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editor
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 Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:21 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Critics
Her Own Society
A new reading of Emily Dickinson
By Judith Thurman
Aug. 4/08
| Quote: | Dickinson came to Higginson in the guise of an unpublished novice, though by this point—middle age (she died at fifty-five)—she had composed hundreds of poems. Among them are some of the greatest ever written in English, but an English unique to her—an unworn language. It revives sensation at the extremities of feeling that, in most lives, habit and cliché have numbed. Few voices are more solitary than her first person, yet few are more intimate: she writes I to I. Richard B. Sewall, whose critical biography, “The Life of Emily Dickinson” (1974), is still unsurpassed, classed her with George Herbert, Wordsworth, the author of the Psalms and of Job, and, in her eerie genius for metaphor (a comparison that isn’t impertinent), Shakespeare.
It is hard to believe that Dickinson didn’t know who and what she was, even if no one else did. She kept her poems in a bureau drawer, sewn into bundles. But she had shared a few with her closest friends, among them her sister-in-law and Samuel Bowles—a driven man, famously attractive, like her new pen pal, and the editor of an influential newspaper, the Springfield Republican. Bowles had already printed three lyrics anonymously. She enclosed one of them in her note to Higginson (who then lived in Worcester) with three others:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the
Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone—
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—
And Doges—surrender—
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.
...
In the course of their friendship, Higginson tried to lead this “wayward” sport of nature, whose rhymes were off, whose rhythm he called “spasmodic,” whose lines were strung tensely between dashes, and who claimed the modern privilege of refusing to signify what others expected her to mean in “the direction of rules and traditions.” (Her credo was “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”) After Dickinson’s death, in 1886, Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s beautiful and ambitious mistress, to edit the poems, and Higginson to help her, lending the project his prestige. (Only ten brief lyrics had appeared in her lifetime, grudgingly surrendered, and without a signature. One was attributed to Emerson.) Todd sometimes went further than Higginson would have liked in taking liberties with Dickinson’s syntax, punctuation, and even her choice of words. He approved and took part in the cleanup, however. Their anthology was published in 1890, and reviews were mixed (some ecstatic, more disdainful), but almost immediately Dickinson acquired a cult following, mostly among women. They showed up in Amherst, asking directions to the Homestead, the Dickinsons’ Federal manor on Main Street, which has since become a museum. The collection quickly went through eleven editions and was followed by seven others, a memoir by Mabel Todd’s daughter, four volumes of letters, endless speculation about the poet’s secrets, and the rise of a myth. By the nineteen-fifties, Dickinson was part of the canon (almost no one graduates from high school without having read her). Her complete works—nearly eighteen hundred poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and letters, edited by Johnson and Theodora Ward, three volumes of each—were enshrined in annotated editions that restored their formal integrity, revealing the magnitude of her power but also the depths of her strangeness. (-- pgs. 68-72 |
| Quote: | | Note to ESL students: There's a good number of sound recordings of dear Emily's work - poems and letters - but we've not heard even one. We'll do our best to find a few. Please check back soon for updates. In the meantime, Ms. Thurman's article - actually a book review - is a wonderful introduction to the poet and her work. |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:44 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New York Times Magazine
But not without the dull clunker daily
Will Dad Ever Do His Share?
Some fathers do. And throw over their old lives. And draw up elaborate charts. Inside the equal parenting movement.
By Lisa Belkin
June 18/08
| Quote: | Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.
The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.
But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.
The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.
“And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.”
Housework, in this context, is defined as things like cooking, cleaning, yardwork and home repairs. Child care is a whole separate category — one that is even more skewed. The social scientist’s definition of child care “is attending to the physical needs of a child — dressing a child, cooking for a child, feeding and cleaning them,” Blair says. It doesn’t include the fun stuff, like playing and reading and kissing good night.
Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. “The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.” (-- pgs. 46-47) |
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| Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2008 12:48 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The New Yorker
Mgazine Subscription
The Financial Page
Equal Before Mammon
By James Surowiecki
Sept. 15/08
| Quote: | She was an ordinary middle-class mom who, despite fierce criticism, succeeded in a male-dominated profession. She challenged the local establishment and became a national figure, earning herself a spot as a featured speaker at her party's recent Convention. But she wasn't the governor of Alaska. She was a woman named Lilly Ledbetter, a former middle manager at a Goodyear plant in Alabama, who appeared at the Democratic Convention to give a human face to the slogan "Equal pay for equal work."
Ledbetter's unlikely journey to center stage began in the late nineteen-nineties, when she received an anonymous note revealing the salaries of her fellow-managers, all of whom were men. Although Ledbetter did the same job as her colleagues, and had more seniority than some of them, they were all being paid considerably more than she was. Ledbetter sued, under the Civil Rights Act, and proved that her lower pay was the result of discrimination early in her career, the effects of which had never been remedied. But victory was short-lived; the verdict was overturned on appeal, and then the Supreme Court ruled against her. The Court did not deny that Ledbetter had been discriminated against. However, according to the Civil Rights Act, Ledbetter's lawsuit had to be filed within a hundred and eighty days, and the Court ruled that the clock started ticking with the first act of discrimination, almost two decades before Ledbetter found out what was going on.
Ledbetter was out of luck. But the Court did leave open a possibility for others like her: if Congress wanted a more realistic time frame for lawsuits, all it had to do was change the law. And so, acting with surprising dispatch, that's precisely what Congress tried to do. Last year, the House passed a bill, named after Ledbetter, that essentially did away with the statute of limitations on pay discrimination, and the Senate was set to do the same until Republicans filibustered it to death.
Protecting workers from discrimination is a fairly uncontroversial idea. So opponents of the bill, who include John McCain, insisted that, while they're in favor of equal pay, the new law would unleash a flood of frivolous litigation. That's a familiar excuse, and in this case a threadbare one. There would likely be more lawsuits if the bill was passed--the point, after all, was to allow more people to sue--but there was no reason to expect a deluge, since, before the Court's decision, it's probable that most potential litigants had assumed a less stringent interpretation of the time limit anyway. And giving workers more time to sue makes sense, because pay discrimination usually takes a while to become evident, and, insofar as raises and bonuses are based on initial salaries, its effects never go away.
Other opponents of the bill depict it as a stalking horse for the idea of "comparable worth" (also known as "pay equity"), which would require the government to shrink the current gender wage gap by insuring that workers in female-dominated professions receive pay similar to that of workers in male-dominated professions, as long as they're doing work of "similar value." To have the government, rather than the market, set wages and decide what kinds of work are comparable to others is indeed a poor idea. But the Lilly Ledbetter bill has nothing to do with comparable worth. It's about closing a loophole that has enabled employers to get away with active discrimination. Comparable worth would require the government to enforce equal pay for different jobs. But Ledbetter just wanted what she was entitled to--equal pay for the same job.
Does the Ledbetter bill matter? It's true that active discrimination is rarer these days than it once was. But, contrary to what much economic work would predict, racial and sex discrimination is still a powerful force in the job market. Decades ago, the economist Gary Becker showed that "taste-based" discrimination (pure prejudice) could not survive in a truly competitive talent market, because unprejudiced companies would outperform prejudiced ones by hiring smart women and minorities. Yet the introduction of blind auditions at major symphony orchestras, starting in the seventies, has increased by fifty per cent the likelihood of female performers' advancing--a clear sign that, for decades, orchestras had made bad talent decisions because of their prejudice without being punished. More striking, recent work by Kerwin Charles and Jonathan Guryan, of the University of Chicago, shows that, under certain reasonable conditions, market competition will not necessarily eradicate discrimination. That may be why, they suggest, the gap between black and white wages is widest in the most prejudiced parts of the U.S.--precisely what you'd expect if businessmen could discriminate and get away with it.
