Behind the Leafy Veil

The big lie

2011-10-09T22:01:00.004-06:00

Republicans have successfully bamboozled the working class into believing that the Republicans represent their best interests. The truth is, Republicans make the working class the slaves of the department of revenue and corporate America. They aren't so much about small government, just small government in certain places.

They talk about tax breaks and they are serious. But those tax breaks benefit businesses, entrepreneurs and wealthier Americans. The working class, particularly income brackets as low as $20k up to $65k, pay the bulk of the taxes. When Bush issued his tax relief checks a few years ago, it was on the shoulders of the working class. They say their taxes go up, not down.

Now Democrats like to tax and spend as we all know. But Republicans do too. They just shift who they tax and where they spend. Don't be fooled by the cliche's. But what surprises me is how readily the working class feeds on the b.s. that the Republicans churn out about who is responsible for their hardships. They create emotionally charged non existent problems to drive poorly informed, over taxed working class adults to the polls to vote for Republicans who don't really represent their best interests.

It's remarkable, and if you like Republicans, even commendable. They are very good at getting out an "issue" around election time to rally the little people around. The Democrats are not very good at creating that kind of solidarity, which is why they are so hit and miss in elections.

On flip side, the Republican style tax breaks create incentives for entrepreneurial expansion, self employment, and innovation. The best place to be working is on a 1099, self employment. Why? The list is long but basically when you work on a w-2 as an employee, your tax breaks are very few. The money you spend related to working is spent after you pay taxes on your earnings. When you are self employed, many of your business expenses are subtracted from your profit before it gets taxed as is also true with corporations. So even though you pay more for social security tax as a self employed, your bottom line is usually better, even in the working class brackets.

The draw back is it can be a lot of work to keep track of your expenses. You have to know what you are doing or be willing to hire someone to help you with your business accounting, or else you can get in trouble with the IRS. When the government starts to close tax breaks for businesses, they do so for the ultra small businesses of the working class. Again, because they are the easiest to mislead at election time.

The solution isn't necessarily to condemn the rich for being rich or go after them with bigger tax bills. The rich are very good at finding places to stash their money to keep it out of the tax mans hands. The solution has more to do with convincing the rich to keep and spend their money at home, which is what Republicans want to do. There isn't a simple answer because the same people who have you working like a slave, paying taxes like a slave and are depriving you of basic assistance when you need it, are also the ones who are most able to create jobs, economic opportunities and wealth that makes everyone better. Such a conundrum.

Democrats are just too all over the map when it comes to pin pointing what their faults are. Some talk like communists about taking wealth away from the wealthy. I think the communists have demonstrated that to be a poor idea. But where they are on the mark is in providing basic assistance and services to the lower incomes and on health care. The republicans have you scared about health care that is if not run by government at least controlled by it. Again, there are profits to be held on to by this way of thinking. The current health care system, the so called free market system is failing and not for the simplistic, racists, classist reasons you have been told. It has to do with greed mostly.

The reality is this. It is cheaper for the government and tax payers and average citizens and the economy to have constant access to affordable or free, high quality health care, than it is to deprive people who can't afford to pay for it until they are so sick they qualify for government assistance. Disabling illness cost astronomically more to treat than routine healthcare.

Now the progress and the retreat

2008-11-20T23:01:00.003-07:00

The election was a euphoric and wondrous event for me and many Americans. It renewed my faith in the democratic process. Sorry for all the disgruntled GOP's out there who are bewildered and angry. The pendulum had to swing back eventually. No one can have their way all the time in a democracy.

But what we have is an imperfect system. The two party system is a failure to us all. It's become a wrestling match between two sides and nothing to stop the dirty tricks. I used to be a Republican way back when. I still embrace much of the fiscially conservative ideals of the party from over 20 years ago. But I do not have any affinity for the social agenda of the Republican party of now. The GOP's solid embrace of the very vocal minority of religious extremists has finally been it's undoing. The emotional tacticts used by the party to instill fear in people are very effective, yet those people go to the polls with their brains off. I think the socially conservative Christian's should have their own party and I think the two parties that currently dominate should share with other parties. I also disagree with the social platform of the GOP because it has no understanding or care for those in need. It is women and children who are thrust into poverty by so many conditions beyond their control. The American dream of working hard and getting ahead is a myth to some. The ways to realize this dream are real and possible, but not very many people know how to do it, and the weakest in our society suffer from that.

