Mother's Day Round-up

First, the obligatory post on how Mother's Day began as anti-war protest.

Second, the round-up on mother's day coverage is that there's been a noticeable shift. This year's op-eds and features are much more political than anyone can remember. Several of us have been emailing around, and found these very good pieces in the Washington Post (and here's another from the Post), the Boston Globe, and the much smaller Newark Star Ledger. Salon.com offers its own round-up, concurring: there's been a change.

The message is getting through.

Of course, the newspaper that comes to my home, the Philadelphia Inquirer alone, it seems, stood out for a ridiculous article about Mom CEO's and professional moms. These are not, as you might think, mothers who are smashing the glass ceiling and the maternal walls to real power in our society. No, they're mothers who are taking avid notes during a talk by a household organization consultant on how to redo their pantries and best structure their time. I too like well-organized closet, but this article is about three years behind the trend. In a season which saw a real shift to seeing motherhood in a public, political light, this old-style mom's-the-head-of-a-private-empire type of reporting really stood out. (Here's the link, so you can see if you agree. I've been advising people to write letters to the Inquirer: Inquirer.Letters at phillynews.com.)

Let's be clear. Given the wage gap, given the maternal walls we face, given how damn hard it is to have kids and rise to the top of the business world and gain come of that capital, economic independence and public influence, being a mom CEO is a very different thing than being a mother who's an actual CEO. Let's not erase that problem by referring to moms as CEO's or Chief Household Officers when we're not. It's one thing to devote part or all of our lives to raising kids and keeping a home together. That's fine. But that's not being a CEO.

Know how you tell the difference? CEO's get their own private airplanes. A black towncar drives them directly onto the tarmac. They have personal assistants clearing the way in front of them, and cleaning up in their wake.

See what I mean?

Thank You Ellen Goodman

A lovely column from Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe. May all the Mothers Day coverage be this good. Personally, I've had calls from several reporters, and for each, I must say, the tenor of questions really has shifted in the past year. The calls I took asked about big pictures for family life. Reporters asked about dads. They asked me to tell them about different kinds of mothers. They asked me to explain why despite mommy wars rhetoric, they observed groups of mothers being supportive and kind. They asked me about political futures for family friendly bills.

Are some of our points getting across?

Quite different from a year ago when I was asked to respond to things like the Washington Post's survey claiming that mothers are really happy.

I can say that this Mothers Day, the black towncar won't be driving up to my house and swishing me to the CNN studios, but it will be great fun nonetheless, especially since I have the Wild Things Softball club annual Mother-Daughter softball game to look forward to. And Saturday evening, I'll be doing a MotherTalk in NY, at the home of Alpha Mom TV's Isabel Kalman. If you're in NY, leave a note here for the address.

Marrit takes on AlternaDad, and the culture of money

There really is an alternative parenting scene, and alternative writing about parenthood, and I'm proud to be linked up with that. As Marrit Ingman, one of my fave alterna-writers reminds us, contra New York Magazine, the idea of alternative parenting wasn't and isn't all about having lots of money to afford all the toys. With her, I too wonder: when did 'hip' become synonymous with 'affluent'? When did hip become something I could no longer afford? When did hip stop being about rebellion?

Well, it's no news that Marrit Ingman is a favorite here at the playground, so run, don't walk, to her latest post "Reinventing the Neal," where she takes on Neal Pollack, aka AlternaDad, and claims
a) that he may have plagiarized some of her writing, and
b) that he clearly felt no need at all to read any of the many, many alterna-moms who plotted the way before him. Women and mothers are just so invisible.
c) He's wrongly making "cool parenting" into a competitive and judgment-driven sport. As Marrit writes, with her characteristic humanity and grace:

"Therein lies the problem for me. I simply don'’t tolerate pitting parents against each other. Not mothers against mothers, not fathers against fathers. When I meet other parents, I don't run down a list of how we're different and I am better. Alternative parenting isn'’t about being the coolest kid in the room. It's about coalition-building and rejecting the ready-made, not about bragging and slagging."

