Brush Stroke
September
10, 2012       
Greetings! 
    
As of September 2012, two changes will be taking place in your subscription to our enews.  
  1. The NAMC (Nat'l. Assoc. of Mothers' Centers) MOTHERS Enews will be published as the NAMC Enews - Advocacy Edition.   You will continue to get the same quality content and up-to-the minute updates. 
  2. You will also be receiving a monthly NAMC Enews, highlighting resources and information of importance to mothers and families.  

We pride ourselves on the relevance and timeliness of our communications and expect you will find value in these publications.  As always however, you can opt-out of either edition at any time. 


Take a look at what is in this edition:
 
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The National Association of Mothers' Centers (NAMC) provides programs that empower mothers, fathers and caregivers to find solutions that work for their families, their work lives and their personal lives.
DispatchDC Dispatch: Campaign Season Can Be a Real Bummer.
 
Political Post
So much yelling and screaming that's beside the point, lots of insincere posturing, theatrics intended to manipulate, and distortions of the truth.  The funny thing is, most of the campaign ads on TV are about the Presidential election, which has less of an impact on our daily lives than state and local races.  
 
The President, alone, does not create an economic environment, nor can he turn the economy around.  Were he to possess all the magic answers, Congress alone has the power to make them reality.  If the Congress is divided and paralyzed, as it has been much of the past four years, the President is powerless.  
 
As voters, we have much more pull with our own members of Congress, the senators and members of the House, who are accountable directly to us, and depend on our votes and our campaign contributions to get into office.  What they think and the priorities they intend to pursue will have far more influence on our lives than who occupies the Oval Office.  That information may not be plastered all over our TV screens, but it is worth our time to find out.
ClimbingClimbing The Corporate Ladder With Teeth Clamped Around Our Ankles
   
The Economist, that super-serious, high-brow periodical, addresses "The Mommy Track" (oh, how I hate that term!!) on newsstands now: 

 

America's biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees and just 3% of chief-executive roles, according to McKinsey & Company, a consultancy. ...Several factors hold women back at work. Too few study science, engineering, computing or math. Too few push hard for promotion. Some old-fashioned sexism persists, even in hip, liberal industries. But the biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. 

However organized you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the "anytime, anywhere" culture of senior corporate jobs. A McKinsey study in 2010 found that both women and men agreed: it is tough for women to climb the corporate ladder with teeth clamped around their ankles. Another McKinsey study in 2007 revealed that 54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men).
Saddling
Saddling our Children with Debt, or Punishing Mothers at Work? 

 

"The High Price of Motherhood" by Maxine Udall is a brilliant essay that just came across my desk, but it is almost 2 years old.  You would never suspect it, though, because it deals with what happens to mothering when the publicly funded safety net is slashed to tatters to balance the budget, a central issue in this election year.  Everything in the economy depends upon women giving birth, feeding their children, and educating and raising them to adulthood.  None of this production and output is tracked by our economic indicators like GDP or employment rates, yet experts acknowledge it is worth between a whopping 20% and 50% of GDP.  Credit IS certainly due, but we are not getting it!! But, that's not all. 

 

And there is another possible distortion from the omission of women's unpaid work from our national accounts. The untallied and unmeasured often becomes the unvalued. When non-market work is undervalued or unvalued, the "stuff" that is counted and valued appears that much more valuable. The result will be to shift national output away from non-market activities and their product and toward market-based activities.

 

In other words, because the work we do at home is "non-productive labor" in the monetary sense, it is devalued socially and treated as less important than paid work.  Why encourage it by providing paid time off for new parents?  Why allow employees time off to go to the doctor or to take a child to the doctor?  If paid work is the only thing that counts, motherhood diminishes in significance, and the irreducible needs of family caregivers are mere personal problems, nothing more than a "scheduling conflict".  But a problem shared by 70% of all households with children, where all resident adults are in the paid workforce, is not a "personal problem".  It's a care crisis, and it deserves national attention.  This article is worth a read.

 

LaughLaugh Yourself Silly with How To Be A Woman
  
"We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that .... GET ON YOUR NERVES? " - Caitlin MoranHow To Be A Woman

 

You can listen to this 30 minute radio interview while you file your nails, file your expense report, or file your way out of your cell...
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Sincerely,
Linda Lisi Juergens
Executive Director
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