But the average American worker is at a disadvantage too. Lot's of things must change or we will lose our status at the top rung of the ladder in world leadership and economic strength. It can't be fixed in 4 years or 8. But it can be fixed. I don't claim to know the answers. One things seems right to me one day, and another the next. Less government here more there. I don't necessarily know the answer. I do know that fear, hate, and oppression are not part of the answer, but they are getting in the way of it.

Thank you John McCain

2008-08-30T11:37:00.004-06:00

The Republicans try to trump the Democrats aces by nominating a woman to be McCains VP running mate. The Rebulicans only seem to show an interest in social change when social change might win them a few disgruntled votes. The problems with Palin aren't just her lack of political experience. Palin fails to represent what disapointed Hillary supporters believe in. Palin does not support women's rights. The only women I see getting excited about her are women who vote republican anyway. I say thank you to John McCain because by nominating Palin, I believe he sealed Obamas successful election to the White House in November. The very few Hillary supporters that pledged their disgruntled support of McCain may not care about a woman's right to choose, or being paid .72 cents for every dollar that a man with the same qualifications makes. But the vast majority of Hillary supporters do care. We supported Hillary because she supports OUR issues, as does Obama. Palin supports conservative Republican issues.

McCain may hope that the working mother that Palin is will appeal to those of us who balance work with families. I see Palin sacrificing the well being of her 5 month old infant for her career. Perhaps governing Alaska allows her to attend to her job as a mother still, but running a presidential election campaign will not. Her 5 month old disabled son will spend many days and nights in the arms of a paid caregiver, not his mother, getting his nourishment from a bottle of formula. Careers are important but motherhood is paramount. It's funny that a socially liberal woman such as myself says this about a conservative woman such as Palin. I'm a big believer in attachment parenting and breastfeeding. I firmly believe that when we have children our duty to them comes first and to ourselves and our careers, second. No woman, no matter how skilled or well staffed, can be both a great political leader and a great mother of an infant. Older children are easier to parent with a working mother, but an infant needs his mothers constant presence. Will Palin take her son in a bouncer seat or a sling to the senate floor? Not likely.

Presidentials

2008-07-17T23:32:00.002-06:00

Write in Hillary. No actually support Obama. It's time to end the senselessness in the White House right now and get the Bush's and his clones out.

Personal responsibility and the Voluntary Fatherhood project

2007-10-22T23:39:00.001-06:00

Whoa. I just visited the website of a group called the "National Center for Men's
Voluntary Fatherhood Project." These guys got me on the first complaint about men being FORCED into parenthood. Forced? Hello? Did you miss sex ed class? Did a woman FORCE you to have sex with her? Not likely. Well then, if you're one of these whiners then here's this. If a man voluntarily has sex with a woman, which is probably 96% of the time men have sex with women, then there's no forcing. The man is consenting, unless he is too young to consent or tied up and forced. News flash boys, sex creates babies!!!! Gasp, can you believe it?

Just because you are a sexually mature male in the post sexual revolution - legal birth control age, does not alter what mother nature intended. In spite of birth control and abortion, no man or woman is entitled to free sex without the risk of mother nature succeeding. Reproducing is the only reason sex was granted to humanity. The pleasure of sex is nature's way of fooling you into doing it many times to ensure the survival of the species. No matter what technology we apply to ourselves today, the main purpose of sex remains the same.

