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Art Imitates Politics
Tweet Share on Facebook February 28, 2007 CommentHelen 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.
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Housework: The Last Frontier
Tweet Share on Facebook February 23, 2007 CommentBritish 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.
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Go, Girls! I Guess ...
Tweet Share on Facebook February 21, 2007 CommentNew 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).
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Which Party Is More for the Troops?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 20, 2007 Comment (1)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?
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Edwards Bloggers' Vulgarity Buried the Message
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2007 Comment (6)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.
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Edwards Bloggers' Message Was Missed
Tweet Share on Facebook February 14, 2007 Comment (3)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.
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The V-Day Wars
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2007 CommentGeez, 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).
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Harvard Drops a Barrier
Tweet Share on Facebook February 9, 2007 CommentIf Harvard does as expected and appoints its first female president this weekend, there will be few groundbreaking "firsts" American women have left to achieve in the political, academic, or corporate worlds.
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A Less Colorblind Valentine's Day
Tweet Share on Facebook February 7, 2007 CommentThis Valentine's Day a counterintuitive study tells us interracial marriage is on the decline. I say "counterintuitive" because interracial couples are hardly the rarity they were in the '60s and gen X-ers are rumored to not see race in the same way their forebears did. Legend has it, anyway, that skin color is of little import to younger Americans and of much less import than it was to their parents or grandparents.
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Is President Bush Irrelevant Yet?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2007 CommentThe president's exceedingly low standing among the American public would probably bottom out and perhaps even rise a bit if he would stop, er, prevaricating. I was reminded how easily untruths seem to roll (perhaps spin) off his tongue this weekend when he graciously met with "the enemy" (to wit, congressional Democrats) then immediately succeeded in stamping out all evidence of grace by dissembling.
