January 31st, 2007
I just heard (via my left nutmeg) that Molly Ivins has died and I’m feeling surprisingly bereft. In the 2 1/2 years that I’ve been blogging, it seems like I’ve written about the passing of too many important women — Ann Richards, Betty Friedan, Rosa Parks. (And I feel badly that I didn’t write about Tillie Olsen.) But this one seems to have shaken me more than the rest. I think it’s because they all seem like people out of history, who did things long ago. Molly was writing up to the end.
She warned us all about Shrub, years ago, and we (the country) didn’t listen to her. And don’t we all wish we had. But she was never shrill, always funny. I remember sitting outside a laundromat waiting for my clothes to dry and reading Molly Ivins can’t say that, can she? and laughing out loud, attracting odd looks from the passers-by.
The Texas Observer has (at least for now) turned their site into a memorial for her.
Firedoglake has some nice excerpts up too.
Posted in Current Affairs | 3 Comments »
January 30th, 2007
I don’t have a book to review this week, mostly because I’ve fallen back into my bad habit of reading multiple books at the same time. Here’s what I’m in the middle of:
The Female Thing. I requested this from the library because of Flea’s positive review. (While she thought she was behind the curve in reviewing it, I had never heard of it.) So far, it’s mostly annoying me. Kipnis seems to be provocative for the sake of being provocative, and to believe that "women’s magazines" are an accurate reflection of women’s psyches.
This year I will… A little book with advice on how to achieve your goals, from losing weight or quitting smoking to being more patient with your kids. Nothing wildly innovative, but a useful set of reminders.
The Lay of the Land. Richard Ford can sure write amazing sentences. But I’m not sure that anything’s going to happen in the entire book. When I finish a chapter, I feel no compulsion to start the next.
With no one as witness. One of the recent Lynley mysteries by Elizabeth George. I’m not liking it as much as her earlier ones — I think they were more interesting when Lynley and Havers hated each other. But it keeps me turning the pages.
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
January 29th, 2007
Via Miriam at Everyday Mom, I read this NYTimes article about "breadwinner moms." Dunleavey’s not talking about single mothers who support their families, but about the women in what I call "reverse traditional families" — married couple families where the wife works outside the home and the husband is the unpaid primary caregiver.
I agree with Dunleavey that there’s a lot of "renegotiating expectations" in reverse traditional families. We have a set of societal defaults about what women should do and we have a set of societal defaults about what stay-at-home parents should do, and when there’s a stay-at-home parent who is not a woman, many of these expectations collide and everything’s up for grabs — as Dunleavey says, from who does the laundry to who manages the money. I’d add from who chaperones the field trip to who is on duty when the child starts puking at 2 am.
But I part from Dunleavey when she says "When I say uncomfortable, I’m trying to be polite. The women I know in these shoes are seething — with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration." I’m sure not seething.
We’ve been doing this for nearly 6 years, and I’m not going to tell you that there aren’t ups and downs. There are days I’m jealous of him for getting to play with the kids and there are days he’s jealous of me for getting to escape to a nice quiet office. When I was trying to change jobs, it would have been nice to have the security of another income. Sometimes when he spends a lot of time on his hobbies, I think it would be nice if he mopped the floor instead. I burn quietly when the preschool teacher effusively tells me how nice it is to see me for a change. But none of these really bug us for more than about a minute at a time. Maybe someday we’ll make a different choice. But this is working for us.
If one of the frustrating parts of being in a reverse traditional family is that there are no guidelines, one of the good things is also that there are no guidelines. So you can make it up as you go along and do things the way that work for you. Last week, I was jealous at the thought that T would get to bring cupcakes to D’s class for his birthday, and I wouldn’t. So I arranged to work from home, and we both brought the cupcakes.
Posted in Reverse Traditional Families | 14 Comments »
January 25th, 2007
Here are some links that readers have recently sent me:
And don’t forget to send your comments on the FMLA.
Posted in Education, Parenting, Reverse Traditional Families, Work-family choices | 1 Comment »
January 24th, 2007
This post is a solicited review.
Dawn at This Woman’s Work is trying to make some money by setting up, Get Them Blogging, a database of bloggers who are willing to receive samples to review. I signed on a few months ago, both to support Dawn and because I like to do book reviews, and a couple of weeks ago I got my first pitch, from Brighter Minds Media. They asked me how old my kids are, and the next week my husband called me at work to say that I had gotten a huge box.