The sense of entitlement men have is predominant in the singles dating scenes and among the dead beat dads who think they were wronged when some women got pregnant and had the audacity to inconvenience him by giving birth. Get this through you heads numb skulls, the existence of abortion doesn't entitle a man to being freed by one when birth control fails. Another point, In spite of it now being the 21st century and we're so advanced, a double standard about birth control still remains predominant. Men still expect women to provide the birth control and think it's their right to accuse them of failing to use it, when it fails. These same men are rarely willing to use the birth control available to them, and almost never willing to fore goe sexual intercourse to avoid a pregnancy. Condoms work very well and yet men make excuses for not using them. If you're a man and making excuses for not using condoms, then you either need to quit having sex with women, or get ready to be a dad. If you can't take a little responsibilty for your penis, then you have no right to complain about the responsibility that you get hit with later. A few boxes of condoms cost a lot less than raising a child, and there's such a vast variety of them available, there's something for every man.

Birth control and abortion have been embraced by men as license to be the complete selfish sex driven dogs they always wanted to be but social restraints wouldn't allow. But when reality checks in, and men find out that 1)birth control fails 2) abortion isn't guaranteed they instead run away, accuse the woman of trapping them, expect a woman to abort, and play the victim when she doesn't. Men think they can lie to woman about loving her so she'll have sex with him, regularly. Men lie about wanting children with a woman so that she'll have sex with him willingly. But then when the woman gets pregnant, whether by oops or by her believing his b.s. or by mother nature's call to motherhood being stronger in her, then men think they are the ones who are betrayed. While making babies these men are being big babies.

Society as a whole is falling to pieces because of this kind of crap. The sexual revolution has betrayed us all. Now our children are growing up without fathers because the father's are too irresponsible and childish to stick around for them. The hordes of determined single men running around with women making babies complain that women are trapping them. They give no real emotional substance to relationships yet expect women to be some fairytale that charms them into love. In the old days, men knew that survival was vested in him having a family and caring for that family. Just because someone allowed sex to be fun, doesn't mean it is no longer about creating children who need to be cared for.

Sex is fun, but relationships and families are still the substance of a healthy society. Those wandering dogs that have grown into out of control packs, abandoning the women they impregnate and the children they create, are the down fall of our society, the reasons children are struggling to find what is normal and the reasons why relationships are so hard to be satisfying. We now live in a culture of entitlement that imposes that sense of entitlement in areas that it has no business being. A sense of entitlement to free unrestricted sex without consequences is based in unhealthy fantasies. It's not a reality. And the sense of entitlement seems to carry over into every aspect of dating and relationships. These same men seem to think that women are just prostitutes to satisfy their every whim, giving nothing of emotional substance in return. The lies necessary to make these arrangements happen in the first place are a clear indication that the man dispensing them is the very kind of man who will complain and call himself victim when he has a child to care for.

No one forced the man to have sex. Therefore he has no claim to being forced into parenthood. So shut up, grow up and be a man you whiners! By being a man I mean be decent to the mother of your child and be a father to them.

Lesbian mothers and breast feeding

2007-09-24T11:59:00.000-06:00

Do many lesbian biological mother's breastfeed their babies? Recently, I was at a brunch of lesbian/bisexual single moms and I was rather embarrassed at the shocked look on the women's faces when I nursed my daughter. I only know of a limited few lesbians that ever breastfed their babies and only one who is, like me, doing extended nursing (nursing beyond 12 months). I admit while I'm in touch with the lesbian community, I don't spend enough time immersed in it to appreciate the norms on issues like this. Many of the moms were adoptive moms, which presents a challenge to breastfeeding. One must induce milk with medically prescribed hormones and a rigorous routine of pumping to get a partial supply when not giving birth. Understandable why some adopting moms choose not to undergo that course.

Breastfeeding beyond a year around other people is a challenge of it's own. I guess I didn't expect negativity from a group of women who daily have to defend their rights to be parents. Personally, I think homosexuality is as natural as breathing, no matter what degree it expresses its self in a person. To me, it is as natural to love a woman as a man. So I don't get it. Lesbians are women, just like me. Many lesbians are mothers, just like me. So why is it weird that I breast fed my child in front of them?

