The Mama PhD gals have started their blogging over at Inside Higher Ed–and what interesting timing. Turns out two new studies suggest that academe may hinder parenthood, and that as a result many female academics may be opting not to have kids. Watch for the Mama PhD anthology in July.
motherhood
Just of few of many links, culled from around the internets:
NPR host Renee Montagne reports on “The Mother’s Index,” which compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries.
Broadsheet sounds off on some pop culture mom-ranking.
MotherTalk blog tours Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own and The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book.
And PunditMom smartly rants on the media branding of families, from the perspective of an adoptive mother.
The brilliant Alissa Quart (of last month’s NYTimes mag spread on transgender youth fame) has a short piece up at Mother Jones about the new fertility-movie genre that’s definitely worth a read.
In “When Chick Flicks Get Knocked Up,” Alissa questions the happy ending substitute of baby love and emphasizes their conservative bent. She also notes that these “embryo pics” invert film themes of yore:
The prenatal pics don’t mean to irk their viewers, of course: they are simply are a corny replacement for the serrated romantic comedies of the 1940s, in which sparkling, independent female protagonists, sporting sharply tailored suits and sharper repartee, wound up getting their comeuppance in the form of a rake who could finally domesticate them. In fertility movies, the rake taming all female powerhouses is an infant. Worse, embryo pics have inverted another film theme. Women who once chose an unusual life path picked child-free independence—liberated Klutes or unmarried women. Now, conceiving of an infant without marriage or even love is the filmic symbol of independence. In this way, these films recast the “pro-choice” narrative of feminists’ personal and political past as a different, less politically dangerous sort of pro-choice story—a woman’s right to choose from a smorgasbord of late fertility options. Once, in the recent age of “Murphy Brown†having a baby as a single woman was the most rebellious and politically radical thing our heroine could ever do. Now becoming a single mom onscreen makes a film heroine more conventional.
Thoughts?!
You MUST check out this piece by the Women’s Media Center’s very own Rebekah Spicuglia (pictured here with her son Oscar), called “Mother’s Day, Observed.” Read it, absorb it, and then please, go make your mother proud.
Caroline Grant, coeditor of the forthcoming anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, just gave me the heads up that InsideHigherEd.com is launching a new Mama PhD blog, and seven of the book’s contributors — Libby Gruner, Megan Kajitani, Susan Bassow, Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, Anjalee Nadkarni and Della Fenster — will be blogging regularly for them. As Caroline notes, “This is a terrific opportunity to bring the discussion of academic work/ family life balance issues out of the book, into the blogosphere and from there into classrooms and campus administrative offices.” Hells yeah.
Megan, of the very cool blog Having Enough, will be writing a weekly advice column. For more on everything, check out the book’s website here. And congrats, you Mama PhD powerhouses out there! I’ll be sure to blog more about the book in this space when it comes out.
Well, today is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, an event I’ve long thought a brilliant conception–especially when it used to be just for girls. But I get it, I get it, esp. when it’s a case of boys seeing Mommy at Work. According to the official literature, the day is designed to be more than a career day:
For over 15 years, the program’s development of new, interactive activities and partnerships has helped us in taking girls and boys to the future they dream of.
This year’s program theme, “Making Choices for a Better World,†centers on “encouraging girls and boys to consider the options they have and make choices for a better world. This means making choices to serve the community and one’s family, to care for one’s body and health, and to make better choices that impact our environment, as well as one’s future.”
Cool. And how can you argue with that. But still, I can’t help but feel the language lost something in the translation from daughters to daughters and sons–and you know what an advocate I am for including boys/men in the feminist conversation.
Helaine Olen (co-author of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding and Managing Romance on the Job and a contributor to the forthcoming book The Maternal Is Political) has a different bone to pick, and I’m not sure how I feel about her critique. Helaine rails against it in a piece in Newsday, writing:
If the past is any guide, several million children nationwide will accompany their parents to work today, participating in the annual rite of spring known as Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. Moms and dads across the United States will allow their kids to play in their offices, running through cube farms and “assisting” at cash registers, all in the name of breaking down the mystique that exists between work and family.
Yet in a world of home offices, moms on the playground taking business calls by cell phone, and dads answering queries on their BlackBerries at school events, it’s quite likely that children are all too aware of the importance of paid employment to their parents. What they really need is a lesson in the value of taking time to kick back and relax.
