When I first read over at Working Dad that NOW was suing under Title IX to get access for women in new federally-funded fatherhood initiatives, I had the same reaction as Paul:

Is this a fight NOW really needs to pick As dads struggle to define their role in the modern family, they need a little help, particularly those battling addiction, struggling with unemployment and poverty.

But when I popped over to the NOW site, I got a different perspective on the issue. These fatherhood programs, in addition to teaching relationship skills, aggression management, addiction recovery, parenting techniques, etc. to fathers, also focus heavily on job training.  According to the NOW site, that’s the piece that rankles.  And it should.  Teaching fatherhood skills to men only makes sense.  But job training is not gender-specific (unless they’re training to be female impersonators), and shouldn’t be offered to one sex only. According to NOW:

Our organizations strongly support appropriate job training programs but only those that are non-discriminatory and serve both men and women. Both in the White and in the African American communities, women earn much less than men, are much more often poor, and are much more likely to be custodial single parents. Excluding women from these training programs does families a tremendous disservice.

Furthermore, while the Health and Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance assured NOW that the job training programs would be open to men and women, 34 of the 100 programs are only providing job training to men. Oddly, one program in Connecticut is recruiting 200 couples for its classes - but providing job training to the men only.

Now that smacks of an agenda that has no place in a federally-funded program.

And there may be some cronyism in the mix.  One of the organizations that received $5 million in funding - the National Fatherhood Initiative - was formerly directed by Wade Horn, who, until a few days ago, headed up the HHS.  (Horn, according to NOW, has argued in the past that social services be made available to single-parent families only after families headed by married couples have been served, as a measure to promote marriage.)

One HHS administrator weighed in:

“If a woman says she wants to apply and it’s not happening, we want to know about it,” said Tara Wall, at the Administration for Children and Families, the HHS agency that oversees the grants. “Yes, fathers are the target group, but at the same time allowing equal access is required.”

According to NOW, that access to job training isn’t happening.

One of the grants NOW objects to is a five-year, $2 million-a-year award to the D.C. Department of Human Services. It expects to help as many as 2,500 low-income fathers with parenting skills, substance-abuse prevention and treatment, job training and educational development, said Debra Daniels, a D.C. spokeswoman.

“It’s to stabilize families, to improve the lives of children,” Daniels said. Asked if women are eligible, she said, “No, because this is the D.C. Fatherhood Initiative program.”

I’m all for programs that invite men to learn skills that may help them become more capable fathers.  But I’m with NOW. You can’t have federally-funded job training programs that are open to men only.  And nudging the idea that dad should be the breadwinner, as the Connecticut program seems to be trying to do, is not the government’s job.

Posted by MommaSteph.

The latest salvo in the ongoing “Mommy Wars” is coming from author Leslie Bennetts, who argues in her book The Feminine Mistake that when a woman takes a break from her career to care for young children, she’s engaging in a dangerous risk because she puts herself in the position of financial dependence on her husband. Moreover, she’s at risk of being unemployable if and when she returns to work because, apparently, employers resist hiring women who put themselves on the “mommy track.” Ms. Bennetts recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show discussing her findings.

While I found her logic to be solid, and her research to be indicative of what is readily seen in today’s workforce (but not often acknowledged), I was still troubled by her whole line of inquiry.

I’m certainly glad that it is starting a conversation about what women, and even further, what parents need from the working world. What bugs me about the line of thinking presented in the Today Show piece, though, is that it closes down discussion about creating a pro-balance, pro-family, pro-human lifestyle in the American workplace. The truth is, there is validity to what she is saying about “offramping” from the corporate ladder—spending time away from work can damage a woman’s ability to climb and earn later in life, not to mention to achieve the leadership positions that will allow her to influence the issues women care about most.

To me, this indicates that the trajectory or “work life span” in America is geared towards a man’s life. Sure, we have won the fight to work side-by-side with men, but the actual make-up of work—i.e., fight though your twenties to climb, establish your management and leadership skills in your thirties, take on more top-line responsibility in your forties, coast into retirement—is geared toward the biology of men. Pregnancy and childrearing are not even factors in this schedule. This is not good for men or women in a pro-balance or pro-family lifestyle, because it says that hopping off the ladder in your twenties or thirties, for whatever reason (but particularly true for children), will make you suffer in your career. It hurts women, clearly, but it hurts men, too, who don’t want to live as their fathers did, with their number one “family” priority being breadwinning.

Why on earth would women want to join this old mentality, where providing financially is the number one way we show love and support to our kids? If it worked so well for men, why are modern men taking such delight in more actively raising their kids� Of course, money is always important, but more important than everything?

