Single Women and the US Women’s Movement: Insights from India

by E. Kay Trimberger

Last fall, I began to study single women in India in preparation for  attending a Women’s Studies conference in New Delhi in January 2008. I knew beforehand that marriage was even more dominant there, and that the number of single women was proportionally much smaller. I found census figures as confirmation: 89.5% of Indian women between the ages of 25-59 are married, as compared with 65% of American women in the same age group. As for the unmarried women in that age group, the "never marrieds" account for 2.5% in India versus 16% in the U.S., while the percentage of divorced women in that population is 17% in the U.S. as opposed to a mere 1% in India. The percentage of Indian widows is 7%, higher than the 2% rate in America. (Sources: 2000 U.S. Census, 2001 Indian Census).

I expected to find  feminist organizing of Indian widows, since their plight has been widely publicized. Nor was I surprised to find that the long-standing, large, and diverse Indian women’s movement focused on issues such as marriage/family reform and ending violence against women (including rape, wife-beating and wife-burning), as well as addressing women’s poverty, and caste and class differences. I was startled, however, to discover concrete examples of Indian feminists bringing together diverse groups of single women (e.g., the never-married, divorced, deserted wives and widows), agitating for  recognition of their common interests as singles. In America, our women’s movement has never done so. In reflecting on the possible reasons why Indian feminists have organized singles while we in the U.S. have not, I gained  insights into how our women’s movement could initiate a new campaign to address the  needs of U.S. women who spend an increasing percentage of their life span single.

Against all odds?

by Renée Bergland

When I started my book on the nineteenth-century scientist Maria Mitchell, I expected to find that she had triumphed against impossible odds.  “Bias and Barriers” against women’s achievement in the science are pretty intense in the twenty-first century, and I presumed that the obstacles must have been much harsher nearly two hundred years ago. My presumptions were bolstered by earlier accounts of Mitchell that tended to emphasize her exceptional qualities and minimize the encouragement she received from her family and her community. The great surprise for me was that Mitchell faced relatively little bias. In her time, girls were thought of as naturally scientific—and science itself was considered a feminine pastime.

The shocks of history can be hard to parse. On one hand, it’s exciting to realize that there was a time (not that long ago) when a girl like the young Maria Mitchell grew up believing that there was nothing preventing her from achieving scientific greatness. On the other hand, it’s a bit discouraging to realize that when I was born in New York City in the late twentieth century, the odds were worse for girls in astronomy than they had been when Mitchell was born on Nantucket more than a hundred and fifty years before. To add to the depression factor, I worried that uncovering Mitchell’s advantages might make her achievements seem less impressive.

Suzanne Strempek Shea on Weekend Edition

For those of you who have been enjoying Suzanne Strempek Shea's posts from the roadtrip that inspired Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, tune in to Weekend Edition on NPR tomorrow, Easter morning, to hear an interview with Shea conducted by Liane Hansen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the story on the NPR website.]

And if you haven't read the posts, here they are:

Celtic Celebrations
Barack Obama's church
Christmas Eve in Bethlehem

The Danger of Water Wars

Fred Pearce is the author of When the Rivers Run Dry: Water the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, March 22nd is World Water Day, an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro.

by Fred Pearce

Water consumption has tripled in the past 30 years and there's a growing danger that disputes over the most necessary of resources could erupt into violence

Water is rapidly becoming one of the defining crises of the 21st century. Climate change is making its availability increasingly uncertain. And we are using ever more of the stuff. In the past three decades the human population has doubled but human use of water has tripled -- largely because, ton-for-ton, modern 'high-yielding' crop varieties often need more water than the old crops.

A typical Westerner consumes, directly and through thirsty products like food, about a hundred times their own weight in water every day. That is why some of the great rivers of the world, such as the Nile, Indus, Yellow River and Colorado, no longer reach the sea in any appreciable volume. All their water is taken.

Many parts of the world, notably the Middle East, are running out of water to feed themselves. In response, a vast global trade is emerging. Not in water itself, but in thirsty crops like grains and sugar and cotton. Europe is a major importer of thirsty crops. Meanwhile the US, along with a handful of other countries, like Australia, Argentina, Thailand and Canada, are major exporters.