She goes on to call for an official event to teach America’s children about the importance of downtime, concluding: “We can call it Let Your Daughters and Sons See Mom and Dad Do Absolutely Nothing Day. Any takers?”
Now, I’m not a parent (yet) so maybe I’m off kilter here. But I still think the event is a good idea. What do y’all think – especially you parents out there? Is it a good thing, or a pain? Did it lose something in the translation when it switched to include boys? What’s been the experience of folks who’ve done it?
If I had a kid and I took them to work today, they’d be spending the entire day in Starbucks, watching mommy type. Thrilling, no doubt.
Well if this isn’t the most timely book ever published, I don’t know what is. Deborah Carr, a brilliant sociologist at Rutgers, has teamed up with journalist Julie Halpert to write Making Up with Mom: Why Mothers and Daughters Disagree About Kids, Careers, and Casseroles (and What to Do About It). If they had timed it a bit differently, they could have easily added “and Candidates” to the subtitle. The book shows how generational differences in women’s lives have created (fixable) frictions between Gen X/Boomer women and their moms. I like the emphasis on “fixable.”
Here’s from the book description:
Young women today have infinitely more options than their mothers and grandmothers did decades ago. “Should I become a doctor, a writer, or a stay-at-home mom?†“Should I get married or live with my boyfriend?†“Do I want children?†Women in their twenties, thirties, and forties today are wrestling with life-altering decisions about work and family—and they need all the support they can get.
But the very person whose support they crave most—their mother—often can’t get on board, and a rift is created between the two generations, even for women who have always had a strong relationship.
A mother’s simple question, like “How can you trust a nanny to watch your children all day?†can bring her poised, accomplished CEO daughter to tears, or provoke a nasty response more suitable to a surly teenager than a leader of industry. Why can’t mothers and daughters today see eye to eye when it comes to important choices about love, work, children, money, and personal fulfillment? Why does a mother’s approval matter so much, even to the most confident and self-possessed daughter? And when daughters choose paths different from their mothers’, why is it so painful for the older generation?
Making Up with Mom answers these important questions by focusing on three core issues: dating/marriage, career, and child rearing. Relying on interviews with nearly a hundred mothers and daughters, and offering helpful tips from more than two dozen therapists, Julie Halpert and Deborah Carr explore a wide range of communication issues and how to resolve them, so mothers and daughters everywhere can reclaim their loving relationships. This enlightening book is a must-read for all women today.
The perfect gift for Mother’s Day?! The authors will be reading at Barnes & Noble in North Brunswick on Tuesday May 20 at 7:30 p.m. For more, check out www.makingupwithmom.com.
HAPPY APRIL 15 everyone! So Americans tend to think we’re better off than families in most other industrial countries because we pay lower income taxes. Right? NOT! As CCF reminds us today, when we factor in the higher amount Americans pay for health care, child care, and education, the comparison is not always in our favor. Where do American families’ tax dollars go and what family “value” they get in return?
For every $100 in income tax:
* $32 goes to national defense
* $19 goes to interest on the national debt
* $15 goes to supplemental programs such as TANF, child tax credits, and
farm subsidies
* $14 goes to health
* $6 goes to education, employment, and social services
* $4 goes to transportation
* $2 goes to administration of justice
* $2 goes to environment and natural resources
* $2 goes to international affairs
* $1 goes to community and regional development
* $1 goes to agriculture
* $1 goes to science, space, and technology
* $1 goes to the commerce and housing fund
Even at their height, the financial benefits of the last decade’s tax cuts for middle class families never equaled the financial benefits that citizens of many other countries receive in the form of monthly child allowances, universal health care, subsidized parental leaves and child care, and college assistance.
In most of Western Europe, citizens enjoy the right to near-universal health care. They do not have to forego routine care for financial reasons, and are not financially wiped out by catastrophic health emergencies. In America, this occurs frequently enough that one-quarter of financial bankruptcies originate in medical problems not covered by insurance. What’s more, of course, every other industrial nation in Western Europe, and most of the rest of the world as well, provides paid maternity leave, and in some cases paid paternity leave as well. In Belgium, free early childhood education is available to all children starting at the age of 2 ½.
Now that’s some family values. But wait–before we all head off to Canada or Sweden, I think we’d better stick around to see how our election plays out. One can still hope for a president who truly values families, which I think both the Democrats running honestly do. Did anyone hear the latest about McCain calling his wife a c—? Family values starts at home, John. Remember that, dude.