Of course, just because the market can't prevent discrimination doesn't mean the government should. And so there is a principled argument against the Ledbetter bill: namely, that Lilly Ledbetter was an adult; that if she didn't think she was being paid fairly she was free to ask for more money or to leave; and that government interference with the idea of what constitutes fair pay is likely to cause more problems than it's worth. Unlike the current opposition to the bill, this is an honest position to take. But it's also, for good reasons, a profoundly unpopular one, which is why few Republicans have voiced it. Instead, opponents of the bill have acted like McCain, proclaiming their support for fair pay while doing their best to insure that workers have a hard time getting it. Maybe it's time for them to give Americans some straight talk and unveil a new slogan: "Unequal pay for equal work." It may not be catchy, but at least it's honest. (--p. 34) |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:44 pm Post subject: |
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The White Album
Essays by Joan Didion
Paperback
| Quote: | | I did meet one of the principals in another Los Angeles County murder trial during those years: Linda Kasabian, star witness for the prosecution in what was commonly known as the Manson Trial. I once asked Linda what she thought about the apparently chance sequence of events which had brought her first to the Spahn Movie Ranch and then to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women on charges, later dropped, of murdering Sharon Tate Polanski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. "Everything was to teach me something," Linda said. Linda did not believe that chance was without pattern. Linda operated on what I later recognized as dice theory, and so, during the years I am talking about, did I. (-- p. 18) |
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God - an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin - at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can't do the same with death. Death can't be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn't have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint or condescension. 'Death is not an artist': no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celbrity called Dr Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn't get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious bookmaker either. Oddly, she did death's work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death. (-- pgs. 69-70) |
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| Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 11:06 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Where the Stress Falls
Essays
Hardcover
By Susan Sontag
| Quote: | Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not.
To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive, or to do one's best to be attractive, to attract. (As being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. As it is thought a weakness in a man to care a great deal about how he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not to care enough. Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and women punished more by the changes brought about by aging. Ideals of appearance such as youthfulness and slimness are in large part now created and enforced by photographic images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.
In advanced consumer societies, it is said, these "narcissistic" values are more and more the concern of men as well. But male primping never loosens the male lock on initiative taking. Indeed, glorying in one's appearance is an ancient warrior's pleasure, an expression of power, an instrument of dominance. Anxiety about personal attractiveness could never be thought defining of a man: a man is, first of all, seen. Women are looked at. (From A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?, pgs. 240-241) |
| Quote: | Imagine a book of pictures of women in which none of the women could be identified as beautiful. Wouldn't we feel that the photographer had made some kind of mistake? Was being mean-spirited? Misogynistic? Was depriving us of something that we had a right to see? No one would say the equivalent thing of a book of portraits of men.
There were always several kinds of beauty: imperious beauty, voluptuous beauty, beauty signifying the character traits that fitted a woman for the confines of genteel domesticity - docility, pliancy, serenity. Beauty was not just loveliness of feature and expression, an aesthetic ideal. It also spoke to the eye about the virtues deemed essential in women.
For a woman to be intelligent was not essential, not even particularly appropriate. It was in fact considered disabling and likely to be inscribed in her appearance. Such is the fate of a principal character in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins's robustly, enthrallingly clever novel, which appeared in 1860, just before (Victorian England photographer Julia Margaret) Cameron started making her portraits. Here is how this woman is introduced, early int he book, in the voice of its young hero:
The Woman in White
DVD
Based on the novel by Wilkie Collins
I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from teh far end of the room set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Reveling in the effrontery and delights of the appraising male gaze, the narrator has noted that, seen from behind and in long shot, the lady satisfies all the criteria of female desirability. Hence his acute surprise, when she turns and comes toward him, at her "ugly" face (it is not allowed to be just plain or homely), which, he explains, is a kind of paradox:
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression - bright, frank, and intelligent - appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting int hose feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman is beauty incomplete.