So go and read.

Andi Buchanan's It's a Girl

Since I've already done some book events with Andi on the It's a Girl tour, including one where I screeched the car into a nearby parking lot, plunked down twelve dollars, yes twelve outrageous dollars to park in Center City near the Barnes and Noble because I was already forty minutes late for the reading, having had one of those evenings--I'm still getting used to the mechanics of our two child family--where nothing went quite right, I'd thought I'd have out at my turn on her blog tour.

On her blog, Andi's featuring my essay in her book. Since I rarely write personal essays anymore, and that's what the book is about, I'll take the liberty of reposting both her excerpt from my essay, "Cheerleader." I wrote it to make sense of what was then Samira's passion for girly cheerleader things, my usual hunch to let things be balanced by my critical sense that things are not right, gender-wise, with the world. This episode, last year, coincided with my concern that she was not being taught math well. It also coincided with a series of discussions I had with her teacher about how in the morning free time, the boys in the class were playing chess and the girls were writing their names in bubble letters on white boards. In the end, the teacher made morning free time into something more structured so that all the kids learned similar skills in school. The combination of the disparity of learning and the genderedness of the skills being taught, with the girls' immersion in a culture where, as I write in the essay, even teen heroine Kim Possible has to fight bad guys and be a cheerleader too, left me angry, and searching for the best path for educating my daughter in how to be a girl.

Cheerleader, an excerpt.

If you ask [my daughter], she’ll tell you the best birthday party she ever attended was Jeannette’s. Jeannette’s mom and dad gave everyone shiny purple pompoms. Jeannette’s older cousin Sarah—a real live high-school cheerleader—taught the six-year-olds key cheerleading moves and chants. She belted out the cheers for all of Philadelphia’s major sports teams. She gave the girls pompom instructions. She even demonstrated the split where you begin standing, and you end with one leg bent in front and the other bent behind, arms held high, up, and out in a triumphal V—and of course, a perfect, full smile on your face. My daughter loved that party. She bounced home that afternoon, shiny purple pompoms in tow, elated, to tell me all about it. I watched as she showed off her new skills. I tried not to be the dour, downer mom.
A week or so after that cheerleading party, Samira’s friend Megan came home with us after school. The two girls scrounged around the dress-up trunk and emerged with—what else—cheering outfits. ...They jolted into the bedroom, where I was folding laundry, wanting to show me their outfits and their cheers.

“And mom, you know, cheering teaches us to spell,” Samira pointed out.

“That makes it good! We can spell Philadelphia—no f’s.”

I was not in a sporting mood. I launched into a mom version of the History Channel, telling them that cheerleading reminded me of times when girls weren’t allowed to play organized sports, when we couldn’t be at the center of attention except as smiling beauties.

My daughter and her friend are both daughters of feminist moms, and both daughters of writers. They’re used to their mothers passing down mysterious, impassioned fragments about the once-upon-a-time tormented life of girls—and then telling them why they can’t do really fun stuff, like cheerlead, or hang out at the mall (not a real possibility for them at six and seven, but something they learned from Polly Pockets). ... I imagine they’re used to hearing these strange ramblings from us every so often. Which isn’t to say they can make sense of it....

After the essays were in, Andi asked me to comment on it, for the blog tour. This, I remember, is what I typed out to her:

The funny thing is this: almost as soon as I wrote that piece, Samira changed. All of a sudden, blue became her favorite color, and then of course, orange, the color featured in all the kid stores this spring, and orange paired with blue denim, well that's the T. Samira had been taking swim lessons for several years, and this winter, joined the swim team at our local Y. She loves being on a sports team, and is developing an identity as an athlete: she swims, she plays soccer in the fall, and each spring joins up with Wild Things, our local girls softball extravaganza. When "Cheerleader" came out we read it together, at least the first few pages, after which Samira looked at me and said, "I liked cheerleading? How revolting."
After writing that piece I realized that of course I don't trust the gender values of the culture she's growing up in. How can I? How can anyone? I have decided to trust her, to trust the parenting that her dad and I do, and to trust that she's growing up surrounded by good adults. She's 7 1/2 now, and sometimes will surprise me by her criticisms of the images she sees around her. I've decided to step back, to model rather than critique, at least for the time being. She'll see billboard images of girls and women that make her feel uncomfortable, usually images that are too sexy for her seven year old soul, and say, "Mom, that's gross. Why do they put that there?"

