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Greetings!
Warm 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. |
 DC Dispatch - VAWA Returns
 Ladies, this is your government at work. The boys (and it is most certainly mostly boys) on Capitol Hill are taking their toys and metaphorically going home, refusing to play with each other. Because their egos are so invested, they simply cannot agree on any point. Better to go down with the ship, they say, than be seen to work things out. We may be wrong, but at least no one can say we caved! Honestly, I've seen middle schoolers run student governments with greater political skills. Beam me up, Scotty! No sign of intelligent life on Capitol Hill.
The good news today is that the US House of Representatives has reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, which makes funds available for the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence crimes against both men and women. This law has been in effect for almost 20 years, but needs to be periodically reauthorized. Last year, a dispute arose when the law was amended to cover domestic violence victims in LGBT couples and undocumented immigrant victims. A group of Republicans objected to these extensions of coverage. They prevented the reauthorization, and introduced other versions of the bill which excluded these groups. For many months, the law was in limbo. Ultimately, the Republicans' efforts failed. Now that the House has finally passed the broader version, already passed by the US Senate, VAWA will return, and in a stronger form, to be the law of the land. Small victories.
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Do You Use the F-Word?
We don't mother in a vacuum, and you can't separate motherhood from gender. No matter how many decades roll by, feminism can still fire people up, raise eyebrows, sometimes curl lips into a sneer, and make headlines. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is having a golden anniversary, and old issues are surfacing again. Do women have equality yet? Is feminism necessary? Are feminists outdated, unattractive, and angry? Whatever it once was, feminism has changed over time as well, opening an avenue for shared parenting, more at home dads, and widening the scope for men as well as women. How has it affected your life, and what role will it play in your daughters'? Here's a smattering of what's been floating around - from Michelle Dean in The Nation, On The Anger of Betty Friedan; Huffington Post's Choice and the Feminine Mystique Fifty Years Later; NPR's On Point The Feminine Mystique at 50.
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Our Cause Is Just, and Our Fight Goes On and On ....and on and on and on....
We've established that mothers can be politicians, professors, truck drivers and engineers. Do we still have to fight for some yet-to-be-won rights?
A number of international conventions include provisions ensuring gender equality and providing protections for workers with family caregiving responsibilities. The United States seeks to exert global and moral leadership as an exemplar of human rights. Yet its neglect of the needs of its own workers with family responsibilities, including its failure to ensure paid sick and paid family leave, is counter to these widely accepted human rights norms.
These are the words of Risa Kaufmann, a sister in arms and co-founder of A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center, and executive director of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute from her recently published letter in The New York Times. The paper also ran a great piece on paid family leave featuring an interview with Vicki Shabo of The National Partnership for Women & Families. Maybe some well-placed righteous anger would be just the thing....
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Sheryl Sandberg - "I Choose Both!"
The Big Three are constantly in print these days about women, children and work. Anne-Marie Slaughter's name will forever call to mind "having it all". Yahoo CEO Marissa "the new baby is really no big deal" Mayer has sure made her mark. Now Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, she of the famous TEDTalk, is about to release Lean In, which purports to tell us why our progress in being mothers AND leaders has been so slow. From a book review in The Atlantic:
Sandberg's proposition, though, looks a lot more like most women's lives than the "either/or" model into which women's lives get shoved. Many women navigate the "ands" every day, juggling a work life and a family life whose demands have meshed into one another in our constantly connected, 24/7-everything world. They don't have the luxury of choosing one or the other because they are too busy doing both.
It's a reasonable argument, that women are so busy caring for children and giving it up at work that they have no time or energy to press for their own political interests and push for the changes that could seriously improve their lives. If Sheryl, Marissa and Anne-Marie are in a position to throw their weight around, more power to 'em.
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