When my son was six years old and my daughter six months old my then husband and I moved to Oxford, England for his sabbatical year. I mentioned our trip to an acquaintance who appeared shocked. “I wouldn’t take my six month old to the supermarket, let alone a foreign country.” I had supportive friends and family, yes, but there were more nay-sayers than not. Even as recently as eighteen… Read More »You Might As Well Jump
I wonder: has everyone else following this manufactured crisis about raising the debt ceiling noticed that it’s just a bunch of men playing a high school game of chicken? Each side is racing their car towards the other and hoping the other will turn the wheel away first. I suppose I could make another analogy about, well, you know what, but the truth is that the whole fight among lawmakers… Read More »Boys Being Boys (on this debt ceiling “crisis”)is Very Ugly
Michele Bachmann is not a feminist but she is running for President. Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman and a lawyer, is running for president. Michele Bachmann is a mother and a foster mother and a wife and she is running for president. What part of this makes any sense at all? Michele Bachmann, according to recent news, went to law school because her husband told her to. Bachmann is running for… Read More »Michele Bachmann is Not a Feminist but She is Running for President
Are bad girls ruining it for the rest of us?
It is really difficult to know how to write about feminism these days. One thing I do know for sure is that we are no more a post-feminist society than we are a post-racial one. The fact that we are still talking about women’s “place” or “role” in society, still worrying about how we come off: slutty, bitchy, angry, all means that we have a long way to go. Baby.… Read More »Whither Feminism?
I am an unmarried woman.
Within the past few days, young and famous feminist Jessica Valenti defended her decision not to take part in a panel based on More magazine’s recent list of hip and important young feminists and Nora Ephron all but dismissed the old-line feminist movement of the Seventies by esstentially calling women of that era “irritable” in a Huffington Post article taken from her new book. Is feminism schizophrenic or what? Although… Read More »Who Gets to Call Herself a Feminist Matters More Than We Might Think
I don’t think I or any woman I know needs to read “The Shriver Report: A Women’s Nation Changes Everything” by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. Although the Report is being highly touted as important on several NBC programs, all the women I know know exactly what our state is: Pretty hectic and too often unrewarded compared to the work we do. Our children and our husbands… Read More »The Shriver Report on Women
Okay, perhaps the New York Times article that graced the front page of the Style section recently deserves a little more parsing than that. But really. Like that other scary statistic that turned out to be wrong — remember the one about women over forty being as likely to get hit by a terrorist’s bomb as to marry? That one had women running like banshees to get hitched to anyone… Read More »Big News? Women Over 50 Less Likely to Remarry