My friend Dana notes constantly, and critically, that parenting turns people into gender essentialists, more convinced than ever that boys are boys and girls are girls, by nature, and with fairly rigid definitions. I strongly agree with her, and disagree with our tendencies to go easy, to pretend it's all okay and that gender roles, well heck, it's nature so there's nothing we can do about it. The gender-is-nature line gives up, and it absolves us from having to think about the results. It's all harmless we think. It absolves us from having to rebel, and one day, we'll regret that deeply, on our own accounts, and when we realize the limitations our kids, girls and boys both, will face. I think we can't discount the huge impact of the images they are confronted with, from day one; the messages we give them (how come I constantly here people call their boys "little man" and I've never ever ever heard a parent call their daughter "little woman"), whether these messages are more or less conscious. Untill we're really committed to looking at how we pull our gender system along, how we reinforce it with the smallest acts, then we're not ready to declare, with no scientific backing at all, that girls and girly and boys are boyish. We're turning back so much of the little progress we've made, and we're doing it as the generation who was raised to be different, raised to create a bit more space in the world to just be.

So that's my once-a-trained-feminist-theorist-always-a-trained-feminist-theoriest view of things. For a batch of beautifully written, and I can attest, well edited, personal essays (I loved Catherine Newman's on her daughter's chubbiness and her own, and Ann Douglas' on her daughter's eating disorder), take a look at Andi's book. Available from bookstores and the usual places online.

Pick up your Telephone

Many times I've talked about how we need to have a daily political practice, something that reminds us that we are citizens and that we matter. The way that meditation or yoga work to ground us (or some of us, anyway) in a world larger than ourselves, a world of calm, a daily political practice can remind us that we are not just our individual private selves.

And it might even help make a difference in the world.

Now, we all know that making a positive difference in the world can be an arduous process. It doesn't happen over night. There are some who would respond that individuals can't do a damn thing and you must join an organization. I'm not against organizations. Join them if you'ld like; there's power in numbers, and power in recognition. I know that I'm not much of an organization type, so I'm casting about for ways that individual acts can matter.

I've also mentioned in the past that we should all be in touch with our elected officials. That they rarely hear from us, and as a result they don't realize what we need. Some officials will undoubtedly be against what we want; there's scores, hundreds who will vote against something like paid family leave, or pro-rated benefits policies, or what have you. But many others will actually be emboldened from hearing from us.

I am not organizing a movement. I can barely organize my weekly grocery list. But I will tell you a pair of stories.

This week I've been digging around for stories for an article I'm working on. As part of that, I've been calling elected officials in Pennsylvania who have been introducing various bills about paid family leave. One suggests tax credits for employers who offer paid leave, one offers a wage replacement benefit, and another allows 20 hours a year for parents to take off and go to their kids' school events and medical visits.

I call their office. I tell the person who answers what I want to know. They connect me.

I know we don't believe this happens. We don't believe they're actually this close.

So let me back up. First I google their name. Within a click or two I am on their home page and I have their numbers for the capital and home offices. Or look for the listings in your local phone book.

It's that simple. Really.

And they are nice to you when you call. I promise.

Here's what I found out. I spoke with a member of the PA house, and a member of the PA senate. The House member told me that he introduced his paid familly leave bill because of the many voters who were coming by his office and telling him they needed paid medical leave to care for elderly parents. (That's the M part of the FMLA, the part we new parents forget about, the part that lets you take off to help sick people in your family). The stories added up, and the bill was introduced.

The Senate member told me that a student at a nearby college had written him a letter. She told him about the low percentages of mothers who qualify for paid family leave, about the low numbers who even qualify and take the unpaid FMLA. He read the letter with interest, and a few days later, got his staff involved in thinking up a solution.