Speaking as someone at home now who truly misses work outside the home, I feel stuck. Affording full-time daycare is really out of the question, and honestly, I don’t want to be away from my daughter all day. Where are my options? Furthermore, where are the options for my husband� What would be so wrong about having a different kind of work schedule? A BALANCE-CENTRIC schedule?

I think we need to work to reengineer our lifestyles so that the work week isn’t so long. So that there is ample opportunity to still have intellectual and financial fulfillment working part-time or in flexible situations. So that child care options are fluid and possible for all types of families.

Simply instructing women that their career might suffer if they stay home is not enough. It negates all of the value of that time spent at home, and doesn’t provide any solution that will work for whole families. We need revolution for men and women. We need a healthier, more active, more relaxed, more family-oriented, more HAPPY society. Continuing to spin on the hundreds-year old hamster wheel is not making us better OR more productive, in my opinion.

Posted by korilu.

In 1873, a prominent Harvard medical professor advised�that women who pursued higher education diverted blood from their uteruses to their brains, rendering them irritable and infertile. In 1838, a prominent marriage�adviser labeled intellectual women “mental hermaphrodites “, less capable of marriage and motherhood than “true” women.� Relics of centuries past? Nope. Only last August a Forbes.com editor created a splash warning his male readers that “career women” are not good wife and marriage marriage material, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd illustrated what she perceived as the modern woman’s dilemma - it’s hard for a girl to “marry up” when she’s very successful herself and when men are naturally inclined to “marry down”.

Is any of this true? Are well-educated, successful women winding up bitter, barren, and alone? Stephanie Coontz looked at the data for a piece in the Boston Globe magazine and she has the answer: Heck, no.

“Surveys from the 1890s to the present reveal that college-educated women have always been at least as satisfied with their emotional and sexual lives as their less-educated counterparts.”

It is true that in the past women often did have to choose between marriage and a career, largely because until the 1980s or so, men were inclined to seek out women who were good first and foremost cooks and housekeepers; “mate preference” surveys taken from the late 1930s on demonstrate that men of the past gave little weight to a woman’s intelligence or education level when choosing a bride. By 1985, intelligence had moved way up in importance, outranking even good looks, while cooking and homemaking abilities had dropped considerably. (This is how I wound up getting hitched, I suppose!)

Another reason well-educated women of the past were more likely to remain single is the tendency to put off marriage until certain education and career goals were met. This is still true today, but the difference is the average age that women marry has risen. While in the past a 25-year-old single woman might be written off as “Christmas cake” (not likely to be “sold” after the 25th), these days getting married for the first time in one’s 30s is not only acceptable, but common.

So what has this done to marriage rates for well-educated career women?

In fact, educated women nationwide now have a better chance of marrying, especially at an older age, than other women. In a historic reversal of past trends…college graduates and high-earning women are now more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings, although they are older when they do so.

College-educated couples also have lower divorce rates than the rest of the population, and better sex lives. Even if the wife�out-earns the husband. And perhaps not coincidentally, well-educated men are apparently more likely to take on an equitable share of housework. (Ah, the ultimate aphrodisiac.)

So, get that degree, pursue that partnership. Or don’t, as you like. But don’t cheat yourself on education or career aspirations because of the scare mongers who warn you that you’ll never get married if you aim too high.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Yessss….Warner Brothers entertainment is in the process of developing a Wonder Woman script for a move on the big screen.  Sure, superhero, comic book movies have enjoyed varied level of success, but who doesn’t want to see a spandex heroin save the world?  So long as she doesn’t come equipped with some sort of automatic fire wearpon, I’m exctied about the prospect of a female superhero for once.

Posted by Dorian.

The Future of Maternity Wear?  What’s hot among preggos in Chinese cities? How about maternity wear that claims to protect the developing baby from radiation encountered in daily life, from computers, TVs and the like? “Nowadays, we are exposed to so much radiation in offices and we need to take precautionary measures. I have bought three maternity garments that can protect me from radiation. Although they are by no means cheap, I feel it is still worth it,” said Ms. Gao, a young woman who has been in a family way for only two months. Do they work? No one can say.

I, Robot:  Hakuo Yanagisawa, Japan’s health minister, managed to alienate at least half of his audience in a recent speech on his country’s declining birth rate:  “The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed,” Mr Yanagisawa, 71, said. “Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can do is ask them to do their best per head … although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”   Not appropriate?  Ya think?

As Congresswoman Nancy Peolsi ascended to Speakership, the first woman to do so in history, she was flanked by children and grandchildren, her own and her colleagues’, who witnessed the historic event. 

