Sister Suffragette

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Today is Women’s Equality Day – 89 years and counting since the passage of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, allowing women to vote in the United States. A day to celebrate, and to take stock of what’s left to be done to get us to full equality, in the US and around the world.

Happily, while there’s plenty of work remaining, lots of people are moving on it. And talking about it. This week, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have published a new book (Half the Sky) advocating action in defense of women’s rights on a global scale, and the NY Times Magazine devoted its pages this past week to the cause (Special Issue).

The National Organization for Women launched a new blog today – called “Say It, Sister,” featuring discussion of feminist issues and calls to action.

Of course, saying don’t make it so, not on its own, and the next big steps for women could connect to direct action through legislation – starting with the Healthy Families Act (paid sick days) as well as both the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Fair Pay Act (anti-job-and-pay-discrimination).

Can we make it to 50/50 by 2020, the 100th anniversary of WED and the suffrage amendment? Only if we keep pushing for change – and speaking out. Whether or not we hold up half the sky, we are more than half the population–could get pretty noisy!

From the archive: Never Done and Under Paid

Suffrage History: August 26, 1920, and the Nineteenth Amendment

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Happy Belated Daddy Day (in Advance)

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We hear often about later moms these days, but less about the new later dads who’ve walked hand and hand with those moms into the modern world of birth timing. While it’s always been possible for men to have kids later than women (Sarah was the miracle, not Abraham, when Isaac arrived), the Tony Randalls of this world (new dad at 77) have always been a small contingent.

Like most women, most men tend to have their kids in their 20s and early 30s, though increasing numbers start their families in their late 30s to mid 40s (birthrates to men and women increased in all age ranges between 15 and 45 in the latest data). Though 80% of couples who marry in their 20s have a male partner older than the female partner, and it’s not exactly rare to see couples with men a decade or more older, most couples are still within a few years of one another in age (just 60% of couples who marry in their mid to late 30s and over have an older man – much closer to the 50/50 split that would occur if cultural pressure for an older man didn’t operate at all).

When birth control gave women the capacity to delay kids until they felt ready for them, whenever that might be, men began delaying at a similar rate, for similar reasons. The new later dads of our moment differ from the later dads of yore in that their wives are their peers – not just close in age, but often with similar educations, job histories and earnings (Ben Affleck [36] and Jennifer Garner [37] are one example among millions).

This completely changes the marriage dynamic and has been directly responsible for men’s increased involvement in the lives of their kids. If both parents are educated and earning, the logic of separate spheres evaporates. If they’re both working outside the home, it only makes sense that they’d share the care work as well. What started within individual marriages has quickly become a culture-wide phenomenon, among parents of all ages.

As men have become more involved in the lives of their kids, they’ve come to love being there – even as they understand in new ways the time and effort involved in home work. So dads and moms together are forging the movement to innovate new work rules that will allow both members of a parenting couple to be active participants in their families’ lives while pursuing fulfilling and decently paid careers ( Families and Work Institute ).

While we’re wishing Happy Daddy Day this weekend to all the loving dads, let’s take a minute to appreciate how much more involved in the lives of their kids dads are today than when the first father’s day was celebrated 101 years ago , and how interconnected are the changing dynamics of dads’ and moms’ roles inside and outside the home.

This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post.

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Midlife Mamas: It’s Worth the Wait

Here’s a link to a story by Karen West published in Seattle Woman Magazine in May.

The media stories on later motherhood focus most on infertility — but 1 in every 7 US babies is born to a mom 35+ and the average age at first birth for college grads is 30.

This article breaks the media pattern by looking at both pros and cons of delay –the reporter cites my work but also did a lot of interviewing on her own.

Birth timing, women’s work and the status of women as policy shapers all entwine. There’s no one right way — but we badly need a straightforward discussion of what’s at stake.

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Gay Moms Doing Well, in Spite of Prop 8

Gay Moms Doing Well

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Recently Wanda Sykes (47) and her wife Alex (wed in California, October 2008) joined the growing ranks of gay parents, as these first-time moms celebrated the birth of twins. Sykes has described herself “proud to be a woman, proud to be a black woman and proud to be gay” — and now she can be proud to be a gay black mom as well.

Though today’s California Supreme Court decision qualifies her status as a gay black married mom–by affirming it for those like her who are already married but by denying the same option to others–the likelihood is great that that qualification will be undone in the not-so-distant future. The tide has turned, and the flood of images and stories of loving gay families like Wanda’s have already begun to redefine her status as part of the status quo.

