I was afraid that the findings would be used against nurturing men, taunting them with loss of virility and status along with “loss” of testosterone, so I hope you will all share this supportive analysis with all those women and men who are trying so hard to reinvent parenting on kinder, gentler terms.

Louise Knight, whose book about the early reformer Jane Addams I really loved, does a good job of summarizing them in this Women’s Media Center “Exclusive”:

Photo: BlackYouthProject.com

The act of daily childcare changes fathers hormonally, and that’s all to the good of their families. The author discusses what feminists have long suspected.

The headlines were certainly eye-catching. “Fatherhood Depletes Testosterone” (Los Angeles Times), “Father’s Testosterone Drops Steeply after Baby Arrives” (Fox News website).

And the stories stressed the same point. The LA Times led with, “Hormonally speaking, becoming a father may make you less of man.” Fox News led with, “A father’s testosterone level drops steeply after his baby arrives.”  They were writing about the research finding that a new father’s testosterone levels dropped temporarily when a new baby came home….

Read the Article….

I have always hoped that one day I would see someone reading one of my books on the subway. In the fantasy I go over and ask them how they like the book. They say “I love it!” and I say “I wrote it!”

That hasn’t happened yet, but it would be the peak experience in the progression of my book from the privacy of my own manuscript out into the world. Now, I am very proud of what I have written; I do want people to read it – and, needless to say, love it. But I know that won’t happen unless I put myself “out there” too. Since I write about my own life and raise issues that are on my mind, talking about my book means talking about me. And since I count on the women I interview to be honest and forthright about their experience, I can expect no less from myself. So I will have to make myself more vulnerable than, say, a historian in the same situation. Nevertheless, for the next several months I will need to do everything I can to call attention to my book by “tooting my own horn.”

Horn-tooting doesn’t come easy to most of us. Witness organizations like Women’s Campaign Forum which seeks out accomplished veterans of political campaigns and urges them to step out from behind the (usually male) candidate and run for office themselves. The OpEd Project and the Women’s Media Center have programs designed to nudge women with strong ideas out of the nest. I myself have written pages and pages about how we have to learn to speak up, speak out, and speak our own minds about what matters to us. I confess that I need a little practice in practicing what I preach. If I want to spread the word, I will have to pitch the word.

So here goes…..

I want thousands of women to pick up How We Love Now and see themselves in it; I want them to be inspired and reassured by its message – that women like us should understand that a softening body is not a lifeless body, that sex can be better than ever when a woman has reached the point where she feels free to express herself, that old relationships can be revitalized and new ones can be transformational, that having a man around is nowhere near the only way to feel profound intimacy with another person, and that experimentation and daring can lead to self-discovery. That at our age passion – for life, for sex, for engagement with the world – is simmering in surprising places.

Now that wasn’t so hard.

In 1963 Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique identified The Problem That Has No Name—a soul-destroying malaise and sense of uselessness that beset the woman who had bought into the “mystique” of perfect wife, homemaker, and mother. Because she wasn’t happy, she thought something was wrong with her. The second wave of the Women’s Movement gave a name to that problem and countless other experiences that women were afraid to discuss.

Everything changed in the seventies and eighties, and an unintended consequence of the revolution in women’s roles was a new mystique—Having It All. The woman who couldn’t juggle work and family, couldn’t cheerfully “bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan”—as the Enjoli perfume ad proclaimed—felt once again that something was wrong with her. We struggled to ward off the guilt and break free of that mystique too.

Now, as gender roles adapt to new family values, comes a new mystique—“the male mystique,” so named by the prestigious Families and Work Institute in a recent study. It finds men increasingly stressed out by trying to achieve an unattainable standard of the perfect father, husband, and breadwinner….

Click here to read and share the full article

The Women’s Media Center
Making Women Visible And Powerful In The Media
http://www.womensmediacenter.com

The author, editor of the WMC Exclusives, recalls a moment decades ago that encapsulates the power and purpose of the former First Lady, who died last week at the age of 93.

From right: Betty Ford, Rosalyn Carter, Bella Abzug and Maya Angelou at the Houston Conference. Photo: Jo Freeman

As the wife of a Republican former president, Betty Ford seemed completely comfortable sitting on the dais with her Democratic counterparts. A member of her party, Representative Robert Dornan of California, called it “the greatest tragedy of all” that she and the other first ladies were sitting “properly with their hands in their lap” alongside of Bella Abzug, “approving of sexual perversion and the murder of young people in their mothers’ wombs.” His outrage referred to two of the 26 planks that the widely representative national delegates had brought to Houston from their state conferences and were about to pass overwhelmingly: one favoring gay and lesbian rights—including the right to serve openly in the military—and one demanding the continuing right to abortion and reproductive freedom.

Read More

There’s no official vacation day, very little media coverage, and you won’t even find it on the calendar—but this holiday commemorates a movement that’s made a huge impact on our lives both personally and professionally. March 8^th is International Women’s History Day. Even more, it marks the 100^th anniversary of the acknowledgment that women, too, made and continue to make contributions to the progress of society.