Breasts are nice to look at when there's not a ravenous, wiggly child attached to them. The mountains are nice to look at when there's not a ski lift attached to them as well. It certainly isn't a sexual feeling since breast feeding frequently hurts, especially when nursing a child with teeth who likes to bite, and pinch with fingers.

Is it just because Americans have such problems with breastfeeding? Or is it because lesbians seem to have more negative feelings about the female body and it's biological functions? It's bad enough to have to endure the negativity and rejection of society telling you that you're unnatural. So why then make it harder by seeing your body as unnatural?

Integrity like trees

2007-07-24T12:26:00.000-06:00

Personal integrity though talked about, is under appreciated until the chips are down. The interesting thing about personal integrity is that it grows with a persons creations. If you run a company, the people you hire and maintain in your company, in some way reflect your own personal integrity. If yours is weak, then often, those that you attract to your business will also be weak. Those with strong integrity who come to work for you, will not stay long. They will go find a place to work where stronger values are appreciated and practiced. If yours is strong, you will systematically drive away employees with weak integrity and hang on to the ones who's integrity reflects yours.

I work in a business where personal integrity is essential. We care for disabled people and ensure the quality of their lives. The agency I work for is meticulous to the point of driving you mad. But they put the quality of care of the people in our service as well as the accountability for that care in such great importance, that mistakes are few, and dealt with swiftly. Sometimes the agency has to contract the services of other agencies to help with services. That's where the disparity really shows. Right now one of my clients gets the majority of his care from the high integrity agency. But his day program services are with a different agency that has the opposite practice of integrity. It's absolutely appalling how the incompetence and attempts to cover for it are evident at every level of the organization. furthermore, they constantly try to cover for it by shifting blame. But they lose in the blame shifting because the meticulous agency is well, meticulous about record keeping. So any accusations are dispelled quickly based on documentation of care given, problems addressed and so on. So it's like starting a fight with someone bigger than you and then realizing your outmatched and ducking out, only to try again another day in the same manner. What is surprising is the agency with the problems doesn't get it. No one there takes it upon the company to improve themselves, because these problems go up to the highest levels. I worked for this company for a short time and left because of the ways they cheat both the people they serve and the people they employ. I work for the company with integrity now, and in spite of the headaches of all their requirements, it's so worth it to be doing the right thing and have proof of it.

Integrity is like a tree. If the trunk is strong, the whole tree will thrive, producing strong, healthy branches. The weak tree will produce weak branches and not thrive.

Why corporate America sucks for families

2007-04-06T23:44:00.000-06:00

This article sums up much of my concerns about the corporate American machine. The warm fuzzy nonsense you read in popular publications does not prepare women before entering the workforce or before becoming a parent while in the workforce for the realities of how anti-family it is. I hope by giving credit to the article's source that I'm not creating any problems posting it here in full. This is an important issue and needs to be understood by the masses.

This article was recently published in the Columbia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Graff.asp

The Opt-Out Myth

By E.J. Graff

On October 26, 2003, The New York Times Magazine jump-started a century-long debate about women who work. On the cover it featured “The Opt Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin’s semipersonal essay, with this banner: "Why don’t more women get to the top? They choose not to." Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full-time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success.

But Belkin’s “revolution”—the idea that well-educated women are fleeing their careers and choosing instead to stay home with their babies—has been touted many times before. As Joan C. Williams notes in her meticulously researched report, “ ‘Opt Out’ or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict,” released in October 2006 by the University of California Hastings Center for WorkLife Law, where she is the director, The New York Times alone has highlighted this “trend” repeatedly over the last fifty years: in 1953 ("Case History of an Ex-Working Mother"), 1961 ("Career Women Discover Satisfactions in the Home"), 1980 ("Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family Over Career"), 1998 ("The Stay-At-Home Mother"), and 2005 ("Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood").

And yet during the same years, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Economists agree that the increase in what they dryly call “women’s participation in the waged workforce” has been critical to American prosperity, demonstrably pushing up our gdp. The vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income—especially now, when upwards of 70 percent of American families with children have all adults in the work force, when *51 percent of American women live without a husband, and when many women can expect to live into their eighties and beyond.