Economists call this the 'virtual water trade.' Many countries would starve without it. But as more and more countries run short of water, the trade will be disrupted. And the threat of wars over water will grow.

Dreaming of Barack and Hillary (and John)

by Kelly Bulkeley

At the conclusion of a recent New Yorker story about her new website posting people's dreams of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Toronto novelist Sheila Heti said, "I sort of hope that the campaign managers will change the way candidates give speeches as a result of people's dream lives. It must be telling them something."

These dreams do have the potential to reveal meaningful facets of people's political beliefs. The frequency and intensity of a politician's appearance in people's dreams can be taken as an accurate index of his or her personal charisma. The more people dream of a politician, the more likely that politician has made a deep emotional impact on them (both positively and negatively--Heti's website has instances of both).

In 1992, when I first studied dreams of politicians during that year's Presidential election, I heard numerous dreams of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, and almost none of George H.W. Bush--no doubt where the charisma lay in that contest! As of March 18th, Heti's website contains 73 dreams of Obama, 67 of Hillary, and four of John McCain (to be fair, the space for McCain dreams was just created on March 10th). Now, as then, the dreams offer a mix of the bizarre and the trivial, the profound and the absurd, the personally idiosyncratic and the socially relevant. From a research perspective, the value of Heti's website is that it provides further evidence that people dream not only about their private lives but also about public affairs like political contests. Dreaming is not purely inward-looking; it also has the capacity to look outwards and express our feelings about the major concerns, conflicts, and challenges of our communities.

Color Me Gay

by Harlyn Aizley

Oh sure I'm a daughter/ sister/ mother/ partner/ friend/ Jew/ writer/ runner/ painter/ cook/ researcher. But when it comes to my daughter's kindergarten all I'm aware of being is a LESBIAN.

"Yoo-hoo, you in the carpool line, aren't you a LESBIAN?"

"Hey you in the front row at the winter concert, I hear you're a LESBIAN."

This is mostly my problem. Apparently the majority of the other parents at this unnamed, posh private school are not thinking about my sexual orientation every time they see me. The problem is I think they are.

Sundays in America: Celtic Celebrations

by Suzanne Strempek Shea

Want to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in an authentic manner, but without having to pay ever-rising trans-Atlantic airfares or swallow a startling dollar-to-euro exchange? Skip the trip to Ireland and stay stateside for a journey to All Saints Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

After all, a holy day is what the holiday is first and foremost. St. Patrick's Day parades now meander down the lanes even of Ireland's smallest villages, and Dublin's to-do now rivals New York City's or Boston's, but until recent years St. Patrick's Day in Ireland was a day off for church and family. Prior to your pub visit, or post-parade, consider a visit to this 111-year-old Anglican church, which holds a Celtic Eucharist service each Wednesday and Saturday evening.

It’s offered as part of a Celtic spirituality focus that began in 1989 at All Saints, a stately Protestant church located down the hill from the birthplace of this country’s only Catholic president. “Celtic worship seeks to heal the wounds of centuries,” All Saints Rector David A. Killian writes in the 20-page black-on-gray liturgy booklet. “Celtic Spirituality is committed to caring for the earth, promoting equality between men and women, securing justice and freedom for all, and working for peace in the world."

On Human Guinea Pigs

by Carl Elliott

In his 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, Maurice Pappworth tells the story of a poor student who had volunteered for a number of medical experiments in exchange for cash. As the student was undergoing a highly complex cardiac catheterization, he went into profound shock and his heart stopped. Only after several minutes was the researcher able to resuscitate him. Pappworth wrote, "The experimenter then continued with the experiment as though nothing had happened." Then the researcher turned to all those present and said, "He must be a fool to repeatedly come back to us."