Marian Halcombe will turn out to be the most admirable character in Collins's novel, awarded every virtue except the capacity to inspire desire. ...
To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model - to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended - was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
Collins's male narrator is touching a gender fault line, which typically arouses anxieties and feelings of discomfort. The contradiction in the order of sexual stereotypes may seem dream-like to a well-adjusted inhabitant of an era in which action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and intellectual innovation are understood to be masculine, fraternal orders. ...
In a woman beauty is something total. It is what stands, in a woman, for character. ...
... To be sure, what has done the most to change the stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness afflicting women are not the labors of the various feminisms, indispensable as these have been. It is the new economic realities that bolige most American women (including most women with small children) to work outside their homes. The measure of how much things have not changed is that a woman earns between one-half and three-fourths of what a man earns in the same job. And nearly all occupations are still gender-labeled: with the exception of a few occupations (prostitute, nurse, secretary) where the reverse is true and it needs to be specified if the person is a man, one has to put "woman" in front of most job titles when it's a woman holding them; otherwise the assumption will always be that one is referring to a man. (-- pgs. 243-248) |
The Male Biological Clock
The Startling News About Aging, Sexuality and Fertility in Men
Hardcover
By Harry Fisch, M.D.
And get this:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Findings
March, 2009
| Quote: | | A British study found that London traders with relatively long ring fingers earn eleven times as much money as do men with short ring fingers, and a survey found that female investors' portfolios recently lost only one third as much value as those of male investors. ... (-- p. 84) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Wage Gap Divides Men Too
8th Annual Year in Ideas
By Aaron Retica
Dec. 14/08
| Quote: | Economists have been trying for decades to understand the considerable gap in wages between men and women, but they have not paid enough attention to our psychological attitudes toward breadwinning, according to Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston, organizational psychologists at the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. What if the real difference isn’t between men and women but between men who think women belong at home — and everyone else?
On average, according to “Is the Gap More Than Gender?” which was published in September in The Journal of Applied Psychology, men who say they believe in a traditional role for women earned a stunning $8,549 more per year than men who profess egalitarian values. Egalitarian-minded women earned $1,330 less than their male counterparts, and traditional women earned another $1,495 less.
Judge and Livingston’s study is based on data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from thousands of people as they matured between 1979 and 2004. Periodically, investigators asked questions like whether “employment of wives leads to more juvenile delinquency.” Judge and Livingston used the answers to assess where people fell on the traditional-to-egalitarian continuum. After the researchers controlled for hours worked, education, occupational segregation and an array of other factors, the effect of what they call “gender-role orientation” was stark. And it held up even for those who change their own orientations. “If you are a man and you become more egalitarian, it has a really detrimental effect on your earnings,” Judge explains.
Judge and Livingston have several theories about why the effect is as strong as it is. Perhaps egalitarian men don’t negotiate salary as strongly as traditional men because they see doing so as “thuggish, alpha-male” behavior — or perhaps employers unconsciously discriminate against “egalitarian men who don’t conform to stereotypes.” Livingston’s biggest concern about the study is that a few people have interpreted it to suggest that you should raise your boys to be chauvinists. “One radio host asked me whether he should go into the next room and call his boss a bitch,” Livingston told me, “which I would not advocate.” |
Yes, and get this in the same issue:
Women in power are set up to fail
| Quote: | Are women set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations?
Two British academics say so, and they claim to have proved it this year. In one study, they took 83 businesspeople — roughly half of them women — and described to them two companies, one that was steadily improving in profitability and another that was steadily declining. The subjects were told to pick a new financial director for the firm and were presented with three candidates: a man and a woman who were identical in experience and a lesser-qualified male. The subjects were slightly more likely to pick a man to lead the successful firm but were far more likely to pick the woman to lead the failing one. Two other experiments with similar designs yielded the same result: When presented with men and women to lead a company that’s going down the tubes, people pick the woman.