So why isn’t there more publicity? Doesn’t this day deserve at least as much fanfare as the Super Bowl, Halloween, or even Groundhog Day? Apparently not! This lack of mention is not only distressing; it’s one more instance of the devaluation of women that’s gone on since recorded time. And I, for one, wish the Great Goddess was still around to kick a little butt!

But since her return isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, let’s launch a fitting celebration of the holiday and commence some butt kicking of our own. Tell your friends and neighbors, inform your coworkers and clients, and even shout it from the rooftops: “We are women—we still roar—and we gals have a proud and rich history of our own.”

Suzanne Braun Levine, former editor of Ms. magazine and author of numerous books on women’s issues, shared an insider’s perspective on International Women’s History Day in our interview on Feisty Side of Fifty Radio. If you ever wanted to feel pride in your gender’s history, be sure to give this a listen. (I promise, it’ll be well worth your time.)

Then take this feeling one step further and share your thoughts on the unsung contributions of women over the years. As evidenced by a recent article in The New York Times entitled Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List, women tend not to toot our own historical horn. This is a huge mistake because history reflects those who write it. So stake your claim, be proud of your accomplishments, and make your voices heard. Check out sites like The Women’s Media Center, Women For Women, and Feminist.com. Contribute your thoughts to Wikipedia, start a blog, begin a women’s group.

Whichever means you choose to employ, be sure to speak up and speak out. That’s the only way future generations will know the truth about the remarkable strides we boomers have made. Perhaps the greatest contribution we can claim as a generation is our passion to ensure equal rights to all people—regardless of race or gender. Don’t let this noble mission get lost in the mists of time or be relegated to the sidelines of the past like an unremarkable afterthought.

Now, more than ever before, we boomers are called to rewrite history. This time, however, it is in service to our own HERstory. So let’s get busy: we’ve got to write, post, and speak our truth whenever and wherever we can. That’s the only way we’re certain to go down in the annals of time as the feisty and fabulous generation of women we are—and that fitting reference should please even the Great Goddess herself!

March 8 commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the official recognition of the world’s women. Over that century American women got the vote, became economic entities, and were granted equal rights in most spheres. And we found our voices. We have been speaking up and speaking out about the conditions and experiences of our lives, and as a result much of our story has emerged from the obscurity that history has relegated us to.

“Lost Women”

In the early days of Ms .magazine we developed a feature we called “Lost Women,” which told the stories of accomplished, brave, and inspiring women whose achievements – as impressive as any of their male contemporaries – had been swept under the patriarchal rug. The message of that feature was that it wasn’t for want of skill and enterprise that women didn’t show up in our history books and the objective was to reclaim many of those women. Later, when I was working on the HBO documentary She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the Twentieth Century (which won a Peabody Award, I’m proud to say), there were whole chunks of our experience for which there was no news footage; to show how it was for women at home in the fifties, for example, we had to use ads for the appliances she was told to buy in order to be the good housewife she was expected to be.

Over the years we have been filling in the blanks…

On both the political and personal levels. Women’s history programs proliferated and mothers, daughters, and grandmothers began to tell each other the truth about being a woman. But the story is still not being fully recorded. Witness the recent furor about the finding that only 13% of the active contributors to Wikipedia are women, and even worse, the entries about women are also anemic. A reporter for the Women’s Media Center website found that “the entry for the fictional Susan Mayer from Desperate Housewives was double that of suffragist Susan B. Anthony.”

One reason for this sad record is a misguided reverence for “facts” over “fiction” which translates into valuing quantitative descriptions over stories, events over individual experiences. Back in the Ms. days, we got lots of laughs over the distinction male journalists made between the “hard news” they admired and “soft news.”

And to some extent we have bought into that thinking, even though we personally choose the reverse .I can’t imagine writing the books I do without the stories of individual women or reading accounts of political events without the details of peoples’ lives. Despite all the journals we are working on, with the encouragement of such sites as SheWrites.com and despite the increasing number of women who speak about events with authority, with the encouragement of such sites as TheOpEdProject.com, our full story still isn’t getting recorded for posterity.

Honoring Women, Sharing Our Experiences

I can’t think of a better way to honor women past and present than by sharing our experiences. I hope many of us will enrich the accounts of women’s lives on Wikipedia and bring the stories of personal history – your own, your grandmother’s, someone whose life you admire – to the attention of local papers, groups you belong to, or your friends around the table at lunch. And please post them on my website too.

We cannot let our history be defined by imposed restrictions on how we tell it, any more than we can let others tell us how to live it. The story of how we are breaking free of being told what to do is our history.

