Ellen Goodman in The Daily Herald Today:
“Oh, so is this the only way women can have it all?”
“May I take a minute to pass out the cigars for Adriana Iliescu? This 66-year-old Romanian woman has been officially designated the world’s oldest mom.
Of course, Adriana had a bit of help. She had nine years of fertility treatment plus a donor egg and some donor sperm. Nevertheless, this single senior has finally fulfilled her dream.
As she glowingly told reporters, ‘I always worked so hard in my career I had no chance to build a relationship and start a family, and after I retired I regretted it bitterly. But I never gave up hope.’
With that statement, Adriana is a role model for revisionists who are forever telling women they can have it all, just not at the same time. She may even become the poster elder for those touting ‘life sequencing’ as the bright shiny new/old solution to the problem of balancing work and family.
She has figured it out: pensions and pacifiers.
You will not be surprised that her demanding career was as a college professor. We know academic women in America have the lowest fertility rate of women in any of the professions.
Before Iliescu entered mom-hood, Berkeley Dean Mary Ann Mason set out to answer the question asked by her female graduate students: ‘Is there a good time to have a baby?’
Her analysis of 160,000 Ph.D’s showed that having children early in their careers was a boon for men and a bust for women. Fathers who had children within 5 years of their Ph.D were more likely to get tenure-track jobs than other men, but mothers were less likely than either fathers or other women. As for women who got on the tenure track before the baby track: Only one in three ever became mothers.
Right now, the big flap in the land of academia is over Harvard President Larry Summers’ off-the-cuff and off-the-wall remarks about women and science. He wondered aloud whether innate gender differences were one reason women weren’t getting ahead in the sciences. But what slid by with little fuss was this economist’s other explanation for science and gender inequity: the conflict between motherhood and the ‘80-hour week’. He made it sound as if the weighty work week was genetically programmed.
Higher education is a laboratory where all the contemporary problems of work and family get distilled. The average graduate student gets a doctorate at around age 33 and makes tenure by 40. As Mason says, ‘The 30’s are the make-it-or-break-it decade with everything colliding at once.’ In the academy, the rule is up or out, publish or perish, tenure or bye-bye. Do I hear a biological clock ticking?
The focus on the 80-hour workweek doesn’t discount old-fashioned gender discrimination, especially in science. One of the women who walked out on Summers’ remarks was MIT professor Nancy Hopkins. 6 years ago, she led a hardy band of 15 senior faculty women, armed with calculators, who forced the venerable institution to fess up to gender bias.
But those professors also worried that they had become ‘negative role models’ to younger women in science. Had their stressed-out lives, their difficulties balancing work and family, led many younger women to say, ‘If that’s having it all, you can have it’?
These questions are in the air, not just in academia. There are a few more family-friendlier plans in academia today, ranging from flex time for tenure-track teachers to re-entry plans. But ‘life sequencing’ remains a conversation about women directed at women. When was the last time you heard a treatise urging men to marry and father earlier in life?
Meanwhile, too few have taken on the unisex madness of the workload overload. Until we do that, having it all, in sync or sequence, is going to be as seamless and sensible as having a baby at 66.” Ellen Goodman, © Washington Post Writers Group
Yesterday in the “Non Sequitur” cartoon in the Chicago Tribune: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the corporate states of America…and to the Republicans for which it stands, one nation under debt, with liberty and justice for oil.”
Nathan Bierma, in the 1-19-05 Chicago Tribune, quotes a study of inaugural addresses by Kristin Lindholm and Michael Bailey: “In the ‘early’ period…from Washington to FDR,… religious rhetoric was used to talk about American’ limits and duty to God. Because humans are imperfect, these speeches said, they must follow God’s laws and realize that their fate is in his hands.”
“Lindholm and Bailey note that in the 20th Century… ‘God is mentioned…to claim divine blessing on all that Americans imagine and achieve. No longer do inaugurals serve as speeches about government-mentions of the Constitution and the word ‘citizens’ have all but dropped out-now they are sermons about the American spirit and how all Americans have infinite potential (as in Clinton’s “the future is up to us”)’”
Nathan Bierma continues: “Lindholm and Bailey call this ‘troubling, because as democracy becomes divinized, realistic limits in political life are downplayed in favor of unlimited promises and utopian ideals’”
“This new rhetoric, Lindholm said…promotes ‘the sense that the power to change the world comes from us as a nation and a people, as opposed to coming from something external such as the laws of God or laws of nature.’”
Paraphrasing Nathan Bierma now, President Bush’s “espousing his Christian beliefs” ‘is only half the story’, says Lindholm. “Sometimes Bush does present a vision in line with early presidents’ view of God as the sole source of American greatness. But at other times, Lindholm says, he presents America itself as an object of worship”.
Does Charles Krauthammer believe America is God? Yesterday he warned that China and Russia getting together was a threat to us. His conclusion seemed to be “there is no rest for the weary!” God America who has to oversee the other peoples of the Planet?