The moms-go-home story keeps coming back, in part, because it’s based on some kernels of truth. Women do feel forced to choose between work and family. Women do face a sharp conflict between cultural expectations and economic realities. The workplace is still demonstrably more hostile to mothers than to fathers. Faced with the “choice” of feeling that they’ve failed to be either good mothers or good workers, many women wish they could—or worry that they should—abandon the struggle and stay home with the kids.

The problem is that the moms-go-home storyline presents all those issues as personal rather than public—and does so in misleading ways. The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upper-echelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences and the resulting social policy needs from view.

Here’s why that matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.

So how can this story be killed off, once and for all? Joan Williams attempts to chloroform the moms-go-home storyline with facts. “Opt Out or Pushed Out?” should be on every news, business, and feature editor’s desk. It analyzes 119 representative newspaper articles, published between 1980 and 2006, that use the opt-out storyline to discuss women leaving the workplace. While business sections regularly offer more informed coverage of workplace issues, the “opt out” trend stories get more prominent placement, becoming “the chain reaction story that flashes from the Times to the columnists to the evening news to the cable shows,” says Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor and the author of Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women (April 2007).

There are a number of problems with the moms-go-home storyline. First, such articles focus excessively on a tiny proportion of American women—white, highly educated, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs. Just 8 percent of American working women fit this demographic, writes Williams. The percentage is smaller still if you’re dealing only with white women who graduated from the Ivies and are married to high-earning men, as Belkin’s article does. Furthermore, only 4 percent of women in their mid- to late thirties with children have advanced degrees and are in a privileged income bracket like that of Belkin’s fellow Princeton grads, according to Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That group is far more likely than average women to be married when they give birth (91 percent, as opposed to 73 percent of all women), and thus to have a second income on which to survive. But because journalists and editors increasingly come from and socialize in this class, their anecdotes loom large in our personal rearview mirrors—and in our most influential publications. Such women are chastised for working by Caitlin Flanagan (a woman rich enough to stay home and have a nanny!) in The Atlantic, and for lacking ambition by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect. But such “my-friends-and-me” coverage is an irresponsible approach to major issues being wrestled with by every American family and employer.

The stories are misleading in a second important way. Williams’s report points out that “opt-out stories invariably focus on women in one particular situation: after they have ‘opted out’ but before any of them divorce.” The women in those articles often say their skills can be taken right back onto the job. It’s a sweetly optimistic notion, but studies show that, on average, professional women who come back after time away—or even after working part-time, since U.S. women working part-time earn 21 percent less per hour worked than those who work full-time—take a hefty and sustained pay cut, and a severe cut in responsibility level. Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce, according to the latest census figures. While numbers are lower for marriages in the professional class, divorce remains a real possibility. Williams points to Terry Martin Hekker, one of the ur opt-out mothers, who in 1977 published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled," The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in ‘An Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing .’ In 2006, Hekker wrote—again in the Times, but demoted to the Sunday Style section—about having been divorced and financially abandoned: “He got to take his girlfriend to Cancun, while I got to sell my engagement ring to pay the roofer.”

In other words, interview these opt-out women fifteen years later—or forty years later, when they’re trying to live on skimpy retirement incomes—and you might hear a more jaundiced view of their “choices.”

The opt-out stories have a more subtle, but equally serious, flaw: their premise is entirely ahistorical. Their opening lines often suggest that a generation of women is flouting feminist expectations and heading back home. At the simplest factual level, that’s false. Census numbers show no increase in mothers exiting the work force, and according to Heather Boushey, the maternity leaves women do take have gotten shorter. Furthermore, college-educated women are having their children later, in their thirties—after they’ve established themselves on the job, rather than before. Those maternity leaves thus come in mid-career, rather than pre-career. Calling that “opting out” is misleading. As Alice Kessler-Harris, a labor historian at Columbia University, put it, “I define that as redistributing household labor to adequately take care of one’s family.” She adds that even while at home, most married women keep bringing in family income, as women traditionally have. Today, women with children are selling real estate, answering phone banks, or doing office work at night when the kids are in bed. Early in the twentieth century, they might have done piecework, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. Centuries earlier, they would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers).

