The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

California: Girl + Girl = Marriage

Naturally, the conversation turned toward the Californians' frustrations that Gov. Arnold kept vetoing the California legislature's freedom-to-marry law... and their frustrations that their progressive nongay friends dismissed their concern with the issue. After all, their nongay friends told them, registered domestic partnership protected them (CA's d.p. is equivalent to Vermont's civil unions): wasn't that enough? Nope. There are legal differences. But even if there weren't, as one friend of mine loves to say, you get to your destination whether you sit in the front or the back of the bus... and yet it's still an indignity to be forced to sit in the back. I mocked my friends mildly that California was trailing so far behind my state of Massachusetts, and promised to come to their weddings when they won.

Hearing frustrations that we had almost forgotten in Massachusetts, it struck me how very deeply the Massachusetts marriage decision had sunk into my psyche. I really have stopped feeling 'queer' in Massachusetts. Nobody around here blinks an eye when I talk about the confusions of dating (or not dating, as the case may be: now accepting applicants!) after two decades of marriage. Here in the Boston area, same-sex couples hold each others' hands in public or kiss goodby at the airport without anyone glancing at them: after all, they could be married. Two women or two men who look like they are together get treated openly as a couple--at restaurants or shops -- in a way that feels simply honest and dignified. It's a complete transformation from my youth, when the possibility of violence always simmered nearby, when shocking comments could flow at any minute. Another friend says that listening to me is like listening to her older black friends describe living through the end of Jim Crow. Yes, there's still antigay sentiment here in Mass., but it makes an enormous difference when a couple's vows to each other are recognized not just by the pair, not just by their families, but also by our government.

And it's hard to convey how very proud so many Massachusetts citizens are of having gone first. I've had Mass. state legislators tell me, in their deeply-stained Massachusetts accents, that they were opposed to gender-neutralizing marriage at first--but once they started hearing from their newly married constituents, they knew they had to vote in favor of upholding the Goodridge decision. They did vote on our side. Those who voted against full marriage rights lost their seats.

California's legislators have already voted twice in favor of full marriage rights for all; the Governator vetoed it, tossing the issue to the courts. Now the issue will be voted on popular referendum this fall. No state's popular vote has yet favored full, gender-neutral marriage. Although California's opinion trends are in the right direction, the state has an enormous conservative population (it's the state where a fourteen-year-old killed his classmate for being openly gay). This vote will be a big test. The good news is that California activists have been preparing for this match-up ever since they lost their first marriage ballot in 2000, in the proposition that the CSC just struck down, with widespread education. If any state can do defeat this bill, it's the Golden State.

I won't be flying out for any California weddings this week; my friends will wait until they've really & truly won. But I lift my coffee mug for the state's 100,000 registered domestic partners and their children -- who are full citizens, for now. May the very large country of California, with its population of 36 million, be as peacefully and easily transformed as the tinier, chillier state of Massachusetts!

AND NOW a question for Dahlia: am I reading the decision correctly? Did the California Supremes just say that sexual orientation is a fully "suspect class," equivalent to race, sex, and religion--that discrimination against LGBT folks gets, as you lawyers say, strict scrutiny? And is that as big a deal as it strikes me?
 

The Whole Race Deck

Welcome, Kim, and I’m glad you brought up Alice Walker's “womanist” position. Her Root essay last March, “Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave,” endorsing Barack Obama stayed with me a long time. Not just because I found Walker’s trademarked word womanism to describe only “feminist women of color” a little exclusionary. 

I do agree that Hillary Clinton is not, as Walker reminds us, "colorless, race-less, past-less," and she escapes racial scrutiny as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always "a black man." Furthermore, playing the race card (whether she then withdrew it or not) was inexcusable. But, although it is true that Hillary has benefited, as have I and other white women (particularly of our generation) from innumerable educational and economic advantages to being Caucasian in this country, I got a little uncomfortable when Walker wrote that Clinton carries "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person." Perhaps wrongly, until reading that, I had not personally considered myself an exploiter of racial inequality. To be clear, I am deeply ashamed of the abomination of slavery and the century of discrimination that followed. I just didn't think simply by being white and of a certain age, I was part of the problem.