Firm stats on the number of gay families aren’t available – one recent study put the number of gay parents at between 2 and 8 million – but clearly they’re on the rise, with or without the marriage option. For lack of a better category, the CDC counts births to partnered gay women in the births to “single” moms (39.5% of births in 2007).

While gay women have been parents for ages, in the past they were generally the parents of kids from hetero unions entered before the mom came out. An out gay woman didn’t often think of herself as a potential mom until recently, for several reasons:

•because it just didn’t seem like an option physically
•because “mom” often wasn’t the image many gay women had of themselves
•and because the world was not very receptive to gay families.

But that’s changing fast. With the growing openness about gay relationships and the availability of sperm donation and adoption, lesbians can now explore family options as never before. And gay moms are doing fine, at least in part because, like Sykes, many of them start their families later in life. This turns out to be a good thing.

My study of later moms found that delay of kids allows women of all orientations and backgrounds to finish their educations, to mature and settle into relationships more likely to last for the long term, and to establish themselves at work (whether in the limelight or in a cubicle) — leading to higher lifetime salaries and to more flexible schedules (essential to care-giving parents) than are available to women who start earlier, in our very family unfriendly work environments.

Gay women face the same pressures to establish themselves at work before starting a family as other women. As with their hetero peers, starting later means gay women have established themselves as individuals, with the kind of personal authority that allows them to be clear on what they want for themselves and can make them confident advocates for their kids.

In addition, the gay couples I interviewed pointed out that it takes time to figure out who you are and to go through the coming out process, which makes it even more likely that gay moms will come to motherhood later. In the coming years, as society becomes more welcoming to gay people, that process may move faster.

As with hetero women, delay may also lead later gay moms to infertility — especially women who seek to start biological families after 40 (this does not apply to the “other mothers” whose partners do the bearing and who in states that don’t allow gay marriage often become legal parents through adoption). But the steady rise in the birthrate to moms 35 to 45 over the past three decades and more has continued its rise in the latest data, and many women form families later through adoption and egg donation.

Out gay women become moms for many of the same reasons as straight women, but accident is not one of them. These highly intentional moms are changing our understanding of what family can mean, and their successes inspire more change. In turn, the move toward expanding the availability of marriage to gay couples nationally will secure these families a fairer chance at their own pursuit of the happiness our Declaration of Independence calls an inalienable right.

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post.

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Remember Mama?

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This piece appeared first on Huffington Post
Motherhood changed utterly on the day after Mother’s Day 1960. That’s when the FDA approved the birth control pill for general use, and women at long last could become mothers by choice rather than by default. Immediately the birth rate fell, down by 44% within 15 years, where it’s basically stayed ever since.* Voting with their wombs, women had fewer kids, started their families later than their mothers did, or went “childfree.”

Released from the old biological constraints, women flooded universities and the workforce, developing their skills, expanding their incomes, and doubling our national talent pool. Most women still want to be moms — on the new terms that allow them to participate in civic life as well. But while they now hold a majority of middle management jobs, 49 years later women still haven’t done more than trickle up into policy-making roles. Currently women (51% of the population) hold 17% of Congressional seats (a new high). In the business world, where women now hold 50.6% of professional and management positions, they comprise only 15.2% of boards of directors and 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs.

What’s the holdup?

Well, basically, men — particularly of the legislative and business-heading types. While our male leaders and representatives might have facilitated change on behalf of their female constituents and workers, with few exceptions they’ve failed to do so, leaving the old and actively family-unfriendly business model in place. Like John Adams, whose wife Abigail (see above) famously enjoined him to “remember the ladies” as he developed the constitution, most somehow forgot.

Even though women can now time their births, our nation’s lack of a family-support infrastructure holds them back — and mothers especially — with a dirty laundry list of inequities: unfair pay, job ghettos, inadequate childcare, no sick leave, limited career tracks, and more. Increasingly access to birth control and abortion have been limited as well, especially for the poor. We’ve heard this list so often, it’s come to seem insurmountable.