Which brings us to an even deeper historical flaw: editors and reporters forget that Belkin’s generation isn’t post-feminism; it’s mid-feminism. Women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. Earlier generations of college-educated women picked either work or family, work after family, or family after work; those who graduated in the 1980s and 1990s—Belkin’s cohort—are the first to expect to do both at the same time. And so these women are shocked to discover that, although 1970s feminists knocked down the barrier to entering the professions in large numbers, the workplace still isn’t fixed. They are standing on today’s feminist frontier: the bias against mothers that remains embedded on the job, in the culture, and at home.

Given that reality, here’s the biggest problem with the moms-go-home storyline: it begins and ends with women saying they are choosing to go home, and ignores the contradictory data sandwiched in between.

Williams establishes that “choice” is emphasized in eighty-eight of the 119 articles she surveyed. But keep reading. Soon you find that staying home wasn’t these women’s first choice, or even their second. Rather, every other door slammed. For instance, Belkin’s prime example of someone who “chose” to stay home, Katherine Brokaw, was a high-flying lawyer until she had a child. Soon after her maternity leave, she exhausted herself working around the clock to prepare for a trial—a trial that, at the last minute, was canceled so the judge could go fishing. After her firm refused even to consider giving her “part-time” hours—forty hours now being considered part-time for high-end lawyers—she “chose” to quit.

More than a third of the articles in Williams’s report cite “workplace inflexibility” as a reason mothers leave their jobs. Nearly half mention how lonely and depressed those women get when they’ve been downgraded to full-time nannies. Never do such articles cite decades of social science research showing that women are happier when occupying several roles; that homemakers’ well-being suffers compared to that of working women; or that young adults who grew up in dual-earner families would choose the same family model for their own kids. Rarely do such articles ask how husband and wife negotiated which one of them would sacrifice a career. Only by ignoring both the women’s own stories and the larger context can the moms-go-home articles keep chirping on about choice and about how such women now have “the best job in the world.”

Underlying all this is a genuinely new trend that the moms-go-home stories never mention: the all-or-nothing workplace. At every income level, Americans work longer hours today than fifty years ago. Mandatory overtime for blue- and pink-collar workers, and eighty-hour expectations for full-time professional workers, deprive everyone of a reasonable family life. Blue-collar and low-wage families increasingly work “tag-team” schedules so that someone’s always home with the kids. In surveys done by the Boston College Sloan Work and Families Research Network and by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, among others, women and men increasingly say that they’d like to have more time with their families, and would give up money and advancement to do it—if doing so didn’t mean sacrificing their careers entirely. Men, however, must face fierce cultural headwinds to choose such a path, while women are pushed in that direction at every turn.

Finally, the opt-out articles never acknowledge the widespread hostility toward working mothers. Researching the book I wrote for Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—and What to Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her highly remunerative specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: Do you feel stupider? Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down. Or consider the experience of Dr. Diane Fingold, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, where she won the 2002 Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the school’s highest teaching award. Her credentials are outstanding, yet when she asked to work three-and-a-half fewer hours a week so that she could manage her family demands—“just a little flexibility for a short period in my life!”—her practice refused. She was enraged. “I thought hard about leaving medicine altogether,” she said. Her husband is a successful venture capitalist whose “annual Christmas bonus is what I make in a year!”

Had Fingold left, in other words, she would have fit neatly with Belkin’s hyperachievers. But she loves practicing and teaching medicine, and realized she couldn’t reenter at the same level if she walked away entirely. So she moved to another practice that was willing to accommodate her part-time schedule until, in a few years, she can return to full-time. Had she chosen the Belkin course, would she have opted out—or been pushed out?

Experiences like Fingold’s bear out what social scientists are finding: strong bias against mothers, especially white mothers, who work. (Recent research shows bias against African American mothers of any class who don’t work, a subject that deserves an article of its own.) Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor, described in an article in the March 2007 American Journal of Sociology. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously described as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three.