Over at The American Prospect, Dana Goldstein objects:

Here was the highest-ranked woman ever to achieve elected office in the United States, proudly speaking about breaking the “marble ceiling” of the U.S. Capitol, but flooding the dais with children and bragging about her journey from “kitchen to Congress,” smiling beatifically as she cradled her newborn grandson.

According to Ms. Goldstein, this mixed image - powerful woman/nurturing mother - has some serious potential fallout.  It reinforces the “negative” stereotype of the Democrats as the “Mommy party” and strengthens the public’s misgivings about women in positions of power.  In terms of a broader feminist agenda, Ms. Goldstein argues that historically women have made gains through separating themselves from “constricting domestic ideology” rather than internalizing it.

Well, nothing succeeds like success, and Ms. Pelosi seems to be doing all right for herself without deep sixing her identity as a mother (for years a stay-at-home one) and grandmother.  The fact that she is wealthy and came from a politically-connected family does not, as Ms. Goldstein implies, automatically negate the idea that she brings some - and perhaps much - of what motherhood has taught her to her work in Congress.  

There’s nothing unfeminist, after all, about being a mother.  The tendency of feminism in this country to downplay the significance of having and raising children has frankly not served us well and left us with the crappiest maternity leave in the industrialized world.

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Just some food for thought…Healthbolt has a brief pictoral on the history of the Western ideal of feminine beauty.  It’s pretty thin (pun intended), but the fleshy women are a sight for modern eyes. 

(Via Feministing.)

Posted by MommaSteph.

Feeling anxious?  Give yourself a hand.  Your husband’s, to be precise.

A University of Virginia neuroscientist gathered sixteen happily married couples.  The women were subjected to the threat of a mild electric shock while holding hands with their husbands or with male strangers, or with no hand to hold.  While the threatening and hand-holding (or not) were taking place, the women’s brains were scanned. 

The results?  There was a large decrease in brain response to threat when the women held hands with their husbands.  The better the quality of the marriage, the more helpful hand-holding was for reducing anxiety.  The brains also registered less of a reaction, though not as dramatic, when the women held strangers’ hands. 

Interesting study, but…there’s something creepy about a male scientist threatening women with shock and reading the effects of male support on their brains.  Or am I just hypersensitive?

You can read an abstract of the study here.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Those of us of advanced maternal age have it pounded into our heads:  We’re taking a risk by “waiting so long” to have babies, or by adding to our families as our bodies are gearing up for menopause.  Older moms are more susceptible to miscarriage, premature birth, or other complications such as pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes.  And we all know about Down syndrome:  at age 30, a woman has around a 1 in 885 chance of having a Downs baby; by age 40, it’s 1 in 109.

But did you know that when it comes to genetic mutations that can lead to disease, most come to us by way of the sperm, and not the egg?  And that older dads are a critical factor? 

Why should this be when men are constantly making fresh sperm, unlike females who are born with all of the eggs they’ll ever have?  Well, “fresh” is a relative term.  Men make a hundred million sperm every day through cell division.  The more times a cell divides, the more opportunities there are for small errors to occur.  These errors can be benign - or they can lead to congenital defects.

For example, a study by British and Swedish researchers concludes that for each decade a man ages, he increases by 50% the risk of having a baby who will develop schizophrenia.  (However, the actual risk is still quite small, one of the researchers on the team notes.  Then again, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, in the U.S., schizophrenia affects around 1% of the over-18 population - that sounds pretty high to me!)  Another study estimated that one in four cases of schizophrenia may be caused by older fathers.

Dads in their 40s reportedly are five times as likely to have a child with autism as dads under 30.  Other conditions linked to older fathers include achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, and Apert syndrome, a condition involving a malformed skull and webbed hands and feet.  (This is not to say these conditions are common - merely that they are more common when the father is older.)

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Bad BORAT:  The producers of the winter hit Borat are being sued by disgruntled co-stars who said they were duped into doing interviews with the movie’s obnoxious main character, and have suffered all sorts of damaging effects.  One woman, who was fired or quit (depending on which reports you read) her television morning show host job, has said all she wants is an apology…the drunken frat boys caught on camera are hoping for a little more.

STOP!  In the name of Feminism:  A town in Spain is fighting sexism by making half of the street signs - the ones with the generic figure crossing the street or whatever - look female, with a ponytail or a skirt.  (Via Feministing.)

Type II Diabetes and extinction:  The Maori and Polynesian cultures of New Zealand are facing extinction due to rampant Type II diabetes.  These results also apply to other indigenous cultures of the United States, Australia and Canada.

Red Meat affects your breasts:  A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine linked the increased consumption of red meat to higher instances of estrogen and progesterone-spurred breast cancers.  Researchers believe that the growth hormones fed to cattle, sheep and pigs could account for a portion of this increased risk.

Posted by Dorian.