I saw Florida recently joined the queue of states that have apologized for slavery. I posted a "Hot Document" a few months ago when New Jersey did the same thing. A lot of Slate readers Frayed for weeks declaiming the emptiness of that state’s gesture while many others wrote angrily that the official apology wasted resources and was not owed by the geographical descendants of New Jersey’s 19^th-century citizens. Personally, I think it’s never too late to apologize. In fact, I now want to apologize to Alice Walker on behalf of myself and all white women who believe in equality. Really. Can we be womanists now too?

As Lavender Is to Purple

Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Let's give credit where credit is due.

Hillary aside, though, what I've been wondering about more and more during this endless primary season is whether the damage done to black women/white women relationships will be permanent or not. That there has been damage to this ever-fragile sisterhood is clear to me, both in reading the millions of words flooding the Internet about this subject and in my own personal life. Problems seem to arise not when friends discover they stand on different sides of the Hillary/Barack divide, but when they discover that the very prisms through which they view this contest, and thus the relative importance of race and gender in this society, are—surprise, surprise—miles apart. More critically, the damage is deepened when one party insists that in failing to share her view, the other party is somehow less enlightened.

Just the other day I had a very awkward conversation with a white woman acquaintance who recalled aloud that infamous Gloria Steinem piece in the New York Times way back when. She recalled the article as refreshing and necessary and brave. I remembered it as the first rock tossed in what would become a battle of who-has-it-harder. Most of all, I remembered reading Steinem's line that gender was the most restricting force in America today and laughing aloud, because I was so sure that what she meant to say was that gender is the most restricting force in America today—if you happen to be white and middle-class. Having spent some time that week at a Boston public school that is visibly and painfully segregated—segregated and restricted by race and economic status and parental educational attainment and maybe some other things but certainly not by gender—and having looked up a number of statistics on the economic status of white women versus black men, including, by the way, the number of white women currently in the U.S. Senate (16) compared with the number of African-Americans (um, that would be one), found her view utterly unsupportable. My friend suggested that I was wrong. I said we might have to agree to disagree; she insisted that sexism and misogyny remain a more potent force than racism not only in America, but in my own life if I just had the good sense to realize it. And we were off on that ridiculous hamster wheel again. She quoted poor Barbara Jordan, who has been trotted out so endlessly this year by people who want to disavow the impact of race on a black woman's life that she must be begging to be allowed to rest in peace. I quoted Alice Walker, who famously wrote that womanist (feminist of color) is to feminist as lavender is to purple. In other words, our struggles are not the same. For a while there we seemed to be working together, though. Is that all over now?

Nice Timing, Don't You Think?

Let's look at how this played out. Hillary claimed that "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," hinting that he appealed only to highfalutin liberals in blue states. She was going to win blue-collar West Virginia anyhow, but did anyone expect that she'd win by 40 points? And just how did she win by that much? I can't put it any better than Jon Stewart and his bottle of Jack Daniels:

Withdrawing the Race Card

Remember how Hillary said last week that Obama's support was weakening among "working, hardworking Americans, white Americans?" Not smart, some of us at Slate thought. Clinton may not have intended to, but her remark tiptoed up to the line of suggesting that black people aren't also hardworking, and also of playing the race card. She now agrees that she screwed up, John Dickerson alerts me. From an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

"On her reference to an AP story about Obama’s support among white voters
BLITZER: Now, your great friend and supporter Congressman Charlie Rangel said and I’m quoting now. 'It’s the dumbest thing you could have said.'
CLINTON: Well, he’s probably right."

Do You Wear Red Nail Polish, Dress for Breakfast?

Among the questions in this 1930s Marital Rating Scale, mentioned by Andrew Sullivan.

Take it, and learn your worth. (Only the first page is available.)

Dead Voter, Live Candidate

Even her fund-raising pitch was subdued, and she sounded like an easy-listening version of herself as she hit all the recent talking points, minus any negative mention of Barack Obama. Her supporters at Charleston's Civic Center were on the quiet side, too, and silent as—well, you know—at every mention of her Democratic rival; when she said she and Obama had "always stood together on what was most important'' no one clapped that I could hear. And in the bleachers waiting for the Hillster to arrive, there was considerable disagreement about whether it would be better to stay home on Election Day, or settle for Barack Obama in November if Clinton doesn't get the nomination.