The Guardian has a great piece up today by Polly Toynbee, “Girlification is Destroying All the Hope We Felt in 1968.” By “girlification,” Toynbee means pink princessification. I love neologisms on a Tuesday morning.
The article comes on the heels of an announcement from the UK’s Office for National Statistics yesterday, which reported that UK women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. Explains Toynbee, “This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap. Young women start out earning almost the same, deluded by beating boys at exams. Motherhood knocks most out of the running.”
The piece goes on to ask, “so, what’s new?,” noting that 2008 is a year for reflection for her generation of women (aka second wave): “What happened in 1968? What really changed? The year of riots saw feminism ignite too, a year hazed in an illusory miasma that nothing would be the same again – but of course it was.”
Depressing. But just in case you aren’t depressed enough, Toynbee reminds us too that only 24% of parliamentary seats in the EU are occupied by women, 20% in the UK; and that 90% of top EU company boards are men. Women dominate primary school teaching, men run universities. The UK has the largest pay gap.
On the upside, Spain’s new cabinet is 50% female. GO SPAIN! And for more on the connection between pinkification and the mommy gap, read the rest here.
Just a quickie this morning. This just came to me via Laura from Catalyst–thanks, L!
A nice summary of an interesting sounding article, “Locating Mothers: How Cultural Debates About Stay-at-Home Versus Working Mothers Define Women and Home” by Heather Dillaway (dillaway@wayne.edu) and Elizabeth Paré:
Most women must decide whether to work for pay while mothering or make mothering their sole social role. Often this decision is portrayed in terms of whether they will be “stay-at-home” and presumably “full-time” mothers, or “working mothers” and therefore ones who prioritize paid work over caregiving. Inferred within this construction is women’s physical location as well—either women are at home or work, not both. In this article, the authors explore common conceptualizations of stay-at-home versus working motherhood, as evidenced by feminist family scholarship and recent media items. To keep in tune with contemporary media conversations, the authors begin to investigate what cultural discourse about these mothers also illustrates about our definitions of home, and the individuals and activities that exist within this space. In writing this conceptual piece, the authors’ goal is to initiate further feminist research on motherhood and paid work, and women’s locations while engaging in both.
Just of few of many links, culled from around the internets:
NPR host Renee Montagne reports on “The Mother’s Index,” which compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries.
Broadsheet sounds off on some pop culture mom-ranking.
MotherTalk blog tours Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own and The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book.
And PunditMom smartly rants on the media branding of families, from the perspective of an adoptive mother.
The brilliant Alissa Quart (of last month’s NYTimes mag spread on transgender youth fame) has a short piece up at Mother Jones about the new fertility-movie genre that’s definitely worth a read.
In “When Chick Flicks Get Knocked Up,” Alissa questions the happy ending substitute of baby love and emphasizes their conservative bent. She also notes that these “embryo pics” invert film themes of yore:
The prenatal pics don’t mean to irk their viewers, of course: they are simply are a corny replacement for the serrated romantic comedies of the 1940s, in which sparkling, independent female protagonists, sporting sharply tailored suits and sharper repartee, wound up getting their comeuppance in the form of a rake who could finally domesticate them. In fertility movies, the rake taming all female powerhouses is an infant. Worse, embryo pics have inverted another film theme. Women who once chose an unusual life path picked child-free independence—liberated Klutes or unmarried women. Now, conceiving of an infant without marriage or even love is the filmic symbol of independence. In this way, these films recast the “pro-choice” narrative of feminists’ personal and political past as a different, less politically dangerous sort of pro-choice story—a woman’s right to choose from a smorgasbord of late fertility options. Once, in the recent age of “Murphy Brown†having a baby as a single woman was the most rebellious and politically radical thing our heroine could ever do. Now becoming a single mom onscreen makes a film heroine more conventional.
Thoughts?!
You MUST check out this piece by the Women’s Media Center’s very own Rebekah Spicuglia (pictured here with her son Oscar), called “Mother’s Day, Observed.” Read it, absorb it, and then please, go make your mother proud.