Can we talk about the influence of individual acts and stories, and the public telling of those stories?

Now, neither of those bills have been signed into law. There'll need to be some legislative change and a Democrat-controlled statehouse for that to happen. As State Senator Mike Stack told me yesterday, the statehouse is not filled with the old model of Pennsylvania moderate republicans, the Arlen Spectors and John Heinz's of the world, but with a bunch of Rick Santorum clones. (We can and will discuss another day why the Rick Santorum clone-types don't actually support family values in real life). But when that changes, and it must, these bills could make headway. And that would be a big help.

So make those phone calls. Yes, a phonecall doesn't change the law. But it can help get the ball rolling. If we're going to have an impact, we have to begin moving beyond talk, and into the legislative arena.

Busy and Wonderful Week

Wow, I've had a wonderful of being on the road and talking about motherhood. This past week I was in DC not once, but twice, and over the next few days I'll post more. The first event was a talk with the Wednesday Morning Group, a wonderful collection of moms who gather at the Unitarian Church in Bethesda, deposit their children in the childcare rooms, and spend an hour listening to speakers of all sorts. It reminded me of Betty Friedan's instructions near the end of The Feminine Mystique that we moms should keep an intellectual life around us, we should have interests and new information coming in, especially during our years with young children. I wrote about this part in my book, because it's not the one-answer portrait of Friedan we always hear. It's the part where she writes about how demanding young children are. The new vision for women, she wrote, is to not have to separate our minds from our daily lives. The WMG seemed to be acting on this.

I gave one of my more political and policy driven talks yet, in part because my friend Rebecca kept telling me how much she and other moms rely on WMG for their burst of smart talk during the week, and because I figured every mom in the room knew the basics about what's simultaneously great and frustrating about motherhood. And after all, this is DC; if you can't talk politics here, where can you? And, finally, because I'm at the point of exhaustion at hearing the same thing over and over again. We've all got to start moving ahead out of the mommy wars cultural saturation we've been in.

And moving ahead means getting political. It means learning what's going on, breaking it down into pieces, and figuring out what to do, how to move ahead. It means shifting the discourse. One thing I've noticed, oh so many times, is how rarely many women--not all, but many--still don't feel comfortable with political talk. Well, we need to raise our comfort. Gain information and tools. And see ourselves--what's the phrase I'm looking for?--as political actors--as people, as citizens who deserve some change.

On Saturday evening I did a Mothertalk with Andi Buchanan and Marion Winik. This was loads of fun, not just because I was in the same room as two beloved writer-pals, but because the room--at Kakki Lewis' wonderful home in Bethesda--was filled with so many other writers and bloggers. Devra Renner, of Mommy Guilt fame, and Tracy Thompson, who has a wonderful and moving book coming out about motherhood and depression.

And drum roll please. That night I was in the room with two of my favorite political/family bloggers. Yes, Elizabeth from half-Changed World, and Brian from Rebel Dad were both there. It was so much fun. They are both lovely, and of course it's a treat to meet them in real life.

More insights to come, and I promise to provide links in the next few days, but if I stop to do it now, this will never get posted, so forgiveness, please, from all.

Gear We Need


Okay everyone, the MomsRising.org site is up. This is the start of our best chance right now of lighting a fire around family issues. Visit the site. It's filled with info, and ideas about real organizing and politics. You can also download the first chapter of The Motherhood Manifesto, by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. When the technology gets figured out, yours truly will be sending Playground Revolution entries over, which is my way of saying once again that I adore Joan and Kristin, and I think they are on the right track. Not everyone, as we know, gets a smile from the Playground Revolution.

And because it's spring and because we need messages out there even when we can't talk three sentences without interruption, buy yourself and those you love one of the fabulous Rosie-the-Riveter plus baby T-shirts with a Moms Rising logo. I'm ordering one tonight. Here's the T-shirt order site.

