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Greetings!
Regards,
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. |
 The 113th Congress has made a strong start. Both the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)and the Paycheck Fairness Act have been re-introduced early in the session. Both bills will impact women's lives directly, and both deserve your consideration. Both were in play in previous congressional sessions, but failed to gain sufficient support to be enacted. What VAWA does is covered by the Center for American Progress here and its history and current prospects in this HuffPo article. It's really simple to call your members of Congress - phone numbers, what to say and short but full instructions here.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was originally a companion bill to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the very first piece of legislation President Obama signed into law in 2009. At that time, the bill's sponsors in Congress thought it would be easier to pass each bill separately. The Ledbetter law gave workers suffering gender discrimination more time to file claims after obtaining evidence. The Paycheck Fairness Act would allow claimants to receive not just the amount of money they were wrongfully not paid, but also money damages intended to punish a wrong-doing employer, called "punitive damages". Continue reading...
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 Moms Hold the Purse Strings
Who pays the bills and manages the money in your house? According to a recent Working Mother magazine survey, almost two-thirds of responding moms claimed the title of chief financial officer, and another third claims to share the responsibility with their partner. Women have long held a huge amount of purchasing power and were frequently targeted by advertisers. But now they are more likely to be in charge of the long term saving and planning as well. They also overwhelmingly want to teach their children about saving, investing, value-shopping, and sticking to a budget. As the article says, "You run the money, honey!"
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Nancy Folbre on Sharers, Takers, Carers, Makers
This, my friends, is the source of a great deal of the injustice we face today, as brilliantly set forth by Nancy Folbre in her recent New York Times column:
When John Locke laid the conceptual foundations of liberal democracy in the 17th century, he contended that a system that guaranteed men rights over the product of their own labor (including wild apples picked from a tree) would always prevail over a system based on arbitrary authority, like feudal dues or taxation without representation.
He excluded women from his theory, assuming that childbearing and family care were not forms of labor, but like apples, gifts of nature (until picked by men). Classical political economy, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, presumed that women's domestic labor was "unproductive" even if it was performed by paid servants.
If only John Locke had given birth, raised infants to adulthood, and run a household himself, how different his perspective would have been.
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Mr. Mom is Dead. Really?
 In spite of a flurry of articles about the new fatherhood, I don't believe at-home Dads are sweeping the nation anymore than I believe women will be out-earning them across the board in a few years time, as has also been breathlessly reported recently.
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Still, the more pictures and stories there are about full-time parenting fathers, the higher the societal value placed on carework will go. Here's a couple - from the 