What’s going on? In a write-up of their experiments in The Leadership Quarterly in October, the academics, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, called it “the glass cliff,” which they contend is an invisible form of prejudice. In other words, people will give women a position of power only when there’s a strong chance of failure. Why? “If someone has to be the scapegoat to take the fall, you’re not going to put your best man forward,” Ryan says. Women are thrust into desperate situations precisely because they’re likely to fail, generating “proof” that women can’t handle responsibility.
The theory has some historical evidence to back it up too. When the academics examined the performance of the 100 biggest firms in Britain, they found that women were disproportionately hired as C.E.O.’s only after their firms had been struggling for years. When firms were doing well, they rarely appointed women to lead.
Ryan and Haslam say the data also suggest the glass cliff applies to minorities. When you consider this year’s American presidential election, the glass-cliff theory becomes particularly tantalizing — because it might neatly explain the rise of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Perhaps it was only during extremely hard times that America would finally consider a woman and a black man for the highest office. |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 2:22 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Ways of Seeing
Paperback
By John Berger
| Quote: | To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distrinct elements of her identity as a woman.
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. ...
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. (-- pgs. 46-47) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:17 am Post subject: |
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Lexus
Magazine Subscription
Words, Words, Words
The Manhattan-based organization Girls Write Now show the power - and pleasures - of the pen
By Grace Bastidas
Q4 2008
| Quote: | The teenage girls I know write in pink spiral notebooks. Like other New York City students, they commute to class on the subway every day, but instead of staring off blankly, closing out the world with the help of their iPods, they watch the bustle of strangers rushing to work and the confusion of tourists unforlding maps that never seem to fold back up in the right way. They observe because observation is a writer's training.
They are the wordsmiths of Girls Write Now (www.girlswritenow.org), a volunteer organization that pairs creative teenage girls, from 13-20 years old, with professional women writers, like me, who serve as mentors and writing coaches. The girls are recruited from public high schools throughout the city; the mentors are magazine editiros, newspaper reporters, and even waitresses waiting to turn their prose into bestsellers.
I once read somewhere that a mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight, but the mentor/mentee relationship is mutually beneficial. My 16-year-old mentee, Thea, writes descriptive personal essays in between Regents exams, soccer matches, and an internship at a local hospital, inspiring me to create new work despite my own hectic schedule. Thea and the other girls are all college bound (Girls Write Now has a 100 percent college acceptance rate).
A native of the Philippines, Thea has lived here for only a year, yet her command of the English language is flawless, much like her fashion sense - her Nike sneakers always match the color of her T-shirt. ... (-- p. 64) |
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| Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:23 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
Lucy's Eyes and Margaret's Dragon
The Lives of the Virgin Saints
Hardcover
By Giselle Potter
| Quote: | These are the stories of brave women who fought to follow their hearts. Their devotion to virginity may oppose our modern notion about powerful women, but in the world they inhabited, taking a vow of chastity was not a passive act; it was a rebellion against the conventions and men that ruled them. These early saints were not swayed from their ideals or turned away from their goals, even under the threat of violence. They met their fierce punishment with smiling grace rather than fear.
Miraculous events helped the virgins through their battles. They became unmovable, fireproof, and airborne. They lost eyes, breasts, and beauty, and then regained them. Saint Margaret emerged from a dragon's belly unharmed, and Saint Agnes grew long hair to defend her modesty as she was led naked through the streets to a brothel. During their lives such miracles caused these women to be condemned as witches and heretics; after their deaths, the miracles led to their canonization as saints.
Many texts question the existence of some of these women, but whether they are mythical characters or heroines of history, they still have admirers around the world. Girls wear wreaths of candles on Saint Lucy's day, and eat hard-boiled eggs on the eve of Saint Agnes's feast day so they may dream of future suitors.