Here’s what feminism hasn’t yet changed: the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and being a worker requires a similar commitment, then the two roles are mutually exclusive. A lawyer might be able to juggle the demands of many complex cases in various stages of research and negotiation, or a grocery manager might be able to juggle dozens of delivery deadlines and worker schedules—but should she have even a fleeting thought about a pediatrics appointment, she’s treated as if her on-the-job reliability will evaporate. No one can escape that cultural idea, reinforced as it is by old sitcoms, movies, jokes—and by the moms-go-home storyline.

Still, if they were pushed out, why would smart, professional women insist that they chose to stay home? Because that’s the most emotionally healthy course: wanting what you’ve got. “That’s really one of the agreed-upon principles of human nature. People want their attitudes and behavior to be in sync,” said Amy Cuddy, an assistant professor in the management and organizations department at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. “People who’ve left promising careers to stay home with their kids aren’t going to say, ‘I was forced out. I really want to be there.’ It gives people a sense of control that they may not actually have.”

So yes, maybe some women “chose” to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full time.

By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what Williams calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Jody Heymann, who teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and McGill University, the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?

The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”

* After this New York Times article was published, this statistic came under fire, since it includes "women" 15 and up.

E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism

Players, Hornivores, Dogs

2007-03-24T22:10:00.000-06:00

I'm disgusted by the latest single men complaint about single mothers. If they don't like them, then they should quit making them. The only woman in the world that ever existed to attend to a man's needs was his mother, before he became a man. After that, men need to quit expecting women to exist just to serve them. The men who have the gall to complain about the singles market being laden with single mothers, are the same ones that woo a woman for sex, feed her lies about love and relationships, have unprotected or under protected sex, and then expect her to abort the baby that comes from this. When that doesn't happen, they bail and play the victims card.

Wake up jerk offs! There's a lot of parents in this world who can back up the latest admission of the pharmaceutical companies that even the best birth control is only effective 85% of the time. That's without the various problems that can occur with birth control. 85% means children are conceived whether or not you did your best to protect yourself. Which means that every time you have sex, you either need to double up on protection, or accept the possible and likely fact that you may become a parent. It's heinously selfish for any man to assume that any woman he has sex with is going to abort an inconvenient accident. Lucky for the man if she does but tough if she doesn't.

Men have control, just not where they want it. If you don't want children at all ever, then get a vasectomy! There, you just took care of your birth control issues! Or hey, here's a thought, maybe you should stop screwing around like the dog you are! Or compromise and assume that no matter what method of birth control she uses, you must back it up with a condom! If not, deal with the consequences and quit your pathetic whining!

Men who blame women for "trapping" them (especially in your 30's and 40's, how pathetic) or refusing to abort, when the man was being a player are the bane of our society. Yes, you Mr. Hornivore Player are causing the decay of all that is decent and good in society!

Wonder Woman Doesn't Live Here Any More

2007-03-24T21:53:00.000-06:00

This is something I wrote about a month ago, but it fits in with what I'm doing here.

Wonder Woman Doesn't Live Here Anymore

I'm a single parent, not because I wanted to be but because I ended up that way. I'm sure I can find many instances where I contributed to this situation. The first time I was a single parent, I ran away from a dangerous person. I embraced it both out of necessity and outrage. I believed I could do it all. The alternative was worse, but perhaps that is why it makes me even angrier the second time around. I know how hard it is. Now I'm a single parent because the man I loved and thought I could count on left me after the baby came. He was and still is full of promising words about being a good father to his child, but that rarely materializes. I'm lately left caring for a fussy baby who has been sick and teething and no longer goes to sleep with any kind of ease. It takes more than one hour, often more than two hours to get her to bed. Meanwhile, all my other responsibilities and family just wait for me to get back to them. On the rare occasion he is here to help, and then we can at least take turns soothing the baby to sleep. Then while one is caring for the baby, the other can care for the other household responsibilities, like feeding the rest of the family.