But the stress and struggles women workers and their families undergo while trying to do their jobs are not only a national disgrace — they’re completely unnecessary. Two examples: Our military runs a strong childcare system, with trained, well-paid workers; a similar system could work for the rest of us and create hundreds of thousands of good jobs. Pay equity may frighten employers who’ve depended on cheap female labor, much of it in unexportable care work, but if women were paid more, they’d spend more — revenue neutral for the economy but an important corrective to the current gender power-imbalance. Women with money could contribute to the campaigns of women candidates, and women with good childcare could stay in their jobs and climb the ladders to leadership roles in business. Things would change — for the better.

Circularly, because the support infrastructure hasn’t changed, women haven’t been able to move in sufficient numbers into positions where they could change it.

The rationale we’re given for this mistreatment holds choice against moms: It was their choice to have kids, so any consequences are their problem. But mothers’ work produces not just the happiness of their families; the kids they bear and raise are essential to the operation of commerce and of the nation, which demand citizens, workers and consumers for their continuation — and good ones at that. It’s in our national interest to ensure that all families can do well and women workers do not suffer because they choose to raise the next generation while also contributing to the wider economy and civic life.

Our business model is outdated in not providing circumstances in which women can contribute to the fullest, and earn a fair wage. When women’s insights into how to make our systems better meet our nation’s needs, including but not limited to the needs of women and families, are not taken seriously at the levels where they might be implemented, every one loses.

Part of the problem is systemic. As legal scholar Lani Guinier explains: “Whoever designs the game or defines the rules predicts the outcome…[Then] the winners tell…the losers that it is futile to resist.” This is true for all biases, not just gender. As we’ve seen, the narrative we’re handed justifies the status quo. In this case, as in others, the game was established in a very different landscape, and the rules no longer makes sense for any of us. Men as well as women will be better off when we even up the playing field here.

In fact, things have been improving incrementally, and we may now be approaching the critical mass needed for a game-changing jump. Women have trickled up to the point where even our incredibly low version of a Congressional high has had visible effect. The Speaker of the House is now a woman, and she and her ilk have put pay equity and paid sick leave on the agenda. Not the same as passing, but progress. Big sister is helping mom.

The Obama administration has already signaled its woman-friendliness through a number of bills already passed and through its creation of a White House Council on Women and Girls to scrutinize the gender-effects of legislation. Michelle Obama, self-styled Mom-in-Chief with an impressive employment history and a new full-time job as first lady, exemplifies in her daily life the importance of support for both dimensions of women’s work. She and Vice President Biden’s Middle Class Task Force have committed to advancing America’s work/life balance.

But mama needs more, including the Commission on Women proposed by Congresswoman Jackie Speier, to take a big-picture look at the circumstances that hold women back economically and socially, and to recommend specific actions to rectify those. (Perhaps the threat of a diversity quota on boards of directors could get industry moving.) Here in Houston we recall a conference with a similar charge, held in 1977, which came up with 25 policy recommendations. Those were then overwhelmingly ignored by the same Carter administration that had called the conference. Back then, there were no women in the Senate and few Congresswomen. This time, there’ll be follow-through.

To guarantee it and to promote further positive change, we need ongoing active citizen support for the pro-equality legislation proposed by current office holders, male and female. Successes or even near successes in these battles can invigorate women and increase the stream of female candidates. (Women’s candidacies in the last election have already led 30,000 girls to apply for a training workshop on political leadership for which fewer than 300 applied last year.) Female candidates won’t all agree on everything, but their presence in the race will change the discussion in ways that will make what used to seem impossible suddenly look do-able.

The recent collapse of the finance markets makes this a particularly auspicious time to consider alternative models for doing the nation’s business. The culture of greed has failed. Who better than mothers to turn to for wisdom on how to build a culture of care — one that assumes, for starters, that everyone in the national family deserves respect, fair wages, and a solid education. One that recognizes that we are our common wealth. Time for legislators to remember the ladies, and the mamas, at last. It becomes harder to forget them when they’re there in the same room, voting for themselves. Since nobody else is going to do it for them.

*The annual US birthrate fell from 118 births per 1000 fertile women in 1960 to 65 in 1976 (the low in
that period). It’s bounced around in that vicinity ever since, reaching an all-time low in 2002 at 64.8, and a recent high in 2007 at 69.5.

While the Pill was developed to assist women (at the behest of and with funds supplied by women), it also arrived at a point when the world needed fewer babies. Infant survival rates were up, health gains meant people lived longer, technology innovations meant farms needed fewer workers, and the globe was getting crowded.

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