Caroline Grant, coeditor of the forthcoming anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, just gave me the heads up that InsideHigherEd.com is launching a new Mama PhD blog, and seven of the book’s contributors — Libby Gruner, Megan Kajitani, Susan Bassow, Dana Campbell, Liz Stockwell, Anjalee Nadkarni and Della Fenster — will be blogging regularly for them. As Caroline notes, “This is a terrific opportunity to bring the discussion of academic work/ family life balance issues out of the book, into the blogosphere and from there into classrooms and campus administrative offices.” Hells yeah.
Megan, of the very cool blog Having Enough, will be writing a weekly advice column. For more on everything, check out the book’s website here. And congrats, you Mama PhD powerhouses out there! I’ll be sure to blog more about the book in this space when it comes out.
Well, today is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, an event I’ve long thought a brilliant conception–especially when it used to be just for girls. But I get it, I get it, esp. when it’s a case of boys seeing Mommy at Work. According to the official literature, the day is designed to be more than a career day:
For over 15 years, the program’s development of new, interactive activities and partnerships has helped us in taking girls and boys to the future they dream of.
This year’s program theme, “Making Choices for a Better World,†centers on “encouraging girls and boys to consider the options they have and make choices for a better world. This means making choices to serve the community and one’s family, to care for one’s body and health, and to make better choices that impact our environment, as well as one’s future.”
Cool. And how can you argue with that. But still, I can’t help but feel the language lost something in the translation from daughters to daughters and sons–and you know what an advocate I am for including boys/men in the feminist conversation.
Helaine Olen (co-author of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding and Managing Romance on the Job and a contributor to the forthcoming book The Maternal Is Political) has a different bone to pick, and I’m not sure how I feel about her critique. Helaine rails against it in a piece in Newsday, writing:
If the past is any guide, several million children nationwide will accompany their parents to work today, participating in the annual rite of spring known as Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. Moms and dads across the United States will allow their kids to play in their offices, running through cube farms and “assisting” at cash registers, all in the name of breaking down the mystique that exists between work and family.
Yet in a world of home offices, moms on the playground taking business calls by cell phone, and dads answering queries on their BlackBerries at school events, it’s quite likely that children are all too aware of the importance of paid employment to their parents. What they really need is a lesson in the value of taking time to kick back and relax.
She goes on to call for an official event to teach America’s children about the importance of downtime, concluding: “We can call it Let Your Daughters and Sons See Mom and Dad Do Absolutely Nothing Day. Any takers?”
Now, I’m not a parent (yet) so maybe I’m off kilter here. But I still think the event is a good idea. What do y’all think – especially you parents out there? Is it a good thing, or a pain? Did it lose something in the translation when it switched to include boys? What’s been the experience of folks who’ve done it?
If I had a kid and I took them to work today, they’d be spending the entire day in Starbucks, watching mommy type. Thrilling, no doubt.
Well if this isn’t the most timely book ever published, I don’t know what is. Deborah Carr, a brilliant sociologist at Rutgers, has teamed up with journalist Julie Halpert to write Making Up with Mom: Why Mothers and Daughters Disagree About Kids, Careers, and Casseroles (and What to Do About It). If they had timed it a bit differently, they could have easily added “and Candidates” to the subtitle. The book shows how generational differences in women’s lives have created (fixable) frictions between Gen X/Boomer women and their moms. I like the emphasis on “fixable.”
Here’s from the book description:
Young women today have infinitely more options than their mothers and grandmothers did decades ago. “Should I become a doctor, a writer, or a stay-at-home mom?†“Should I get married or live with my boyfriend?†“Do I want children?†Women in their twenties, thirties, and forties today are wrestling with life-altering decisions about work and family—and they need all the support they can get.
But the very person whose support they crave most—their mother—often can’t get on board, and a rift is created between the two generations, even for women who have always had a strong relationship.
A mother’s simple question, like “How can you trust a nanny to watch your children all day?†can bring her poised, accomplished CEO daughter to tears, or provoke a nasty response more suitable to a surly teenager than a leader of industry. Why can’t mothers and daughters today see eye to eye when it comes to important choices about love, work, children, money, and personal fulfillment? Why does a mother’s approval matter so much, even to the most confident and self-possessed daughter? And when daughters choose paths different from their mothers’, why is it so painful for the older generation?
Making Up with Mom answers these important questions by focusing on three core issues: dating/marriage, career, and child rearing. Relying on interviews with nearly a hundred mothers and daughters, and offering helpful tips from more than two dozen therapists, Julie Halpert and Deborah Carr explore a wide range of communication issues and how to resolve them, so mothers and daughters everywhere can reclaim their loving relationships. This enlightening book is a must-read for all women today.