These virgin saints are examples of strength and courage for all women. We may take comfort in the thought that they may be watching over us, protecting us from illness, bad eyesight, difficult childbirth, fire, or cumbersome husbands. (From the Introduction) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue May 05, 2009 8:50 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Questions for Susie Orbach
Her Beautiful Mind
The psychologist talks about how the Western body became a global brand, whether she treated Princess Diana and why Cleopatra wasn't image-obsessed.
By Deborah Solomon
March 8/09
| Quote: | ... “Body hatred,” as you call it, has become a leading Western export. Young women in South Korea are undergoing surgery to Westernize the appearance of their eyelids.
It’s supported by their parents. They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots. They see it as a chance at modernity. Fiji is the country where 11.3 percent of girls were bent over the toilet bowl three years after television was introduced. (emphasis added)
Do you believe there is actually a direct connection between watching a show like [b]Gossip Girl and developing bulimia?[/b]
Yes, the girls were trying to remake their bodies in the shape of skinny Western bodies. In general, the Western body has become a global brand.
You’ve publicly expressed an interest in suing Weight Watchers.
Yes. Fifi, which is what I call my book “Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” was in part a plea to give up dieting and learn to recognize hunger and appetite and respond to them. Dieting, I argued, caused compulsive eating and destabilizes our relationship to food.
In what way?
If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don’t work. They don’t help you understand why you’re eating more than your body wanted in the first place. ...
Do you believe that men are biologically inclined to favor unwrinkled flesh?
Actually, I don’t buy that myth. I think most men crave intimacy, connection and interest, and one of the painful aspects of life today is that women are encouraged to turn to quite dramatic cosmetic procedures in the face of loss.
I trust you won’t succumb to cosmetic surgery.
No. I’ve become accustomed to the way I look. I look my age, which is 62. If I were afraid of wrinkles, I’d probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them. (-- p. 13) |
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
Paperback
By Susie Orback
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Last edited by editor on Fri Jun 05, 2009 10:47 am; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 10:46 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Bait and Switch:
The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream
Hardcover
By Barbara Ehrenreich
| Quote: | Reverting to her maiden name, Ehrenreich tweaks her CV to present herself as a PR professional who is returning to the workforce after a divorce, having spent a number of years working in the home. When she submits the CV to a potential employer, however she learns that it contains a fatal flaw - a gap.
"A gap of any kind, for any purpose - child raising, caring for an elderly parent, recovering from an illness, or even consulting - is unforgivable. If you haven't spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job," she writes.
Indeed, most of Ehrenreich's advisers, who charge large fees for their mostly worthless advice, suggest that job-seekers should treat the job hunt itself as a kind of job, drawing up timetables like at work and filling every hour with application writing, Internet research and networking opportunities.
...As a woman over 50, Ehrenreich faces a double disadvantage in the corporate labour market, where younger workers are valued as more flexible and less demanding. After 10 months of effort and thousands of dollars in coaching fees, her only job offers are positions as a sales agent with no basic salary, no health insurance and no pension entitlements.
Few of the job-seekers she met along the way had better luck and many found themselves lowering expectations steadily until they accepted work paying the minimum wage, often as little as $7 an hour. (From Got dem ol' white-collar blues by Denis Staunton in the Irish Times Book Reviews, March 11/06, p. 13) |
Following closely the success of:
Nickel and Dimed
Hardcover
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 11:59 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The Irish Times
Women fail to win any seats in Kuwaiti election
By Haitham Haddadin in Kuwait
July 1/06
| Quote: | Powerful Islamist and reformist candidates swept Kuwait's election but women failed to win a single seat in their first attempt to run for parliament, results showed yesterday.
Analysts and newspapers said a strong showing by the opposition - a loose coalition of pro-reform ex-MPs, Islamists, leftists and liberals - raises the possibility of deeper tension between the new assembly and the government.