I have heard that thought expressed many times, although not quite so bluntly. Why does anybody take untested drugs for money, much less earn their living by doing it? Clinical research is regulated far more strictly now than it was in 1967, but it still rests on the willingness of thousands of human subjects to test the safety of new drugs. Many of these subjects are guinea pig pros, who spend a good part of each year in private, for-profit research units, submitting themselves to invasive medical procedures in exchange for cash. Nobody today calls them fools, of course. But many observers assume that guinea pig pros must have something wrong with them -- that they are psychologically disturbed, or that they like to live on the wild side, or as the current jargon has it, they enjoy "engaging in risk-seeking behavior." Nobody seems to consider the more obvious explanation: that they are desperate for the money.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver in concert, Bob Herbert on Poverty, Suzanne Strempek Shea's Religious Roadtrip

Eight of Mary Oliver's poems were set to music by Ronald Perera and performed by the The New Amsterdam Singers this past Sunday afternoon. From the New York Times:

Ms. Oliver’s poetry, which has drawn comparisons to the work of Emerson and Thoreau, reveals an awestruck regard of nature that verges on the religious: “What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven,” she writes in “I Looked Up,” the fifth poem in Mr. Perera’s cycle. Her work also demonstrates a discerning eye and an ability to render vivid images with a few deft strokes.

Mr. Perera sensitively underscores both attributes in a cycle spanning a day from one dawn to the next, linked by a subtle, recurring four-note motif. His music neatly conjures Ms. Oliver’s rippling pond, wary crows, flitting bats and lazily unspooling snake. At the same time, the work’s dramatic progression, from the shivering anticipation of “Morning at Great Pond” to the radiant affirmation of the concluding title poem, “Why I Wake Early,” does justice to the poet’s more transcendental intents. Enhanced by Mr. Perera’s estimable knack for setting English, this is a substantial addition to the choral canon.

Listen to an excerpt of "Why I Wake Early" on Mr. Perera's website.

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Bob Herbert, in an op-ed about our current economic mess, quotes John Edwards' introduction to The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

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The Springfield, MA, Republican (the paper, not the party) ran a piece about Suzanne Strempek Shea's ambitious and illuminating adventure that resulted in the forthcoming Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith. Suzanne has posted here about two of the churches she visited (Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and Barack Obama's Church) and this Sunday we'll run another about St. Patrick's Day at All Saints Episcopal in Brookline, MA.

Making it a Movie

by Martin Moran

I write from the edge of Washington, DC, on a freezing day. I'm here performing a one-man play, The Tricky Part, which was developed from my memoir of the same title. There's an Obama event going on at a Virginia high school some blocks from here. A massive motorcade -- cycles, black sedans, police cars -- is streaming past my apartment window. It is the picture of momentum itself: wheels and steel and flashing lights, the gathering force of change, a traffic nightmare, a future president? The high school they’re headed to, T.C. Williams, was the subject of a feature film some years ago starring Denzel Washington as the coach of the school's football team, the Titans.

I'm watching all this, here at my computer, while struggling to write a script, a film adaptation of my book and play. The autobiographical tale is sensitive and complex and I am finding the task of transforming the material into yet another genre daunting if not impossible. This accounts for all the looking out the window.

Let me lay out the essentials. When I was twelve, a camp counselor molested me. Our illicit sex went on for three years. I grew taller and older while holding the boy inside me hostage because I blamed him for being bad, for doing wrong, for succumbing to desire. I couldn’t help it and it was agonizing. I got even older and started writing about what happened, became obsessed with remembering, with using language to seek meaning in the story. A day would arrive when I stood to face a pasty old man crumpled in his wheelchair, the counselor who'd wronged me when I was a child. The one who ignited my aching sense of complicity. I looked at that man, at his stained pajamas; his puffy cheeks and I felt my heart break. For the fragile human in front of me, but more so for the boy I once was. And somewhere in that breaking was the beginning of forgiveness. Somehow, because I'd spent so much time piecing together the narrative of my own life, I was able to see, to feel, how that boy was blameless and how forgiveness was the gift I must give to myself.

