More on Gender Roles

Still reading the NY Times and finding more information for our gender discussions. What do you think?

Pat
May 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Liberated and Unhappy
By ROSS DOUTHAT

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

This is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” the subject of a provocative paper from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The paper is fascinating not only because of what it shows, but because the authors deliberately avoid floating an easy explanation for their data.

The decline of the two-parent family, for instance, is almost certainly depressing life satisfaction for the women stuck raising kids alone. But this can’t be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Again, maybe the happiness numbers are being tipped downward by a mounting female workload — the famous “second shift,” in which women continue to do the lion’s share of household chores even as they’re handed more and more workplace responsibility. It’s certainly possible — but as Wolfers and Stevenson point out, recent surveys actually show similar workload patterns for men and women over all.

Or perhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female. But even in the warm, nurturing, egalitarian European Union, female happiness has fallen relative to men’s across the last three decades.

All this ambiguity lends itself to broad-brush readings. A strict feminist and a stringent gender-role traditionalist alike will probably find vindication of their premises between the lines of Wolfers and Stevenson’s careful prose. The feminist will see evidence of a revolution interrupted, in which rising expectations are bumping against glass ceilings, breeding entirely justified resentments. The traditionalist will see evidence of a revolution gone awry, in which women have been pressured into lifestyles that run counter to their biological imperatives, and men have been liberated to embrace a piggish irresponsibility.

There’s evidence to fit each of these narratives. But there’s also room for both.

Feminists and traditionalists should be able to agree, for instance, that the structures of American society don’t make enough allowances for the particular challenges of motherhood. We can squabble forever about the choices that mothers ought to make, but the difficult work-parenthood juggle is here to stay. (Just ask Sarah and Todd Palin.) And there are all kinds of ways — from a more family-friendly tax code to a more accommodating educational system — that public policy can make that juggle easier. Conservatives and liberals won’t agree on the means, but they ought to agree on the end: a nation where it’s easier to balance work and child-rearing, however you think that balance should be struck.

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn’t seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period. We simply don’t have the stomach for permanently ostracizing the sexually irresponsible — be they a pregnant starlet, a thrice-divorced tycoon, or even a prostitute-hiring politician.

In this sense, ours is a kinder, gentler, more forgiving country than it was 40 years ago. But for half the public, it’s an unhappier country as well.

So, Is April the Cruelest Month?

The vote was 3 to 1: April is not the cruelest month! Those in favor of April commented on its being the time "when everything seems so vigorous" and its actually being the "beginning of the year" Another did concede that April "could be crazy," with its changeable weather, but insisted that it does have very nice, warm days as well. This author loves the tulips of April, and the way they line up to bring cheer to her neighborhood; the cherry blossoms in DC; and the Easter celebrations. The third proponent of April considers it the second month of the year, since in her country the year starts after the events of Carnival. She pointed out that months have names: the bride month, the Christmas month, the vacation month, the "apart month" when many relationships end. That last one is scary! The lone dissenter to April's charm sadly described it as the month "without the glory of May" with its explosion of colors and life. Of course, he was writing on a very rainy day, when he would have preferred staying home and sipping coffee in his kitchen.

Instead of Poetry, Some Spring Prose

Editorial | The Rural Life
Perfectly Still

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Article Tools Sponsored By
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: April 18, 2009

The sun went down half an hour ago, and there is a nearly perfect stillness in the evening. I stand outside and wonder how such a night is possible, how — in the great cycle of air masses thrusting and obtruding their way across the planet, boiling up from the oceans and scattering over the plains — this small-valley quiet comes to be.

The grass in the field is as thick as a woodchuck’s fur and just now giving up its green to darkness, which is settling like a cold dew. If there were leaves on the trees, they would show where the wind lies, turning slightly in the way I might quote a poet to describe. Instead, there are stiff blossoms, the buds of a spring that is about to happen. Every twig seems to end in a red knot. In the uplands, people are still dragging winter to the roadside — tangled hedgerows of ice-broken limbs. I got a glimpse today of the last snow slowly rotting on a ski slope. Winter has a stillness, but it’s nothing like the stillness of a spring evening, when it feels as though every living thing has stopped quivering with expectation just for the moment.