The “Mutts” cartoon the same day was the perfect foil. The dog looks down, “what’s on my to-do list” today? “1. Chase your own tail”. The dog then looks at us and says “no rest for the weary”.
The book Persian Puzzle was quoted in a recent Trib editorial. The author was one of 3 guys answering questions about Iran on C-Span.
The last reporter asked: Will Israel will take care of the problem for us, as they did with Iraq?
The 3 explained: Iraq was a slam-dunk for Israel, as it was a “hop, skip and a jump” for their planes. Iran is much further; at least one refueling would be needed, and even so, the planes would have to carry so much fuel that only the tiniest of bombs could be carried.
Also, not even Israeli Intelligence knows how many or the whereabouts of any Iranian nuclear sites.
Most Mid-east countries did not like Saddam, so they were perhaps secretly relieved when his nuclear capabilities were halted. It won’t be the same with Iran.
Coincidence that VP Cheney came out with his incredibly simplistic statement? Was the author of The Persian Puzzle totally wrong, or was Cheney? Did the VP maybe hear about the reporter’s question, but didn’t listen to the answer? Or even scarier, didn’t care about the experts’ explanation? He figures he knows better than they do?
Letter to the Editor:
I’m really glad Exelon has figured out how to make older Nuclear plants run safely; but after decades of learning what works and what doesn’t, how come there isn’t ONE standardized design? So reactors can all be built to the same safest standards?
Four new and different designs make me nervous. Will it take more decades to work out the “kinks”? Is $260 million just the start of greater taxpayer subsidies to come?
Why risk it, when the U.S has plenty of electricity? When more nuclear plants won’t reduce our dependence on Mideast oil? Investing in Biodiesel makes more sense. Vegetable oil can run cars and trucks. Electricity can’t.
Thank you,
news2notice@msn.com
“John Kerry came straight out of central casting”, asserts Kathleen Parker in the Tribune. Wasn’t that was Ronald Reagan, trained actor and TV star in a white cowboy hat? He didn’t think Ike was tough enough on Communism, and was horrified when Ike cut the Defense budget. Ike called the war option preposterous in a nuclear age. He wanted to grow the “real” economy, and exposed the Military-Industrial Complex.
But then, Ike had actually been in war, as had Kerry. Ike had a “personality surplus”; but even so, Fear of Communism swept the nation. Now here we go again, and its worse, ‘cause Kerry has a “personality deficit”, says Kathleen Parker. It’s his own fault the Majority “didn’t trust him enough to “abandon the devil they knew”.
The Majority doesn’t take responsibility for reaffirming Bush? It’s Kerry’s fault for snowboarding and not acting his age? Sheesh! The guy “saw 4 different sides to every issue.” The Majority liked the Bomber Jacket-guy and could repeat verbatim his 4 excuses for invading Iraq. “Osama who”? What a hoot!
Happy ending? Americans are full of Honor, concludes Kathleen. No mention of the first September 11th , 1973. Or how RR armed and trained 500,000 Mujahideen for Holy War. If the Bible is the only book the Majority reads, did they miss the Pharaoh and Moses? And maybe wonder if terrible things are being done to us, because we did it to them? John Kerry tried to be realistic, to move on toward constant improvement. And he did try. Thank you.
Derrick Z. Jackson, in the Chicago Tribune 12-6-04, said Lynndie England could get 38 years. In contrast, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, received a 15 gun salute when he returned to his base in Germany, and could still make 4 stars, if Rummy and Wolfowitz get their wish.
In spite of a report that “U.S. military sweeps of thousands of people off the streets were so indiscriminate that they were ‘counterproductive to the coalition’s efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry.’” And many prisoners were being abused in secret facilities all over the country.
Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, where the Red Cross found “extensive physical and psychological abuse”, has landed in a cushy job at the Pentagon. But “3 soldiers accused of smothering an Iraqi general to death in an interrogation…may get life behind bars.”
And the President’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who considers the Geneva Convention rules “’obsolete’” and “’quaint’”? Is that like an “activist” judge? George Bush wants him to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
Derrick Z. Jackson, in the Chicago Tribune 12-6-04, said Lynndie England could get 38 years. In contrast, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, received a 15 gun salute when he returned to his base in Germany, and could still make 4 stars, if Rummy and Wolfowitz get their wish.
In spite of a report that “U.S. military sweeps of thousands of people off the streets were so indiscriminate that they were ‘counterproductive to the coalition’s efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry.’” And many prisoners were being abused in secret facilities all over the country.
Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, where the Red Cross found “extensive physical and psychological abuse”, has landed in a cushy job at the Pentagon. But “3 soldiers accused of smothering an Iraqi general to death in an interrogation…may get life behind bars.”
And the President’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who considers the Geneva Convention rules “’obsolete’” and “’quaint’”? Is that like an “activist” judge? George Bush wants him to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
