our so-called mass exodus — which, in truth, is not so massive and reflects neither a sea-change in values among feminism’s daughters nor the modernization of the feminine mystique.

Opting Out? fills a void — virtually no real research has been done before on women leaving careers — and it’s the question mark in the title that propels the book. Stone looks at who these women are who leave and head home (whether permanently or temporarily), why they walk away from years of training and accomplishment to take on “full-time” motherhood, and what happens after they do. She looks at the implications of their leaving for the workplaces they leave behind, and the impact their decisions have on other women — female coworkers and, especially, younger women embarking on careers. Loaded with facts and real data, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book.

Stone found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision is “a kind of silent strike” and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: “These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos.” Stone emphasizes that these women’s stories are not over, that most are still in the process of re-invention — but leaves us wondering, how will the next chapter unfold?

Anyone acquainted with the research knows that younger women and girls aspire to professional achievement. It’s made headline news. As a recent New York Times story and books like Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters make perfectly clear, Millennial strivers are ambitious to the point of extremes. Daughters of a half-finished revolution, this generation (as well as my own) lives suspended between the expectation of a world ready to open its arms to us and the reality of a world not yet fully transformed. Books like Stone’s have the potential to rally without blaming, and incite without fear. Let’s hope it finds its audience — working women present and future pondering their limited options and the workplaces that, drained of such women’s talent, should have no choice but to change and offer us alternatives to heading home.

I’m finally catching up with the books on my Feminist Reading Shelf and wanted to belatedly comment on Jennifer Baumgardner’s very thoughtful Look Both Ways.

Part personal, part political, and always poignant, Jennifer writes about coming into her own bisexuality when (oops!) she unexpectedly falls in love with a fellow intern at Ms. shortly after college. With her usual intergenerational flair and contextual savvy, she includes a chapter on “The Woman-Identified Woman” – icon and theory of “second-wave” feminism – and puts her “third-wave” embrace of a more fluid sexuality in the context of feminism’s evolution. It’s interesting to juxtapose this far more nuanced account of girl-on-girl dynamics with the current conversation about GGW (Girls Gone Wild, for those not yet in the know), where girls get it on for the boys. The book goes way beyond the superficiality of the Madonna-Britney kiss (Madonna: what were you thinking?!), past the reductive stereotype of third-wave sexuality (my lipstick is political), and boldly explores the non-PC world of desire in an era of sexual complexity. If you haven’t already, I urge folks to get past the annoyingly snarky review that appeared a while ago in the Times and give Both Ways a fresh look. Go. Go now. Read this book. Well worth the journey. It changed the way I think about bisexuality and Jennifer is a gorgeous writer. (She’s gorgeous, too, but that’s not why you should read the book! Though I must say, those eyes on the cover certainly draw you in.)

(For less battle-axe coverage, see the interview on Feministing.com, a bit in Mother Jones, and a more mixed review in Salon.)

Yesterday I went to a panel on working across generations, sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women’s Corporate Circle. Entering Weil Gotshal’s shiny headquarters at the bottom of Central Park, I had one of those many moments where I wonder why I went academic instead of corporate. Oh those lunches (seared tuna and roasted vegetables).  And oh the fact that some of these firms are really talking about generational differences and have programs like “Reverse Mentoring”. (That would be Merrill Lynch.) There are those here who are genuinely trying to reframe workplace flexibility from employee benefit to something that managers can’t afford not to have. If all of corporate America looked like this particular panel, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat and come join their team. In fact, hmmm…But I digress.

Ellen Galinsky of Families & Work Institute was on the panel and served up a number of interesting tidbits from an earlier study called Generation and Gender in the Workplace, such as:

-Boomers are more likely to be work-centric than other generations, and Gens X and Y more dual-centric (meaning, they place the same priority on their job and family) or family-centric
-younger men are spending more time with their children
-men report more work/life conflict than in the past
-dual-centric and family-centric workers are actually LESS stressed than work-centric worker bees

And my personal favorite:

-if there are tensions in the workplace, they’re NOT primarily between women with kids and women without, as the media loves to overblow; the REAL tensions are between people in high-status jobs vs. those in low-status jobs – which means, I take it, that the real collisions have to do class and generation

And speaking of, I came across an interesting book the other day: When Generations Collide: Who They Are, Why They Clash, and How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work. Along with Kara Jesella’s Sassy book, this should be great airplane reading for tomorrow. I’m off to sweet home Chicago for the Council on Contemporary Families Anniversary conference, where I’m on a panel with the divine Miss Virginia Rutter. We’ll be talking to researchers and clinicians about pitching and translating research. Off to make my handouts…