You know, I get many emails asking me to pitch products. I pretty much reject them all, especially as of late, asI've decided to not accept advertising on this blog. You can trust that if I recommend something, it comes from my true admiration and desire. Let's keep the roll going. While you've got the credit card out, head over to Rebel Dad--which is my favorite site these days, and if I go for too long without posting because life with a baby is so busy, know that Rebel Dad is probably saying whatever I would be saying, so read Rebel Dad. And then check out his line of Rebel Dad clothes. There's a Rebel Dad flask there, too. Can we predictthat such a flask, properly filled, will lighten the mood at your kids' baseball games, soccer matches and swim meets, especially if you share it with other parents. The RebelDad T will be a Father's Day present for the guy in my life.

The light pink Rebel Mom is a keeper, too. Especially now that I've gotten over my pink fetish.

When Others Say it Better

Good thing Entitlement Whores have friends. I am so often recharged by others' eloquence. Here's Andi's comments on the responses we've received after our show. Yes, there's the shock of how many people actually watch Book TV--this, I must say, is enlightening and happy news--and how much effort and time some people spent to track down my email address and write very long, very, very long letters to me telling me how wrong I am. On the sunnier side, many people wrote to tell me their agreement; often these were from men who, intriguingly enough, advised me to begin teaching women how to invest better and make more money. They were clear that when women have more financial control, we'll get what we want.

And on eloquence, I was also energized recently by Marritt Ingman's words. Marritt, of course, is the author of Inconsolable, the book on post partum depression that Brooke Shields didn't write, and better because of it [note from Miriam: this is the book we should all be sending to any mom who's depressed after childbirth, trust me].

Marritt also writes the column Mom and Pop Culture on AustinMama.com Marritt wrote these sentences in a different context, which to respect privacy I won't reproduce. Her sentences ring true, though, and are a good reminder of what it means to love our kids and family and fight like hell for better cultural and social conditions. Thanks Marritt, for letting me archive them here.


... I like to remind myself of the Adrienne Rich's
distinction between motherhood as experience and as
institution. . . We can love our individual
experiences as mothers and still chafe at the role
mothers play-- economically, culturally, and
politically--in public life. In other words, we can
still be pretty pissed off about the institution of
motherhood. Hell, I think we should be, even if our
infants do indeed make us ecstatically happy day and
night. It almost sounds like we're not supposed to say
anything "negative" post-motherhood, even about
culture or public policy?

Even to talk about the "dark side of mothering"
assumes that there is a converse, a bright side. I
tend to look at every relationship I've ever had in
those terms. There's a dark side to my marriage, to
most of my friendships, to my work as a writer, to my
status as an American and a white married person--I
mean, I'm pretty ambivalent about everything in the
world because the world is a pretty complicated place.
For me to express that in writing doesn't obviate
another person's experience. If Louise Wener doesn't
find a book on the shelf reflecting her experience of
motherhood, then by all means she should WRITE one, as
we have, instead of writing about her lack. I think
motherhood is the most emotionally complicated task on
planet Earth. To state that it is difficult is not to
say that there's something wrong with the very act of
*being* a mother.

(ps.here's
Marritt's blog, www.suite102.com/baldo, I'm adding it to my blogroll now)

"Entitlement Whore"

That, appparently, is me, according to one person who wrote in after my appearance on BookTalk over the weekend. It seems I am an entitlement whore because I dared to suggest that the costs of childcare shouldn't fall on workers alone. I may even have paired that daring statement with an announcement that California now offers twelve weeks of paid family leave, that it's a good thing, and that other states, such as New Jersey, might be following suit.

That's right. Who, we must ask, needs us to be at work so many hours of the week? Not hardworking moms and dads. Many of them would prefer to work fewer hours for more decent wages, and see their kids more. A heavily guarded truth about our society is this: it is not those of us who work who care the most about our jobs, it's the employers. It may seem counterintuitive. It may take some time to get it, but ultimately, that's right, it's those who make a true profit from our work who have the most at stake in our working. They care more than we do. Without all of us working, there is no productivity. Without productivity, there are no profits. You don't need a PhD in economics to figure that out.