The boys were very excited when I told them that the box had stuff for them. We opened it up, and went through it. The books were attractive and well-designed, if a little too overtly educational for my taste. D immediately grabbed the lift-a-flap alphabet book and wanted to see what was behind all the flaps, but lost interest as soon as he had seen them all. I liked the idea of the puppet built into the book, but was less thrilled to discover that it had an electronic voice. (We may pass it on to my nephew as revenge for all the noisy toys my brother has given the boys in the past.) When N is starting to learn his letters, we may break out the alphabet book that encourages finger tracing. Overall, I’d rate the books a B- there’s nothing objectionable about them, but nothing that made them stand out as books I’d want to read over and over again.
The package also had two computer games. D quickly grabbed the Land Before Time game, and I gave Caillou’s magic playhouse to N. D’s had practice with computer games before, and was soon navigating around the game. His favorite part was probably the dinosaur pinball game. He’s played it a once or twice since. I think that because there’s not an obvious goal that you’re supposed to achieve, he’s not drawn back to it as much as he is to games where he can see that he’s making progress.
N has only played games where something happens no matter what you hit, and so he struggled a bit to figure out his game. The box says that it’s for 2-6, but I find it hard to imagine that a 2 year old could manage the mouse well enough to play; N can do the sub-games where the object you’re clicking stays still, but not the ones where it moves. He’s also never watched the tv show, and so doesn’t quite get the video clips that you "win" when you solve a game. But he loves the way Caillou nods or shakes his head and says yes or no when you move the cursor over the right. He’s asked to play it again almost every day.
On a somewhat related note, I agree that the Baby Einstein reference in the state of the union address was odd.
Posted in Books | 3 Comments »
January 23rd, 2007
I’m watching the state of the union address and trying not to grind my teeth.
I’m expecting that the most interesting part of the speech will be the health care proposal. Based on the advance info, it’s a terrible proposal, but I think it’s massively significant that Bush feels a need to have a health care proposal. 12 years after the crash and burn of the Clinton health care proposal, the demand for change seems to have outweighed the ghosts of Harry and Louise.
The one part of the Bush proposal that I agree with is that it doesn’t make sense for employer-provided health insurance to be fully tax exempt, with no limit. It costs the government a huge amount of money, and mostly benefits the wealthy and middle-class. I’d be happy to limit it if the funds went to something that was actually going to expand coverage.
But it’s nuts to think that everyone is going to buy health insurance on the individual market. It’s way too expensive for low-income families (and a tax deduction doesn’t help those who don’t owe income taxes) and out of reach for anyone with a pre-existing condition. One of my friends who lives in Massachusetts says that the plans there are costing 2 -3 times more than estimated when the individual mandate law was passed. Health insurance has to involve risk pooling or it’s just a way of smoothing out spending over time.
Some links:
Ok. I was wrong. The proposal to reduce gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next 10 years is more interesting than the health insurance. I have no idea how he thinks we’re going to achieve this.
Posted in Health, US Politics | 5 Comments »
January 22nd, 2007
I’m not in the mood to write tonight, so I’ll just share some links:
1) I really liked Rowan Crisp’s comment on the sHillary post at Pandagon:
"I was told recently that “as a feminist” I had a duty to vote for her. I stopped laughing long enough to ask if I had to vote for Condi Rice if she ran, too. Funnily enough, I never got an answer on that one.
"I want someone who will fight for national healthcare. I want someone who will stop wrapping themselves in the flag and the bible to justify horrors. I want someone who will obliterate the movement towards a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I want someone who will ridicule DOMA for what it is: a limitation on the right of legal, consenting adults to contract freely.
"I’d also like a pony. 🙁 "
Hillary isn’t my first choice for the Democratic nominee. She’s not even my second. But I feel like there’s a level of vitriol against her on the left that is totally out of proportion to the compromises that she’s actually made.
2) Blogging for Choice posts from Cecily and Bitch, PhD. And Wealhtheow writes about Virginia’s "controversial" bill to ensure that anti-abortion laws don’t ban contraception as well.
3) And via Funds for Writers: Small Markets, I thought some of my readers might be interested in this call for submissions of speculative fiction about futuristic motherhood.
What do you imagine the function of motherhood to be? How do you think the image of motherhood will change? How do you think the image of motherhood will stay the same? What possible customs, norms or laws will be in place in the future that would have an impact on changing or affecting mothers? How will science and technology affect pregnancy, birth, and child rearing? How might full social equality affect childcare in the home and workplace? How does a lack of social equality in a highly technological society affect pregnancy, birth, and childcare? How about in a future culture with a highly evolved social order but low technology?
