As usual, too much good stuff to write about and not enough hours in the day. Since Torts calls, I give you a link round-up:
Various writers tackle women and work. Some of my favorite excerpts:
Dana:
Over the course of a century in which women’s roles outside of the home expanded radically, mothers continued to spend the exact same number of hours on basic childcare chores as their great-great-grandmothers did. And the average working man with a working spouse still spends just three hours a week on basic child care.
Ezra:
In a home where both parents work, women spend 11 hours a week caring for the kids and men spend…three. Whoa. Of course, this isn’t because husbands and wives sit down and set up a schedule where women do about four times as much child work. Rather, it just sort of…happens that way. People are busy. The guys look at the work and assume someone else will take care of it. The women look at the work and decide they’d better get it done. Societal expectations reinforce this division of labor.
Woah indeed.
Tom Colicchio from Top Chef:
Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they’re right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone — spouse, parent, paid caregiver — will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path — say, catering or opening a bakeshop — because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.
Atrios (just read it all — it’s brieft).
It genuinely pains me that I am probably not going to have time to write a post on this article about shared parenting in last weekend’s NY Times Magazine. But you should definitely check it out. I went in expecting to hate it — particularly because it’s written by Lisa Belkin, she of the “opt-out revolution” faux-trend articles — but actually found it to be quite nuanced and interesting. It gets beyond the same old explanations for the household division of labor and really delves into the structural and broader social that push women in certain directions while casting it all as a “choice.” There have been some criticisms that the article only focuses on two-parent families, but since it’s about the gender-based division of labor, I can see why Belkin made that choice. I do wish that there had been a greater emphasis on the class dynamics at play, but Belkin did do a decent job at addressing those without flat-out using the word “class” — through the anecdotes and interviews, she made it clear that for a lot of families, equal division of labor and childcare is an economic privilege, and that the “choice” to have a less equal division is more about financial realities than feminist beliefs.
If you’re up for being ticked off, check out this piece, titled “Is There Really a Bias Against Women in Politics? History Suggests Otherwise.” He’s right, when you think about it. I mean, after the long line of female presidents we’ve had, and the huge numbers of Congresswomen and female governors, who can reasonably argue that there’s an anti-woman bias in politics? Silly feminists and your victim mentality. (If you actually read the article, you’ll see that he goes on to blame women getting the right to vote for “big government.”)
Is it 3am for feminism now that Hillary Clinton has lost and women are supposedly bitter?
No. Feminists are prepared to back Barack Obama.
Ugly news out of Europe: Another xenophobic anti-immigrant measure has been passed. We’ll see if it passes judicial review.
Bitch PhD writes on the ACLU blog about how same-sex marriage helped her heterosexual marriage.
If women genuinely just want to have babies and dust the furniture all day, why is Kathleen Parker a gainfully employed columnist? I do love the right-wing women who make entire careers out of telling other women to stay home. And FYI to Kathleen: I’m pretty sure that some people aren’t “hard-wired” to like scrubbing the floor more than others.
A new book is out discussing how contraception access could help to stem population growth, because most women want small families. This isn’t anything new, but the Washington Post reviewer seems befuddled, and her conclusions are truly bizarre:
But Engelman’s account gives the impression that women have always been more interested in preventing children than in having them. Surely, throughout history there have always been women wanting fewer children, but there have also been women praying to have even one. While human history may have seen lots of informal contraceptives, it also saw lots of fertility totems. Moreover, this argument — give women birth control, and women will take care of any population crisis — strangely ignores the role of men, who don’t always want eight children, either. Give women birth control and their husbands and partners might insist that they use it.
Uh… ok? Sure, there have always been women praying to have even one child — but far more women attempt to control the number of their children by limiting childbirth than by taking steps to up their fertility. That isn’t to denigrate the issues that women face when they have trouble conceiving, just to say that throughout human history, preventing pregnancy has been something that a greater number of women have attempted. It’s also odd that the review claims that a pro-birth-control argument ignores the role of men.
Planned Parenthood hits suburbia, and the WSJ freaks out. This is a pretty irritating piece — it goes after Planned Parenthood for having the audacity to open clinics in wealthier suburban areas, instead of serving low-income people. Except that in reality, there is no “instead of” — Planned Parenthood serves a wide variety of people, and they aren’t cutting services for low-income people in order to go to suburbia. In fact, the suburban clinics help PP to recoup some of its losses on the clinics that serve primarily low-income populations — so clinics that can charge full price for birth control make it possible for PP to offer reduced-price birth control to a greater number of people who need it. Nor are low-income people all living in the “inner city” — for a lot of low-income Americans, the suburban clinics are more accessible than the urban clinics. And you know, it’s about time that Planned Parenthood made its clinics look better. The article gives the impression that PP is only renovating the clinics in wealthier areas, but that’s not actually true — they’re giving a large number of their clinics face-lifts. And since PP has always poured most of its money into services and not frills, a lot of their clinics need it. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing — unless we’re under the impression that low-income people don’t deserve to be served in nice locations, and should have to settle for shit. It’s also worth noting that despite the WSJ’s hand-wringing about PP serving the suburban wealthy, three-quarters of people PP serves qualify as low-income.
A shot to the G-spot for better orgasms? Color me skeptical too.
Aww, Barry… I know you have to fight the “Barack Obama is a Muslim” line, but not letting women in headscarves sit where they may be in photos with the candidate? Of course it’s not Obama’s fault personally, and the campaign has said it’s not their policy, but, damn.
A Catholic charity is being investigated for helping a teenage girl get an abortion. I know we rail against anti-choice groups and the politicization of the Catholic church, but this is a good opportunity to point out that there are lots of Catholics on the ground who are working hard for social justice. Much of the aid to immigrants in border states has come from Catholic charities, and Catholic workers have been on the front lines against people like the Minutemen who seek to harass, assault and even kill illegal immigrants. Before Roe, religious groups — including Catholics — helped women to seek out safe illegal abortions. And now, there are Catholic charities that are going against doctrine and helping women who need it get legal abortions. Here, the woman in question is a 16-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala.
This is unrelated to feminism, but is about one of my personal pet peeves: Arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. They sound like a good idea, but in practice they almost always only benefit the business. They are no good, and an important issue for consumer advocates to tackle.
The history of American soldiers committing sexual assault against women in Japan is finally getting some attention — and the U.S. government isn’t happy about it.
Obama is the real pro-life candidate.
The boys on the bus — with Clinton out the race, the campaigns are dominated by men.
Enjoy!