One of the many mystifications about caring for young children in our country is that is should be a private cost, a cost shouldered by an individual mom or dad who also holds a paying job. Businesses have lobbied long and hard to keep us believing that. The result is a god-awful system of childcare that's often not so great for kids, anxiety-producing for parents, and pays its own workers barely livable wages. Those who have access to and can afford good childcare, consider yourself lucky. Consider yourself among the top 20% of income earners in the country. Then look around at those other childcare centers, the ones you would never ever consider putting your kids in, and ask about the other 80% who use them. If this sounds harsh, know that I mean it in the best, most generous and caring sense. It can feel unsettling to reflect on what one can afford that others can't; it can be angering to think about what you can't afford that others can. I think this looking around can be uplifting; those of us--myself included--with some economic and cultural privilege in our nation need to keep our eyes open, even when it hurts. Even though we often feel alienated and silenced and powerless, we're the ones who are closer to having a political voice in our nation, and my new goal in life is to help us figure out how to find and use those voices.

But back to topic:

We've been persuaded that childcare is a private cost, kind of like a yearly vacation to Disney World. It's something extra.

Well, it is something extra, and it isn't. The question of who shoulders this extra cost should be up for question. Currently we think of childcare as an extra, not a necessity. K-12 education is seen as a necessity, still, and funded collectively. I'd like to see us debate which category--extra or social necessity--childcare falls in. I think it belongs in the latter category, and that we need to shift from seeing it as extra to seeing it as a necessity. In the long run, childcare costs should be shared by all who pay corporate taxes in America. After all, they're the ones who really, truly need us to work. And they're the ones who have been getting quite the tax cuts lately. Childcare should be seen as part of the employer's cost of doing business in our country. If that cost is shared, then each of us and each of them would barely feel it.

If that makes me an entitlement whore, so be it.

I'm sure I'm in good company.

(And for those who complain about the cost of such a shifting in tax priorities, and are sure we can't afford it, repeat after me ten times: billions spent in Iraq, billions spent in Iraq, billions spent in Iraq.....)

C-SPAN 2 on Saturday April 1

Saturday, April 1 at 11 am and 10 pm for my panel Work, Women and Family: A Candid Discussion with me, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Andi Buchanan. If you miss it, it will be on archive shortly, and I'll post the link soon on the sidebar. It's a terrific panel that might inspire and encourage you to take action! If you watch, email me and let me know what you think.

Veja

I was email-interviewed two weeks ago by Veja, one of the largest magazines in Brazil, think Time magazine in Portuguese. Yes, it seems like my ideas have greater currency in Brazil than they do in the US, and someone will have to explain that to me. Anyway, I was cleaning up documents today and found the questions, and the answers I typed out. I thought I'd post them here. I was intrigued by the questions, and had fun answering them, even though I know but a fraction of my words will reach the final article, if that, and being portuguese-illiterate, I won't even know what they are. Enjoy!

Interview questions from Veja:

- You are a daughter of feminism, decided to leave your job and I can imagine how you felt judged these last months (even though you wrote a great book etc.). Why did you decide stop to work all day long for few years? Did you feel guilt?

My job demanded tremendously long hours, as do many jobs in professions like law, medicine, business and academe. Long hours make it especially hard to combine these jobs with having a family, especially a family with young children. That's why we're seeing so many mothers leave the professions we fought so hard to enter--these are the hardest jobs to reconcile with being a mom.

When my first daughter was born, it was just too much. I wanted to work less for a few years. In the US we are expected to work very long hours; it's just assumed. I wanted a different model for family life, in the name of a family-friendly feminism. Most moms and dads are just asking for a few years off, to work a few hours less each day, over a working life that is 45 years long. It's not such a big deal. Our culture is still caught in the judgmental mommy wars, and that stops us from realizing what changes are possible.