Posted in Parenting, Reproductive rights and choices, US Politics | 1 Comment »
January 18th, 2007
I was intrigued by this story in the Washington Post on Monday, reporting on a study that examined the cost of childbearing on parental health. The researchers took advantage of the huge amount of geneological data collected by the Mormon church, and studied the effects of family size on both parental and child health.
As you’d expect, the odds of dying in childbirth or immediately thereafter rose for women the more children they had borne. But the odds of dying in the next year rose significantly for women even after the first few months, and for men as well. In an online Q and A, the reporter said that the findings held across imputed socioeconomic status, which suggests that it’s not just a matter of having too many mouths to feed. The article suggests that the findings may be a sign of the health impacts of stress. Children in large families were also more likely to die than those in small families, possibly due to inadequate supervision.
I wasn’t surprised to see that children were more likely to die in childhood if one of their parents died before they reached age 5. I was surprised that this finding was so much stronger for maternal death than paternal death. I can see how maternal death would be a disaster for an infant, but my stereotypical image of pioneer families makes me think that loss of a father would be a greater disaster for older children. But there may have been more social support for widows and their children than I imagine. (I also think there may be some bias introduced by the sample design, which is limited to couples who were each married only once; my impression is that both widows and widowers tended to remarry out of simple economic necessity.)
Given both smaller family sizes today and better medical care, I’m not sure if this study has any practical implications today, but I thought it was interesting.
Posted in Parenting, Science | 4 Comments »
January 17th, 2007
I thought I had posted this at the end of 2006, but I just found it in my draft posts. Whoops. Anyway, better late than never, here are my picks for my favorite posts of last year (and why).
- Fair, not kind. The right word matters.
- The Endless To Do List. I really like these posts where I pull together ideas from lots of different places.
- TBR: The Woman at the Washington Zoo. In too many of my book reviews this year, I feel like I simply recapped the thesis of the book. I think I did a better job on this one.
- School spending. I haven’t done as many data-driven posts since I’ve changed jobs (since they take a lot of time to research), but this is a post where I really learned something in the process of looking up the data.
- Why register with the state? One where I feel like I added to the dialogue in a productive way.
- School round-up. This was not necessarily one of my best posts of the year, but it summed up probably the best conversation of the year, taking place here, in the comments, and in other people’s blogs.
Here’s what I did as a roundup last year [2005, that is] and in 2004.
Posted in Weblogs | No Comments »
January 16th, 2007
Today’s book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, by Barbara Ehrenreich was published in 1989. I picked it up because I read a reference somewhere that made me think that Ehrenreich might have made the connection I’ve been trying to draw between high-intensivity parenting and the increasingly competitive economy.
Ehrenreich does argue that middle class parents are highly insecure about their ability to pass their class status on to their children, but doesn’t really go with it in the direction that I’m interested. Rather, she suggests that middle-class status is largely a function of the willingness to defer gratification, whether in the form of extended education and low-paid entry level jobs or in the form of the savings needed for homeownership. Parents are anxious because there is little they can do to assure these values among their children. Ehrenreich argues that this is why the 60s were so unsettling to middle class adults — their children were rejecting the very values that made them middle class.
While the book made some interesting points, overall, it was so dated as to be of little interest. Fundamentally, Ehrenreich is trying to explain the shift to the right of American politics in the 1980s. She rejects the idea that it was due to a significant shift of the working class (the Reagan Democrats) and argues instead that it’s because the upper middle class chose to identify with the upper class corporate elite, rather than joining in solidarity with the middle and working class. I find that an unconvincing argument.
I also think it’s absurd to talk about the increased appeal of investment banking and law to college graduates in terms of an ideological shift without any acknowledgment of the increased burden of student loan debt. And as a Gen X-er myself, I found myself irritated by her idealization of the 60s without any acknowledgment that the boomers didn’t exactly live up to their youthful promises to build an egalitarian society. Ehrenreich also discusses the middle-class "discovery" of poverty in the 60s without any mention of the role that poor people played in the war on poverty.
So, I can’t recommend the book. But I don’t regret taking the time to read it. I found parts of it very interesting, especially the discussion of how the media hyped the idea that blue collar workers were opposed to the social activism of the 60s, and downplayed the role of unions in progressive coalitions.
Posted in Books, Poverty and Class | 6 Comments »