A Hodgepodge of Interesting Things
Just a quick post to point out some great things I've come across in the last week:
- Sharing the workload at work- and home: A San Francisco Chronicle piece that interviews Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, the authors of Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All and Why It's Great for Your Marriage, Your Career, Your Kids ... and You. There are some great thoughts here:
Q: You write about the "maternal wall." What is that?
Meers: There are a variety of
attitudes and entrenched policies that make it hard for women to
continue to be successful when they are mothers if they are working as
hard as they were before. There are expectations about how women will
perform once they are mothers that women have to overcome. Someone
called it postnatal hazing.
- Exemption from Service: Mothers in the Military and Fathers at Home: A great piece by Katherine Franke at Feminist Law Profs, cross posted from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog. This is the recent news coverage of Lisa Pagan, who showed up for deployment with her small children in tow. She received an honorable discharge so that she could care for her children, the reason being that her husband's job in sales required a lot of travel. Prof. Franke makes a critical point:
On the other hand, when I read the Times story I thought: what about
the children’s father? Can’t he take care of the kids? If their
positions had been reversed, and the IRR member called up for active
duty had been a man, do you think the military would have allowed him
to plead “family hardship” if his wife was unwilling to quit her job to
take care of the kids?
- Ms. JD put us on the front page (keep scrolling...). It's a *great* blog that links to a lot of excellent news stories and creates a lot of interesting content, like the latest in their Superwomen JDs series featuring an interview with Nicole Auerbach.