Entries for February 2007

Helen Mirren's Best Actress Oscar this week catapults "mature" female leads to a lofty new perch. Mirren was not the only 50-plus actress to be nominated–Mirren is 61–she was one of three women over 50 among five nominees. The others included 57-year-old Meryl Streep, who played the Cruella De Vil of the fashion industry in The Devil Wears Prada, and Dame Judi Dench, a ripe 72, who played a villainous English schoolteacher in Notes on a Scandal.

British philosopher John Stuart Mill is widely recognized as the "father" of the women's movement in the mid-19th century. His essay "In the Subjection of Women" compared the legal status of women to that of slaves and argued for equality in marriage and under the law. American suffragists learned of his work while in England attending a conference on slavery (and how to end it), and the rest is history. Well, once again the Brits have upended Americans' self-proclaimed front-runner status on women's rights, this time with a study on housework.

New federal data show women gaining on men in the job market, but it's not necessarily good news for either gender. Between 2000 and 2005, "Women took on slightly more than half of U.S. jobs created in the first part of the decade and made gains in securing the most lucrative openings. Women posted a net increase of 1.7 million jobs paying above the median salary, while men gained a net increase of just over 220,000 of such positions," according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report (free preview available).

The Democrats have spent the better part of four decades trying to overcome their antitroop image. One would think, just might think, that the party whose members are huddling this week to "plot strategy on their next move, which will be seeking to restrict some of Bush's Iraq war spending by establishing high readiness and equipment targets for troops and requiring those targets be met first" would be the pro-troop party, right?

This week the Planned Parenthood Federation of America held a nationwide "Day of Action" to push passage of local and federal laws giving poor women access to family planning services. Every moderate with a stake in the abortion debate agrees that pregnancy prevention is preferable to unwanted pregnancies. Only zealots oppose family planning. But by outdoing the zealots with their semipornographic language describing the virgin birth, the newsmaking John Edwards bloggers discounted their credibility on this and a host of other issues. The media gave Planned Parenthood's move scant coverage, because the fireworks caused by the Edwards campaign bloggers dominated the news cycle.

It's too bad the brash-mouthed babes of John Edwards's campaign blog resorted to gutter-speak to make their points. Their points were lost in the netherworld of right- and left-wing truculence and in the jousting, jabbing, and parrying so prominent in today's nonstop news cycle. It's too bad because the points they meant to make were worth considering.

Geez, and I thought V-Day was for chocolates and roses. How naive!!! It's for V-Day wars–you know, wars between "radical feminists" (at least that's what the conservative Independent Women's Forum calls them) and "radical right-wing women" (for lack of a shorter moniker).