Resources

To share your stories or learn more about organizations dedicated to making women visible in the media, history books and on the Internet, please visit:

www.wikipedia.org

www.msmagazine.com

www.womensmediacenter.com

www.theopedproject.org

www.wifp.org

www.shewrites.com

www.feminist.com

www.feistysideoffifty.com

www.more.com

www.vibrantnation.com

Women’s Media Center

We have all been almost paralyzed by horror over the events in Arizona. Not Gloria Feldt. She has written a passionate appeal to action. For those of us who stood up for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, it is time to mount a calm, cool, and collected campaign to cure the ills in our public life – civic rights.

– Suzanne Braun Levine

EXCLUSIVE: GIFFORDS’ TRAGEDY – What Is the Message to Young Women?

“When an angry young man aimed his semiautomatic handgun at Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson Safeway store on Saturday, he didn’t just critically wound her and kill or wound 19 others. He fired a shot through the heart of American democracy.

It will fall to rising leaders like Giffords—and girls like nine-year-old Christina Green, killed by the assailant’s gunfire just days after she was elected to her school’s student council—to transform our political community to one where differences can be debated safely and policies decided without fear for anything but re-election prospects.

I feel a deeply personal connection to those horrendous events that occurred during the latest “Congress on Your Corner” public meeting the third-term Democratic congresswoman has held routinely in her district. Though I was witnessing them from New York, I’m a resident of Scottsdale, 120 miles north of Tucson, and from 1978 to 1996 was CEO of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. I know the state’s wild-west politics quite well. And I’m so familiar with violent extremist attacks upon reproductive health providers that my first reaction was to swing reflexively into “how can I keep colleagues safe and courageous” mode….

To Read More…go to Women’s Media Center: www.womenmediacenter.com

Gloria Feldt is a nationally renowned activist and author whose passion for social justice has propelled her life’s work. Her previous books include the New York Times bestseller Send Yourself Roses, co-authored with actress Kathleen Turner, Behind Every Choice Is a Story, and The War on Choice. People Magazine calls Feldt “the voice of experience.” A teen mother from rural Texas, Feldt served as president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s largest reproductive health and advocacy organization, from 1996-2005.

Feldt’s passion for bettering women’s lives remains her driving force as an independent commentator on women’s issues, politics, media, and leadership. She teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and serves on the board of the Women’s Media Center.

www.gloriafeldt.com

The release of a report suggesting that women should begin regular mammograms at 50 instead of forty shouldn’t obscure the fact that women over fifty should most definitely be conscientious about scheduling annual mammograms:

Here is what I wrote last month (see “Five Ways to Make Fall Work for You – Remember Good Health is about Maintenance):

“Older age is the single greatest risk factor for breast cancer in women. According to the American Cancer Society (1999), breast cancer risk increases from 1 in 67 at age 40 to 1 in 25 at age 70, and the incidence continues increasing to age 80. More than one-half of all breast cancers occur in women age 65 or over. Mammography screening has been demonstrated to reduce breast cancer mortality, especially among women in the age group 50-74 compared with those without mammography.”

Barbara Glickstein’s analysis of the current controversy, posted on the Women’s Media Center website (www.womensmediacenter.com), is the smartest I’ve read yet:

“As a feminist health activist who has followed the debates over mammography since the technology was introduced in the 1970s, I’m convinced that the current controversy has resulted from the premature promotion of mammography to younger women. Both the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute had recommended mammography for women ages 35 and older—before any research supported the advice. There was considerable controversy then, and a widespread belief that the recommendation to extend screening to women under 50 depended less on evidence than on politics.

What the new guidelines state is that baseline mammography should start at 50, not at 40. They don’t say never do it from 40 to 50 but just don’t automatically do it. Dr. Susan Love stated it clearly, “Mammography is not a good tool for finding breast cancer in younger women and we need to put our efforts to finding something better. Young women’s breasts are more sensitive to low dose radiation and starting yearly mammograms at 40 will cause as many breast cancers as it will find. With age the breast sensitivity to radiation becomes less and mammograms become more accurate and so it becomes worth it.”

Read the entire article at www.womensmediacenter.com. The Women’s Media Center makes women visible and powerful in the media. Led by its president, Jehmu Greene, the WMC works with the media to ensure that women’s stories are told and women’s voices are heard.

Like many of you, I am sure, I kept wondering as I read about the American journalists who were arrested by North Korea, tried, sentenced and finally released, what prompted these two women to leave their families (especially a young child) to venture to the Korean peninsula to follow a story. What was the story they were pursuing?

In all the coverage of their chilling circumstances I found no answer to that question. Until this week when I read the dramatic, detailed, and well documented background report by another courageous woman, Ji-Yeon Yuh a Korean American scholar, writer, and activist who is also working to uncover underground criminal human trafficking operations.

Ji-Yeon Yuh’s article “What Were Laura Ling and Euna Lee Looking For in North Korea?” is on The Women’s Media Center website. Read it and be informed.
And outraged.

Click here to read the article

The Women’s Media Center (WMC) was founded in 2005 as a non-profit progressive women’s media organization by writers/activists Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem. WMC makes women visible and powerful in the media.

The Women’s Media Center (WMC)
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/index.html