I passed a clump of deer on the roadside the other afternoon, and they looked as though they had been carved out of decaying wood. It was a trick of the light. A much more solid deer is walking along the high ridge-line that borders this property. It pauses and looks down over this house, or perhaps it’s looking to the sound of the river, which is nearly as quiet now as it will be at midsummer. The sound of the river takes over for the sound of the missing wind, which has been rattling the windows for the past few months.

I know what grows in the warmth and the expanding light of spring. But I wonder tonight what grows in this stillness. Perhaps it’s only the mosquitoes hunting for the first time this year, or the Diptera that will be rising and falling along the river’s edge tomorrow morning. But I think something human grows in the stillness of a night like this — fulfillment, if you like, or an untroubled hope. Soon the stars, and a late-rising moon, will add what they can to the calm outside.

Speaking of American Culture

In class on Tuesday, we had an interesting discussion of consumerism and cleanliness as facets of American culture. Now you can take a look at marriage!
Spotlight:

Q&A: Can we be married, but independent?

Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, says in his new book, “The Marriage-Go-Round,” that Americans marry more, have more live-in partners and divorce more frequently than any other country. USA Today interviewed him about these findings:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-04-14-marriage-cherlin-QnA_N.htm

Grammar Spot

The Comma Manifesto - Eats, Shoots & Leaves


"A panda goes into a café, orders a sandwich, eats it, takes out a revolver, fires it into the air, and goes out. When the waiter calls to ask what is going on, the panda plunks a badly punctuated wildlife manual onto the table and growls: "Look me up." ....
...The waiter finds the entry: "PANDA. Large, black-and-white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.""
Far from being a text on Pandas, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a roaming, raving and sometimes ranting manifesto of comma violations across the English language - mostly from those who should know better. The author, Lynne Truss, also takes aim at the flagrant, inconsistent (and usually public) mis-use of apostrophes. She welcomes all of us to the Apostrophe Protection Society, a real organization that (along with Truss) is horrified by commercial signs that announce "Antique's" or "Apple's".
One of my personal favorites is the difference between - "Let's eat, mother" and "Let's eat mother".
It's all in the comma....
Or consider the classic romantic note below:
Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy--will you let me be yours?
Jane
As opposed to -
Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Jane
Yes, it is all in those pesky little punctuation marks.
The current edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves also includes an Emergency Punctuation Repair kit - stickers of commas and apostrophes to place over signs you might see. As Lynne Truss says - "Sticklers Unite!" It's available from Gotham Books (a division of Penguin Group).
For examples of mangled English not necessarily related to punctuation, check out http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-497544/Chinglish-Hilarious-examples-signs-lost-translation.html or http://fun-in-language.blogspot.com/2007/11/hilarious-chinglish-signs.html

More Free Writing Snippets!

in Just" !

I like the spring season, too. Flowers are blooming. I also remember that, when I was small, in the beginning of spring, my grandmom took us children to woods to dig out bamboo shoots. We left home in the morning and [came] back home in the evening with full baskets of bamboo shoots. We didn't only dig bamboo shooots; my grandmom also taught us how to recognize mushrooms and wild vegetables. We did have a wonderful time in the spring.

The meaning of the poem is all about atmosphere. One can not understand a poem without some kind of imagination. When we read it, we read it aloud and slowly at the same time. We try to see before our eyes the scenery the author was trying to describe, and most of all the feeling and the mental stage he is [on] when he was composing it.

It's amazing how changed those plaqns look. Their branches are now fat, full, and alive mamas! . . .

When spring is here, everything be comes alive again and every thing moves fast and happily. The children, . . . the wind, the noise, the balloonman, all jump, tilt, and make happy sounds.
All screaming and yelling hard, the spring is here and is here.
It is lush green and every thing
and every one wants to move and jump and have spring energy. It was . . . the lush green and the smell of the spring.