..."Women failed us," said Zikra al-Majdali, a 39-year-old lawyer who ran in an ultra-conservative Islamist area, referring to hopes among female candidates that women - voting for the first time - would help elect at least one of them. (Opening paragraphs, p. 9) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:01 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Sally Ride
A generation later, the first female astronaut is still on a mission.
By K.C. Cole
November, 2005
Is homosexuality in high places, we wonder, the real reason girls are 'behind the eight ball' in science?
Get this:
| Quote: | Sally Ride, the nation's first woman astronaut, no longer flies for NASA, but she has embarked on a mission into territory that is just as mysterious and controversial, and is much closer to home: making sure that girls get to share in the adventure that is science.
This is not an easy task in an age when the president of Harvard, no less, hypothesizes that girls can't cut it in science because they lack the inherent ability. In truth, though, Dr. Ride, who earned her doctorate in physics, thinks that Dr. Lawrence Summers' January 2005 statement inadvertently helped more than harmed her cause.
...Even today, Ride says, "you see all these boys who get Cs in math and say, 'I'm going to be an engineer!' And all these girls who get As in math and say, 'I'm not good enough.'"
...And so she's spent the last five years creating the Sally Ride Science Club, science festivals, summer camps, newsletters, career guides, Web site and books - all under the umbrella of her company, Sally Ride Science.
...That purpose is to smooth the bumps, especially for the middle school girls who seem to be the most vulnerable. (- pgs. 65-66) |
...or is it an ethics problem?
Here's a clue in the same issue of the magazine:
| Quote: | | Francis Crick died in July 2004, age 88. Maurice Wilkins died two months later, age 87. In Stockholm in December 1962, Crick, Wilkins and James Watson had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery nine years - as all the world knows - of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA, the stuff that genes are made of. Another scientist should have been on that platform, Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958, age 37. Her meticulous experimental work in 1952 had supplied the essential X-ray crystallographic data that Watson and Crick used, without her knowing at the time, to get out the structure. Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously;... (From the profile by Horace Freeland Judson at p. 78, celebrating the contemptible and charmless opportunist, James Watson, who at 77 got the face but not the fate he deserved - hideous!) |
A final word on Rosalind Franklin:
Theories for Everything
An Illustrated History of Science from the Invention of Numbers to String Theory
Hardcover
By champion science writers John Langone, Bruce Stutz, and Andrea Gianopoulos
| Quote: | ... Watson and Crick seemed stymied. (Linus) Pauling in California appeared to be gaining ground, returning to his helix. In a lab not far from Crick and Watson in England, (Rosalind) Franklin was getting very close to bserving DNA's structure in her increasingly explicit diffraction images. (At the crystallography laboratory at Birkeck College, London, Rosalind Franklin investigated the molecular structure of the tobacco masaic virus. She discovered that ribonucleic acid (RNA) was a single strand rather than the double helix found in the nucleus of other organisms.) Crick and Watson had consulted with Franklin, but their relationship was far from a collaboration. Female primary investigators were rare in science laboratories in those days, and in fact they were often not even allowed to eat in university dining rooms with their male counterparts. Personality conflicts had estranged Franklin and Wilkins, so she was working very much on her own.
Although the stories differ as to how it happened, at some point Wilkins gave Crick and Watson copies of Franklin's images. They realized - as she already had - that the molecule's shape was a spiral or a helix. The model came into focus: DNA was made of two long, helix-shaped sugar-acid strands, wound around each other like spiral staircases, each step another paired chemical goup of atoms. For their work, Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. None of them acknowledged the part played by Franklin, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37. (-- p. 294) |
Best science documentary ever!
Me and Isaac Newton
DVD
Directed by Michael Apted
Featuring *1988 Nobel Prize winning chemist Gertrude Elion, who reminiscences none too fondly about her career as a pickle-tester, the best job on offer to women chemists in the '40s.