Some people judged my decision harshly; they felt I had so much to contribute to my profession, and it was a shame to waste that. Many others understood the inner tension that mothers experience when working fulltime becomes too hard. They realize that asmore of us share our stories, we can start to change our society, so that women won't have to sacrifice their careers and their economic earnings when we become mothers.

My own mother is the model working professional woman, and she had been home with us kids when we were very young.

I didn't feel guilt. No, when I had a child and realized how little our country supports families and supports women who have children, I felt anger. My generation was told we could be totally independent, that we could 'have it all.' That turned out to be untrue.
.


- What is your opinion about "feminism choise"?

We need more real choices. Women and men need the choice to leave their jobs for a few years to parent young children, and be able to return to good jobs later. People in Scandinavia have this kind of choice, but not in the US. Working a paying job is important. Caring for children is important. For too long women and men were told to choose one or the other. We need the real choice to do both, without penalty, and with more support. I'm not interested in debating who's the right kind of feminist. I want to show our nation a family friendly feminism.

And you know what? Some of the next wave of feminist activists are housewives too. The founder and editor of Mothers Movement Online (mothersmovement.org) is a housewife. The creators of the forthcoming motherhood activism website MomsRising.org are both housewives. We're seeing mothers leave the workplace, get frustrated, and become very political about making change. Housewives can be very political on behalf of all mothers, paid workers and at home both.


- Do you think feminism failed - where and when?

Feminism hasn't failed, no. There was much backlash; almost immediately conservatives started to organize against women's requests. In the 1970's, feminists were trying to support mothers, and families. They were asking for good daycares. They were asking for equal pay. But the political forces against them were stronger, and eventually feminism's programme was whittled down to something more narrow. All that is changing. The National Organization for Women (NOW) is beginning a new campaign on behalf of mothers and caregivers. There's a new political website called MomsRising.org that hopes to launch on Mothers Day.




- How do you see feminism today?

In feminism I see a chance to rally all of us to take better care of our families, in ways that help women, not keep us down. I see lots of young mothers, especially those online in the blogosphere, saying, hey, we want to work, we want reproductive freedom, we want economic independence, we want families too. They won't accept the old answers, which told us to either work, or have families. Younger mothers want both. This is feminism today: friendly to families, offering support to all of us, openminded, like a best girl friend.


- What is your opinion about Hirshman's solutions, like to marry down and have only one baby?

That's insane advice. Marriage is magical it's about love. Telling women to "marry down" is as bad as the old advice that told us to "marry up," to marry for money. Hirshman's marriage advice abandons the love and romance that we women want in our lives. Real feminism believes in love. Real feminism recognizes that we share the work of raising the next generation--of loving the next generation. Instead of bad relationship advice, we need policies that help us and our families. And one baby--ridiculous--some of us want one child, some want three. Children are about love, not social engineering. Her advice takes our eyes off the real problem, which is that our workplaces and our policies don't yet support family life, and don't really support mothers, who do most of the work of raising children.
Mothers don't want to be told what to do. They don't want to be underestimated. Many feel they wanted to keep working, and were pushed out by their employers. They're mad, and they want people to understand that, not tell them they married the wrong man.


- In your opinion, what is the future of feminism?

The future of feminism is quietly exciting. Beneath the media radar, younger mothers and fathers are rejecting the old roles. Stay-at-home fathers, like those at the RebelDad.com website, want to raise their children. Mothers and fathers both are asking for part time jobs with fair pay, so we can earn a living and be near our kids and stay happy. At its core, feminism is about having real choices about work and real choices about family life. Our nation's policies and mass media haven't yet caught up to this shifting wind.

Love her tone....

Anyone else catch Anne Lamott's colum Let's have a revolution! Does July 14 work for you? in Salon this week? I loved the easy tone she uses to write about what we sense is going wrong in our nation, and the ease with which she can be political without resorting to screed and rant. I wrote more about it at the blog I write for Hylands should anyone want more!

Good Models...