The perfect gift for Mother’s Day?! The authors will be reading at Barnes & Noble in North Brunswick on Tuesday May 20 at 7:30 p.m. For more, check out www.makingupwithmom.com.
HAPPY APRIL 15 everyone! So Americans tend to think we’re better off than families in most other industrial countries because we pay lower income taxes. Right? NOT! As CCF reminds us today, when we factor in the higher amount Americans pay for health care, child care, and education, the comparison is not always in our favor. Where do American families’ tax dollars go and what family “value” they get in return?
For every $100 in income tax:
* $32 goes to national defense
* $19 goes to interest on the national debt
* $15 goes to supplemental programs such as TANF, child tax credits, and
farm subsidies
* $14 goes to health
* $6 goes to education, employment, and social services
* $4 goes to transportation
* $2 goes to administration of justice
* $2 goes to environment and natural resources
* $2 goes to international affairs
* $1 goes to community and regional development
* $1 goes to agriculture
* $1 goes to science, space, and technology
* $1 goes to the commerce and housing fund
Even at their height, the financial benefits of the last decade’s tax cuts for middle class families never equaled the financial benefits that citizens of many other countries receive in the form of monthly child allowances, universal health care, subsidized parental leaves and child care, and college assistance.
In most of Western Europe, citizens enjoy the right to near-universal health care. They do not have to forego routine care for financial reasons, and are not financially wiped out by catastrophic health emergencies. In America, this occurs frequently enough that one-quarter of financial bankruptcies originate in medical problems not covered by insurance. What’s more, of course, every other industrial nation in Western Europe, and most of the rest of the world as well, provides paid maternity leave, and in some cases paid paternity leave as well. In Belgium, free early childhood education is available to all children starting at the age of 2 ½.
Now that’s some family values. But wait–before we all head off to Canada or Sweden, I think we’d better stick around to see how our election plays out. One can still hope for a president who truly values families, which I think both the Democrats running honestly do. Did anyone hear the latest about McCain calling his wife a c—? Family values starts at home, John. Remember that, dude.
The Guardian has a great piece up today by Polly Toynbee, “Girlification is Destroying All the Hope We Felt in 1968.” By “girlification,” Toynbee means pink princessification. I love neologisms on a Tuesday morning.
The article comes on the heels of an announcement from the UK’s Office for National Statistics yesterday, which reported that UK women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. Explains Toynbee, “This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap. Young women start out earning almost the same, deluded by beating boys at exams. Motherhood knocks most out of the running.”
The piece goes on to ask, “so, what’s new?,” noting that 2008 is a year for reflection for her generation of women (aka second wave): “What happened in 1968? What really changed? The year of riots saw feminism ignite too, a year hazed in an illusory miasma that nothing would be the same again – but of course it was.”
Depressing. But just in case you aren’t depressed enough, Toynbee reminds us too that only 24% of parliamentary seats in the EU are occupied by women, 20% in the UK; and that 90% of top EU company boards are men. Women dominate primary school teaching, men run universities. The UK has the largest pay gap.
On the upside, Spain’s new cabinet is 50% female. GO SPAIN! And for more on the connection between pinkification and the mommy gap, read the rest here.
Just a quickie this morning. This just came to me via Laura from Catalyst–thanks, L!
A nice summary of an interesting sounding article, “Locating Mothers: How Cultural Debates About Stay-at-Home Versus Working Mothers Define Women and Home” by Heather Dillaway (dillaway@wayne.edu) and Elizabeth Paré:
Most women must decide whether to work for pay while mothering or make mothering their sole social role. Often this decision is portrayed in terms of whether they will be “stay-at-home” and presumably “full-time” mothers, or “working mothers” and therefore ones who prioritize paid work over caregiving. Inferred within this construction is women’s physical location as well—either women are at home or work, not both. In this article, the authors explore common conceptualizations of stay-at-home versus working motherhood, as evidenced by feminist family scholarship and recent media items. To keep in tune with contemporary media conversations, the authors begin to investigate what cultural discourse about these mothers also illustrates about our definitions of home, and the individuals and activities that exist within this space. In writing this conceptual piece, the authors’ goal is to initiate further feminist research on motherhood and paid work, and women’s locations while engaging in both.