It's no longer about whether we see eye to eye on how to conduct ourselves with each other. It's about a whole new person who needs us more than we need our silly notions of love and romance. The reality check when it comes to children, is love and satisfying relationships don't deserve the priority our culture has given them. The care of children is critical and essential and yet we place our own needs for validation, approval, romance and excitement and this ever elusive notion of happiness wrapped in a package before our children. Or some of us do. Most parents who are living with and taking care of their children either know or are learning the importance of putting your child’s needs first, which are greater.

No one should stay in a dangerous relationship where there's abuse, recklessness, substance abuse and other situations unacceptable for anyone to live in. But America needs to get real on its ideas of love and romance. If you have children or bring children into a relationship, you have created the greatest responsibility of your life. No divorce court or child custody/visitation arrangement ever really puts the needs of the children first. It puts the needs of the parents to be away from each other or be away from the children first. Period. I know I sound like Dr. Laura and I don't like her, but living the life I live has taught me one thing, it's this. Children need intact families with more than one parent.

I'm a great mom and I make decent money. I own my own house and business. I raise two children mostly by myself. I benefit from the influence of my parents (married and in love for over 40 years, applause for them!)But I'm not wonder woman. I get very little sleep. I have very little in my retirement account, I have very little saved. I do not have the reserves to deal with an emergency or send my kids to college. I have an education. I have a thousand times, if not a million times more than most single mothers.

If you want your kids to have the best, then you have to zip up your pants, quit flirting with the girl or guy you just met, get over the fact that you find your girlfriend/boyfriend wife/husbands left eyelash irritating or that they like to read or don't like to read or watch too much football. Give up your fantasy about having a super thin woman/ six pack abs guy or someone who reads your mind and understands and appreciates your every nuance. That stuff doesn't matter in comparison to your children's emotional well being and stability. Your children need the stability that both parents working as an emotional support and financial support team, not two separate entities.

You're young even if you're starting at 40, your children will grow fast. Wait until they are in double digit years before you bail. And even then only bail a few blocks away so you can still be there for them. Then you have the rest of your life to chase your fantasies and self interests without taking away the critical foundations of your child's life.

In the meantime, there's a child who has no choice in their coming into the world, who needs love, support, patience and nurturing. This child needs the unconditional love and exhausting support of both parents. But when the man bails, especially before the child is even born or shortly after, it's mom who gets to go to work frazzled and under slept and get in trouble for doing a crappy job, because she was the only one available to soothe a fussy baby all night, night after night without end. Unless a man has actually cared for a child himself, he just doesn't get how much work it is and how many things must be ignored in order to care for the baby. For example, I still haven't had a shower today. I'll try again tomorrow. Sure, I could be taking one right now instead of writing this blog, but I just got done doing dishes, so there's no hot water. The blog is warmed by my anger.

I'm not even really interested in dating. I don't have time or energy to start with. I'm not in a place where I'm remotely willing to do more than have a conversation online or a cup of coffee, if I could get away. But here I am, contemplating the possibility that someday I'll actually want to try to meet someone compatible. I don't want to find someone to be a dad to my children. That is roulette in and of itself. I'm done having children, at least my doctor promised me that after the surgery. I just hope that some day, I will be able to have companionship. But that isn't today. Like I said, Wonder Woman doesn't live here anymore.

The Green Goddess' first post

2007-03-24T21:14:00.000-06:00

I'm starting by apologizing in advance for all the offense I may incur in the future. I plan to vent some hefty thoughts, pains, and more here. I'm a writer, and earthy gardener and a mom. I have a lot to say. But getting it worked out requires I unjumble the thoughts. Blogging is public journaling which is risky. But somehow, being heard, no matter how hormonally induced of a mood, rational or not, seems essential.

Potential topics may contain but are not limited to: politics, women's issues, family, children, breast feeding, babies, pregnancy, relationships, sex, corporate work, government, gardening, organics, ecology, compost, cloth diapering, birth control, men and the crappy things they do...