motherhood

Hello again, Girl w/Penners!  I’ve been sequestering myself this fall as I finish work on a book of my own but I am very glad to jump back into getting the word out about some of the amazing new books that explore the realities of contemporary women’s lives.

You know that feeling when you sense a new book, acquaintance, or connection is going to be deeply important to you and you’ve stumbled onto something that will be profoundly affecting? That’s how I felt when I first saw the title Mama, PhD— putting together two terms that aren’t usually seen in conjunction – which is, of course, the whole point of this collection. Its rich collection of essays explores how these two topics mesh (and more often crash and contort).  By the time I finished reading, my book had as many underlines, post-its and corner-turned-pages as any of my graduate school texts and I daresay had far greater an impact.

The contributors in this book, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans, break the seal of silence that suppresses the intense difficulties and institutionalized prejudice that academics who want to be more than just a “head on a stick” – but rather a whole person, including a maternal body – experience. And the pressures that result for women as their likely prime childbearing years meet squarely with the ticking of the tenure clock is intense.  The book’s contributors, from a range of academic fields and even generations, outline in often poignant and sometimes excruciating detail how they are forced to choose between career and family, or find creative, often exhausting, and most likely just plain lucky ways to tie the two together.

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Yesterday, Paul Raeburn, who is in my author’s group, posted about some studies that might have naturally included fathers but which examined only mothers in Where are the fathers? over at his Fathers and Families blog. (Thanks, CCF, for the heads up!)

Paul and I were recently talking over cookies and tea about why it is that mothers are the more studied parent, and I offered some thoughts on history, psychology, and biology — from a feminist pov.  I suggested he go back and read some socialist feminism, and also Nancy Chodorow.  But I also felt like my response was incomplete and hence inadequate.

I’m interested in continuing the conversation!  If any GWP readers have thoughts to share on why this is so, I’m sure Paul would be interested as well.  And I assure you, Paul is by no means a men’s rightser kind of guy but a thoughtful journalist (his previous book is Acquainted with the Night, a memoir of raising children with depression and bipolar disorder.)   Please feel free to leave thoughts for me — and for Paul — in comments or at Paul’s blog. Thanks, ya’ll!

January 22 will mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. My dear friend and fellow “WGL” (of Women, Girls, and Ladies traveling panel fame) Gloria Feldt, who is also a noted author/blogger, and one-time teen mom who rose to be the head of the world’s largest reproductive health provider and advocacy organization, Planned Parenthood, has an article in the current issue of Democracy Journal in which she rethinks the most famous Supreme Court decision of recent time.

And another amazing mama and activist, Rebekah Spicuglia, writes about the first global consortium of motherhood organizations: the International Motherhood Network (IMN).

Great stuff, on both accounts. (And congrats, you two!)

I tell ya, a girl trying to scramble her way to motherhood can sure get whiplash these days.  There’s some great reading out there, and some frustrating reading.   My response to Alex Kuczynski’s cover story in this weekend’s NYTimes magazine (Her Body, My Baby) was pretty much summed up by this commentor’s comment:

I made the mistake — I guess you could call it that — of looking at the photos before reading the article. The surrogate mother is sitting, barefoot, on a dilapidated porch in one photo, whereas the mother and child are standing in front of a hugely expensive, well manicured home with their baby’s nurse, a black woman, in the other photo. This view tainted my reading of the article, and I couldn’t help but notice every self-conscious admittance of guilt or passing acknowledgment of class or social status. Perhaps the surrogate, as the writer tells it, is fiscally better off than her photo shows; perhaps the nurse, who was not mentioned in the article, just happens to be black. But someone, either the journalist or the photojournalist, is deceiving us.

I am trying, very hard, to be happy for the writer and her new baby — how wonderful after all the years of heartache! — but all I have in my head right now are images of how our country is so racially and socially divided. Is it always going to be this way?