Caroline Healey Dall

by Helen Deese

Each time I hear a news report of an American woman's breaking a new gender barrier--Madeleine Albright's becoming the first woman named as Secretary of State, Nancy Pelosi's becoming the first woman elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives, or, more recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton's coming to be the first woman who is a serious contender for a major party's presidential nomination--I can't help wondering what Caroline Healey Dall would have thought. Dall is the woman who has been my almost daily companion for almost a quarter of a century. Although she died nearly a hundred years ago (in 1912) at the age of ninety, Caroline Dall remains a lively presence for me, and I frequently play the game of trying to analyze what she would do or think in response to a particular twenty-first century event or dilemma. As both an abolitionist and a feminist, would she think it a higher priority for the country to elect its first black president or its first woman president? Although I cannot be certain of her position on such questions, I am sure that she would have been engrossed by them. I am also confident that she would have known her answers instantly and that the chances of her changing her mind would be almost nil, for she was a strong-minded and highly opinionated woman. 

The Psychological Trauma of War

by Margot Adler

It's not something you read in a newspaper or hear on an ordinary news show; it's only on the comedy shows like Real Time with Bill Maher where you hear it whispered: the idea that John McCain has PTSD, and that it would be scary to have his finger on the button. Whether or not this is the same kind of slur we hear from those who say Barak Obama was schooled in a madrassa, it seems perfectly reasonable to wonder if anyone who spent five years in a tiger cage might have some remnants of PTSD - even decades later.

So when I heard it on Bill Maher the other night, it reminded me that we are living in a society where thousands of young men and women, our very future, are returning home every day scarred from battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those scars are painfully visible; many others are not. Few people are really looking deeply at what this means for families and relationships, even what it means for our daily lives as Americans. Only one person that I know of in the mainstream media has delved deeply and movingly into this issue. For more than a year, in a series of searing pieces, Daniel Zwerdling at NPR has chronicled the plight of military personnel to get the mental health care they need. In many cases, veterans with PTSD have been kicked out of the military for bad behavior and are unable to access mental health services.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book called Heretic's Heart about my own life during the 1960's. Several chapters of that book were letters between me, as a twenty-year-old University of California - Berkeley student and activist, and Marc Anderson, a soldier fighting in Vietnam whom I met through the mail after he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper that could only be described as a cry from the abyss.

Link Roundup: Margaret Seltzer a sociopath? The Sexing of Science. Lowlights of the Presidential Race.

Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, ponders the question of blame in the Nation:

Could it be as simple as a case of innocent victims--the editor, the agent, the writing teacher--being duped by one sociopathic young lady?

Maybe. But it also may also be true that when it comes to a hard-luck gang story, McGrath, Bender and others involved in the publication of Love and Consequences were more inclined to err on the side of sensationalism and exploitation over the hard work of grooming an author who might give readers genuine authenticity. And it is more than a bit ironic that their apparent quest for vividly told ghetto authenticity led them to nurture and promote a white woman writer whose story, even if it were true, represented only a one-dimensional version of the Authentic Black Experience.

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The Nantucket Independent highlights the life of native daughter Maria Mitchell, whose life in science is explored in the forthcoming Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renée Bergland.

Throughout the book, Bergland examines Mitchell's rise from 1847, when she witnessed the flash of a comet... to becoming the "computer of Venus" employed by the Nautical Almanac to calculate by math the orbit of that planet; to her hiring as the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College for women; and to the close of the 1800s when women's roles in the sciences were discouraged and Mitchell lamented that she might be the last of the nation's female scientists.

Bergland notes that while the word "scientist" had no masculine association at the start of the 19th century, by 1873 a male Harvard Medical School faculty member posited that women were physiologically unable to study science and that those who pursued the subject with vigor risked becoming "thoroughly masculine in nature or hermaphroditic in mind."

As of 1875, 10 years after Mitchell was appointed to her professorship, the move toward a male scientific role model had gained societal dominance.

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The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy compiles the worst moments in the race for "Pastor-in-Chief." Watch them on YouTube, where the video has been added to the Beacon Broadside favorites. Mitt Romney's speech on faith in America didn't even make Gaddy's top ten.

Media, Technology and Bullying: New Partners in Nastiness

by Mara Sapon-Shevin

When I was in middle-school, the way the “popular kids” tormented those of us who weren’t so lucky, was through something called “Slam Books.” A popular kid (it was usually a girl) would start a notebook with individual pages headed with the names of unpopular students. The book would be passed around to the other “popular” kids and they would take turns making nasty entries under the unpopular students’ names. Under Beth’s name, for example, they would write, “Ugly,” “Bad complexion,” “Stupid,” and “Slutty.”