* Gertrude Elion patented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine in 1954 and has made a number of significant contributions to the medical field. Dr. Gertrude Elion’s research led to the development of Imuran, a drug that aids the body in accepting transplanted organs, and Zovirax, a drug used to fight herpes.
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 9:52 am Post subject: |
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Lucky, lucky little Indira. How could she help becoming great?
From Mother India:
Glimpses of World History
Being Further Letters to His Daughter Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People
Hardcover
By Jawaharlal Nehru
| Quote: | I do not know when or where these letters will be published, or whether they will be published at all, for India is a strange land to-day and it is difficult to prophesy. But I am writing these lines while I have the chance to do so, before events forestall me.
An apology and an explanation are needed for this historical series of letters. Those readers who take the trouble to go through them will perhaps find the apology and the explanation. In particular, I would refer the reader to the last letter, and perhaps it would be as well, in this topsy-turvy world, to begin at the end.
The letters have grown. There was little of planning about them, and I never thought that they would grow to these dimensions. Nearly six years ago, when my daughter was ten years old, I wrote a number of letters to her containing a brief and simple account of the early days of the world. These early letters were subsequently published in book form and they had a generous reception. The idea of continuing them hovered in my mind, but a busy life full of political activity prevented it from taking shape. Prison gave me the chance I needed, and I seized it.
Prison-life has its advantages; it brings both leisure and a measure of detachment. But the disadvantages are obvious. There are no libraries or reference books at the command of the prisoner, and, under these conditions, to write on any subject, and especially history, is a foolhardy undertaking. A number of books came to me, but they could not be kept. They came and went. Twelve years ago, however, when, in common with large numbers of my countrymen and countrywomen, I started my pilgrimages to prison, I developed the habit of making notes of the books I read. My note-books grew in number and they came to my rescue when I started writing. Other books of ocurse helped me greatly, among them inevitably, H.G. Wells's Outline of History. But the lack of good references books was very real, and because of this the narrative had often to be slurred over, or particular periods skipped. (From the author's Preface to the original edition, Jan. 1, 1934, p. vii) |
How to father a daughter 101:
| Quote: | How shall we bear ourselves in this great movement? What part shall we play in it? I cannot say what part will fall to our lot; but, whatever it may be, let us remember that we can do nothing which may bring discredit to our cause or dishonour to our people. If we are to be India's soldiers we have India's honour in our keeping, and that honour is a sacred trust. Often we may be in doubt as to what to do.l It is no easy matter to decide what is right and what is not. One little test I shall ask you to apply whenever you are in doubt. It may help you. Never do anything in secret or anything that you would wish to hide. For the desire to hide anything means that you are afraid, and fear is a bad thing and unworthy of you. Be brave, and all the rest follows. If you are brave, you will not fear will not do anything of which you are ashamed. You know that in our great Freedom Movement, under Bapuji's (Mahatma Gandhi's) leadership, there is no room for secrecy or hiding. We have nothing to hide. We are not afraid of what we do and what we say. We work in the sun and in the light. Even so in our private lives let us make friends with the sun and work in the light and do nothing secretly or furtively. Privacy, of course, we have and should have, but that is a very different thing from secrecy. And if you do so, my dear, you will grow up to be a child of light, unafraid and serene and unruffled, whatever may happen.
I have written a very long letter to you. And yet there is so much I would like to tell you. How can a letter contain it?
You are fortunate, I have said, in being a witness to this great struggle for freedom that is going on in our country. You are also very fortunate in having a very brave and wonderful little woman for your Mummie, and if you are ever in doubt or in trouble you cannot have a better friend.
Good-bye, little one, and may you grow up into a brave soldier in India's service.
With all my love and good wishes. (From A Birthday Letter for Indira Priyadarshini on Her Thirteenth Birthday, Central Prison, Naini, Oct. 20/30, pgs. 1-3) |
The Outline of History
Hardcover
By H.G. Wells, another pro-feminist legend
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