On other fronts, I caught a fresh breeze blowing through the fields of the mommy wars — a call for truce — when I came across Meghan O’Rouke’s post over at XX Factor, “No More Advice for Michelle Obama.  Except This!”, in which she writes:

As Michelle herself has said, being first lady is a powerful platform. And the modern professional marriage, for better or for worse, usually requires some alternating in who gets to take the professional lead (that is, if you want your kids to get any attention). It’s too bad, sure, that there aren’t more men stepping up to support their wives—but it’s not as though that’s not happening in our political culture. (Hi there, Todd Palin!) The best way Michelle Obama can act as a role model for women right now is not by making the decision any one of us would make (because we’d all make different decisions), but by reminding us that life is fleeting, and we ought to immerse ourselves in the opportunities and joys of our own life as it exists. Not as it might exist.

And meanwhile, for some hands-on practical support for pregnant and parenting students, check out the National Women’s Law Center’s latest webinar.  Though the event has passed (it was on Weds), you can download the presentation and materials here.

These three researchy news items just in, courtesy CCF:

The Television Got Me Pregnant, by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon, Nov. 4, 2008 — A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. They found that, among sexually active teenagers, those who spend the most time watching racy programming like “Sex and the City” are twice as likely to become, or get a partner, pregnant. Researchers interviewed 718 sexually active teens aged 12 to 17 once a year for three years and, based on an analysis of 23 TV shows, estimated the amount of sexual content (including kissing, petting and sex) that they had been exposed to. About 12 percent of those who viewed the least amount of sexual programming became involved in a pregnancy, compared to 25 percent of those who consumed the most. A total of 58 girls got pregnant and 33 boys got a partner pregnant during the study.

Pregnancy Discrimination Complaints Jump, Especially for Women of Color, by Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nov. 6, 2008 — Workplace discrimination against pregnant women is on the rise in a stunning way according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The National Partnership for Women and Families found that in 2007 working women filed 65 percent more complaints of pregnancy discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than they had fifteen years earlier. The report also finds this new wave of discrimination affects women of color at a much higher rate than white women.

The Economics of Single Motherhood, by Kat Bergeron, Biloxi, Miss., Sun Herald, Nov. 6, 2008 — No other state has a higher rate of children born to single mothers than Mississippi, at 53.7 percent. That compares with the lowest state, Utah, at about 18 percent. Last year 46,456 Mississippi children were born, 24,939 to single mothers, and the numbers are rising. About 15 percent of those births are to teens aged 15 to 19. That is a slight drop from a decade ago but the trend is again upward, as are the rest of the unwed-mother statistics. Pete Walley, an economic analyst who studies and reports trends to state leaders, says that if Mississippi doesn’t change the numbers, it will permanently become No. 50 in income, health, education, economy, even in per capita traffic deaths.

Wow — some very cool authors speaking on the radio together tonight. Tune in to City Visions Radio, 91.7 FM, KALW or online at www.cityvisionsradio.com at 10pm ET to hear Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life coeditor Caroline Grant in conversation with Mary Ann Mason, author of Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers, and Joan Williams, author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It.

You can participate too.  During the show, call in with your questions and comments to 415.841.4134 or email feedback@cityvisionsradio.com

Just when you thought that with the interesting yet complicated angle Palin is injecting into red state feminism, we might onto something new, Christina Hoff Sommers is back fanning the flames of the mommy wars by arguing that in building her case, Betty Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book’s appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create.

According to Sommers in a New York Sun article titled Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Friedan not only attacked a postwar culture that aggressively consigned women to the domestic sphere, but she attacked the sphere itself – along with all the women who chose to live there.

I seriously can’t wait for Stephanie Coontz’s reconsideration of TFM (which is in the works). We need it, bad.

And while we’re at it, Newsweek reports that a new study finds that children of privileged families fare worse when the mother works outside the home–but what does the research really tell us? Read it and see.

(Thanks to Steve Mintz and the Council on Contemporary Families–on whose Board I now sit!–for the links.)

