News for June 12
June 12, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
When Opting Out Isn’t an Option | The American Prospect
For too long, the narrative about working women has centered on professionals with children. It’s time we focus on the majority of women workers.
To hear the media tell the tale, the central problem facing working women today is the question of whether they should leave their professional careers to raise children.
For much of the past decade, the “opt out” debate has been a staple of style sections and op-ed pages. It’s easy to see why. The story of how highly educated, professional-track women choose to construct their personal lives lies at the nexus of personal, political, and economic issues. It is a good fit for business columns, for parenting magazines, for feminist blogs. From Lisa Belkin’s coinage of the term “opt-out revolution” in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, to Caitlin Flanagan’s excoriation of feminists with nannies in The Atlantic in 2004, to Linda Hirshman’s 2005 admonition that educated women Get to Work, upper-class women have never tired of discussing–and dissing–each other’s choices. Even though professional, highly educated women who can afford to “opt out” account for only about 10 percent of working women aged 25 to 44, this debate has dominated the conversation about women and work.
Examining the lives of privileged women and their work-life choices is certainly much sexier and more controversial than telling the stories of the majority of working women in this country. After all, most women must balance work with caregiving. They don’t have the option of opting out. Where’s the debate in that?
During Recession, Reimagining the American Male | Tapped @The American Prospect
The idea that this recession represents a feminist watershed is, sadly, bunk. While it’s true that 49 percent of the work force is female and that men are getting laid off at a faster rate than women, occupational segregation means that women are still more likely to be employed in jobs with irregular hours, no benefits, and without union representation. Sixty percent of children living in poverty are supported by single moms, often young women who have very few options for stable employment with middle-class wages.
All that said, there is some truth to the ubiquitous commentary about the recession shifting assumptions on gender, work, and domesticity — at least among the college educated. Consider this: Between 1995 and 2005, the number of self-employed Americans increased by 27 percent, to 9 million. As Emily Bazelon writes in Sunday’s Times Magazine, many of those workers were creative class freelancers, drawn to the Fast Company mantra, as articulated in that dot-com bible in 1997: “The main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents. … You create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You.”
Unsurprisingly, this lifestyle — which embraced risk, instability, and even narcissism — was more appealing (and more accessible) to men than to women. Only about a third of all self-employed workers in America are female. And because the recession is hitting freelancers especially hard, some couples are finding that dad — once proudly self-employed and free-spirited — is now contributing less than mom to the family’s coffers, and is thus due for some serious diaper-changing or floor-scrubbing duty.
Most Americans Want an Immigration Overhaul | AlterNet
Despite anti-immigrant groups repeated attempts to sway public opinion by scapegoating immigrants for the recession, new polling data suggests that the majority of likely voters actually support an overhaul of our broken immigration system–an overhaul that includes a path to citizenship for the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants living in America.
A recent survey by Benson Strategy Group–a group who conducts polling for President Obama and Fortune 100 Companies–found that 71% of likely voters think undocumented immigrants should take steps to become legal taxpayers. Similarly, Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners said recent polling data suggests that voters want undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and on the books.
Sherman Alexie Clarifies “Elitist” Charges | Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits
As noted by Kassia Kroszer and others, Sherman Alexie recently expressed some controversial remarks in relation to the eReader. At a BookExpo panel, Alexie called the Amazon Kindle “elitist” and said that he wanted to hit a woman sitting on a plane who was using a Kindle on her flight to New York.
Now since I’m a man known to make extraordinary statements myself, I recognized Alexie’s pugilistic promise as the conversational theater he intended. Nevertheless, I was baffled by Alexie’s position. So I took it upon myself to contact Alexie to figure out where the guy was coming from. I didn’t believe the boilerplate message on his website was enough. Alexie was very gracious to respond to my questions.
Why do you consider the Kindle “elitist?”
I consider the Kindle elitist because it’s too expensive. I also consider it elitist because, right now, one company is making all the rules. I am also worried about Jeff Bezos’ comments about wanting to change the way we read books. That’s rather imperial. Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books?
The Myth of Humble Origins | The Daily Beast
The contest over Sonia Sotomayor’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court seems to be shaping up as an argument over affirmative action. But what is really at stake—and what President Obama has shrewdly put at stake—is the myth of humble origins. It seems that the election of the nation’s first black president, a man whose rise has been breathtaking, has done nothing to resolve our perplexity over just what the mechanics of social ascent should be.
The argument over what Judge Sotomayor thinks about the social roles of character, luck, and the helping hand promises to change the way we think about American government, American chances, and the ideal moral qualities of the American journey.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