There would be lots of snickering and giggling as the notebook was passed (not that unobstrusively) between the popular kids who were writing the nasty comments. Slam books were the source of public humiliation, and they made the lives of some of us miserable. It was never clear whether or not teachers were aware of what was going on, but I don’t remember any intervention at the time.

Now, however, we have entered the era of high technology, and the ways in which students torment one another are far more sophisticated. Cyberbullying is a growing and distressing phenomenon that has recently received extensive media attention.

Link Roundup: Seed Vaults, Marriage, Reproduction, Updates

"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth, and ties its mission to the struggles to maintain genetic diversity in agriculture despite the increasing privatization of seeds by agribusiness. You can hear Cummings on NPR's OnPoint tomorrow. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the segment.]

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Check out Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, at the Washington Post, the Washington Blade, the Los Angeles Times, and on her new blog, where Polikoff, an expert on gay and lesbian family law, highlights issues in the news that affect the legal rights of all families.

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Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, appeared on WUWM's Lake Effect radio show. Listen here.

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Kathryn Joyce, whose book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2009, wrote in the Nation about the real motives behind worries that there's a looming European "demographic disaster." The piece was cross-posted at RHRealityCheck, where Kathryn has previously posted about Quiverfull, an anti-birth control movement that urges Christian families to "leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God."

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Glenn Branch sent us an update to his post on the evolution debate in Florida (also added as an update to the post):

It happened. On February 29, state senator Ronda Storms (R–Valrico) introduced a bill, SB 2692 [pdf], styled “The Academic Freedom Act.” Purporting to protect the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins” and the right of students not to be “penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position or view regarding biological or chemical evolution,” the bill would not affect the content of the standards, although it is clear that it was introduced at the behest at those who opposed their excellent treatment of evolution. A string of similar bills in Alabama—HB 391 and SB 336 in 2004; HB 352, SB 240, and HB 716 in 2005; HB 106 and SB 45 in 2006—failed. With only sixty days in the regular legislative session, perhaps the Florida legislature will be able to find something useful to do, instead of wasting its time mollifying creationists.

The Sound of Silence, Supreme Court Style

by Jay Wexler

The Supreme Court has a lovely tradition whereby each Justice’s group of law clerks gets to go out to lunch with each other Justice once during the term. This tradition, which dates back to the sixteenth century, allows the Court’s thirty-six or so law clerks to have at least a little face time with all the Justices. When I was clerking for Justice Ginsburg during the 1998-1999 term, for example, my three co-clerks and I were lucky enough to share Indian food with Justice Breyer, pizza and red wine with Justice Scalia, and classic American with Justice Stevens. The only Justice we didn’t have lunch with was Justice Kennedy, and that was only because on the day of the event, we were notified that we would have to get dressed up to be seen with the Justice in public. Since we generally showed up to work in bathrobes and hair curlers, we were forced to decline the invitation. 

When people ask me which Justice seemed the most like a regular, normal person, they often appear surprised when I say that it was, without any doubt, Justice Thomas. Not that “Most Normal Supreme Court Justice” is a particularly difficult title to achieve, but during our lunch, Justice Thomas impressed me as being a totally friendly and incredibly down-to-earth guy, and I say this not just because he laughed at my “Why- did- the- guy- get- fired- from- the- orange- juice- factory?- Because- he- couldn’t- concentrate” joke.

Obviously my time up close with Justice Thomas was extremely limited, but I did get the sense that he cared a great deal about the people who he worked with at the Court. He’s the guy, for example, who supposedly knows the name of everyone who works at the Court, from the cafeteria workers to the Curator’s assistant to the security guards. At the time of our lunch, one of my co-clerks was having a family problem that Justice Thomas knew something about. The next day, I was working on some memo or something when the door to the chambers opened.  It was Justice Thomas with a book that he wanted my co-clerk to have. It’s hard to communicate how unusual it is for a Justice to just pop into the chambers of another Justice, much less anywhere near where the clerks sit. Perhaps it’s some evidence of how startling it was that, when I saw Justice Thomas suddenly standing in front of my desk, I immediately projectile vomited all over my memorandum.