This past weekend I was at a conference hosted by the Posen Foundation and the Center for Cultural Judaism, based in NYC. They asked several of us to meet with them in Miami. Because my husband had meetings that truly couldn't be rescheduled, I took both children, the 7-year-old and the baby with me. It was harrowing to get through the airport. At the end of the trip, this is what I found.

The Foundation had hired two babysitters and rented a suite in the hotel. They created a hotel camp/childcare for all the professors who needed to bring their children.

And, because my baby won't take a bottle and we were meeting not at the hotel but at the University of Miami, they hired a third babysitter devoted to my baby, who watched her in a nearby office and called me out whenever she needed to nurse.

How's that for a new experience, and a model of workplace family-friendliness that doesn't make us choose between being parents and professionals? Kudos to the Posens and the CCJ.

Also, bravo to Good Morning America for today's good show on "Mothers Make it Work."

C-Span this Saturday, aka Friday Night with B.E.

So much fun to appear with Barbara Ehrenreich and Andi Buchanan on a panel last Friday evening at the Virginia Festival of the Book. BE has been fighting and writing for so long for women's rights, and for the rights of all americans across class lines to have a shot at economic independence and a decent life. She began the session by talking about her own life, just a bit, reminiscing about how when she interviewed to enter a PhD program in the sciences, she was asked whether she intended to become a mother. "I knew the right answer," she said, "No." You couldn't at that time profess to want a family and be taken seriously as a professional. She did indeed want a family, and did go on to have kids. Considering this, and reaching as she always does for a vision of the big picture, she told us that she fears that work and family are on their way to becoming one or the other, mutually exclusive, once again. She reminded us all to look beyond class lines, to care about what happens to professionals and to care about what happens to cooks and line workers and taxi drivers and the people who clean the bookstore--we were appearing at the UVA bookstore that night.

The evening energized me. It's easy to become dispirited. There's so much to be fixed in the work-and-family problem, and it all seems to intractable and vague. And still, we discuss it as mommy wars, or as work-family-balance, and we leave out the F-word; we don't seem able to tackle head on the fact that we are talking about another episode in a 150 year struggle in our nation about the role and rights of women. Clear and simple, but untill we can address it in these terms, as a gender problem, we'll never get to the core of why the workplace is so hard for mothers to navigate well (hint: it's not because we're lazy or stupid or not ambitious enough) and why good nurturing child care is so hard to find and afford and why we need to pit women against each other (hint:the mommy wars keep our eyes off real prizes, like social change, or equity, or fairness.) It was lovely to be in a place where you could say the F-word. I had a good time announcing "I'm a mom, I'm a feminist. And I'm proud." And Andi was her usual eloquent self. Barbara seemed to enjoy herself, and was incredibly gracious to us younger women. I think she was happy to find some women writers who weren't running fast as they can from a feminist and progressive vision of the world.

Ah, children to be put to bed, so I will return later. Till then, the panel should be aired on Saturday on C-SPAN 2. I knew, in lieu of Good Morning America and the Today show, I get to appear on C-Span. Hey, could be worse, at least on C-SPAN, when you say things like "sexism is bullshit," no one edits or censors you. I'll post the time when I know it.

(PS: the Good Morning America show with Kim Gandy and Laurie Pettine will air Friday, we're told. They're on between 8 and 8.30. And Laurie will be putting in a guest appearance here at the playground next week sometime.)

Stories Wanted for MomsRising.com

You heard it here first: Mom's Rising will be the funnest part of May. Promise to supply details very soon, but here's a call for stories for their website. Feel free to pass it around. Trust me: MomsRising.org is a place you'll want to be.


YOUR TRUE-LIFE STORY WANTED: A new online grassroots organization,
MomsRising.org, is working furiously to launch a website with an
ultimate goal of bringing motherhood and family issues to the forefront
of our country's awareness.

MomsRising is looking for 500 word (or so) personal essays for the
MomsRising website launch on April 15th. The Personal Stories feature is
a chance for women to share anecdotes about being a mother. The good,
the bad, the ugly, and especially the funny. We'd like to hear it. Send
your story to Kristin at gateway@halcyon.com by April 1st. Thanks!