Thanks to Caroline for these two links over at Literary Mama: “The Sarah Myth” by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, and “Sarah Palin’s Kids, Our Kids” by Rebecca Steinitz.

And heads up on an interesting convo going on over at Work It, Mom! spearheaded by Veronica Arreola and provocatively titled “Why Sarah Palin is Good for Feminism.”

Hmm…

Six new articles of interest, courtesy of Rebekkah of course over at the WMC:

McCain and Palin Want Women’s Votes But Do Women Want Them?
9/8/08
RH Reality Check: Instead of clear policy stances on these issues at the GOP convention or in the surrounding media attention what we have been privy to are endless distractions about Sarah Palin’s family, the personal matters and private choices Ms. Palin and her family have made over the last few months and a religious right bloc that has firmly cemented their support for said choices – support that falls in direct conflict with the rhetoric, agenda and policies they promote for the rest of American families.

Fusing Politics and Motherhood in New Way
9/7/08
NY Times: Sarah Palin’s baby shower included a surprise guest: her own baby. He had arrived in the world a month early, so on a sunny May day, Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, rocked her newborn as her closest friends, sisters, even her obstetrician presented her with a potluck meal, presents and blue-and-white cake.

Parents of Special-Needs Children Divided Over Palin’s Promise to Help
9/6/08
NY Times: Gov. Sarah Palin directed an emotional appeal to the hearts of millions of parents with children who have special needs, promising they would “have a friend and advocate in the White House.” Ms. Palin’s offer of friendship sparked hope in many parents, advocates and lawyers as the often-marginalized subject of disabilities rights took center stage.

Bristol’s Choice
9/5/08
Slate.com: Pundits were quick to point out that Bristol Palin’s “decision” to have her baby must have been at least somewhat constrained by her mom’s position-as articulated in November 2006-that she would oppose an abortion for her daughters, even if they had been raped. Palin is an outspoken advocate of parental veto; she called the Alaska Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down that state’s parental-consent statute “outrageous.” So what exactly, one wonders, was young Bristol permitted to decide?

Sex Ed In Schools: Little Connection Between What’s Taught, Teen Behavior
9/8/08
USA Today: The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and the pregnancy has reignited the national debate over two different approaches to sex education: abstinence-only vs. comprehensive.

Palin & Press: A Testy Start
9/8/08
Washington Post: From the moment Sarah Palin stepped onto the national stage, she was mauled, minimized and manhandled by an openly skeptical media establishment. But By six days later, after a speech in which she chided the journalistic elite, the previously obscure governor of Alaska was being hailed by many of the same media gurus.

Image cred

This morning I woke up to the voice of Katherine Lanpher (LOVE her) on NPR’s “The Takeaway” talking about a new Census Bureau report on fertility. According to the data, the number of women ages 40 to 44 who were childless in 2006 is twice as high as it was 30 years earlier. Among other highlights, the report, Fertility of American Women: 2006, found:

• The majority of women with a recent birth (57 percent) were in the labor force. (Are we, um, surprised?)
• Of the 4.2 million women who had a birth in the previous 12 months, 36 percent were separated, widowed, divorced or never married at the time of the survey. Of these 1.5 million unmarried mothers, 190,000 were living with an unmarried partner.
• Second generation Hispanic women tend to have lower fertility rates than either foreign-born Hispanics or those who were third generation (i.e., native and of native parents).
• The highest levels of current fertility (67 births in the year prior to the survey per 1,000 women) were among those with a graduate or professional degree.

The report also finds that the national birth rate for women age 15 to 50 receiving public assistance in 2006 was about three times of those not receiving public assistance. A decade after the passage of welfare reform in 1996, data show that women in this age range receiving public assistance had a birth rate of 155 births per 1,000 women, compared with 53 births per 1,000 women not receiving it.

To hear Katherine’s interview with a prof from Florida who hits on some of the implications of it all, click here.