"I won't vote period if she doesn't get it, and I've got a big family and none of them will vote for Obama, either,'' said Carroll Ramsey, who was with his 12-year-old grandson and cast himself as a reverse ageist: "I've been in this old world for 63 years and he doesn't have the experience." The hairdresser sitting in front of him agreed: "I didn't care for all that church stuff with his preacher,'' said Dorothy Chapman, "and really, I don't think he's got enough oomph. He could change my vote, I guess, but he'd have to do some high talkin'.''

"Well, I'm a lesbian,'' said another supporter, Nancy Toney, as heads swiveled, "and these Republicans are not homosexual friendly, so hell yes I would'' vote for Obama in the fall. "I had to go with the woman, but I like both of them.''

Are YOU Having an Affair?

Well, if you're not, go to the playground and look around. One of the three married mommies innocently trailing their little tyke is cheating, according to a new "Sex and the American Mom" survey conducted by Cookie magazine and AOL Body and apparently filled in by 30,000 women. When faced with this statistic, my own (perhaps nervous) husband pointed out that this was a self-selecting survey, answered by people probably attracted by a survey with "affair" in the title. But, then, our own Emily Bazelon says this matches evidence gathered from other scientific surveys and paternity tests. So I guess I have to believe it.

But I, too, would be much more likely to believe that 30 percent of all Cookie-reading moms are having affairs. (And now prepare for a long festering rant about Cookie.) It's not merely that the hot moms of Cookie attend picnics in Italian gowns that cost as much as my laptop or have skinny jeans for every occasion. It's their sense that they deserve to preserve their "lifestyle" exactly as it should be, and God help any chocolate-smeared infant or rumpled husband who stands in their way!

When I first read about Cookie I thought I was the perfect demographic. Those mommy magazines in the ob waiting room always seemed a little sad and frumpy to me, with their tenty maternity clothes and perennial lists of "10 tips" for everything. I was even willing to overlook the fact that Cookie was founded by two hipster New Yorker roommates who didn't even have kids.

Then I picked up an early issue a couple of years ago, and Oh My God. One feature I recall was called something like "You Can Decorate White!" Some poor kid lived in a house with white couches and white side tables and fluffy white rugs. His room was all white, and there was a white model airplane on his bedstand. (Cranberry juice, anyone?) The ads were a marvel and gave the demographic away. Anyone remember that New York magazine feature about the little demon shopper girl—a 6-year-old who seemed to know everything about Marc Jacobs' latest line? Well, every ad was tailor made for her: back to school wear that ranged from $400 shoes to $1,000 plaid miniskirts and made a normal person yearn for JC Penney.

Well, a mom who sends her 6-year-old to school looking like an expensive hooker could certainly not be expected to put up with a little middle-aged husband paunch or to resist the come-on from the hot new Israeli gym teacher.

Back to the main point: Take the survey. If you don't have time, we'll excerpt what we XXers have decided is our favorite question, a decidedly normal one:

Would you rather:

1. Have more sex

2. Make more money

3. Lose ten pounds

4. Get more sleep     

Is a Stillbirth a Crime?

Maybe not in South Carolina, it turns out. You may remember Regina McKnight, who in 2001 was convicted of "homicide by child abuse" for her stillbirth. The state argued that she'd killed her fetus by using cocaine while pregnant. This week, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned her conviction, saying her public defender failed to do a decent job representing her at trial (or to use the technical term, because of "ineffective counsel")—in part by failing to present medical evidence about the shaky link between the stillbirth and the cocaine use.

This means, I guess, that my sibs and I can't go file criminal charges against our mother for giving us asthma and allergies by smoking while she was pregnant. (Yes, Mom, I know it was way back in the Dark Ages when everyone was doing it. But if everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you jump too??). Alas! The end of personal responsibility is nigh!

But seriously, folks. McKnight was sentenced to 12 years in prison, without parole, for a failed pregnancy. Right now she's still in prison, while the state decides whether or not to appeal. Read more here, here, and here.

Feminism Means Never Having To Say "I'm Toast"

Emily asked a good question yesterday about the proper feminist reading of Hillary Clinton’s weird new Bartleby phase—wherein she is all but mathematically eliminated; superdelegates are running screaming for the exits; the office furniture is being carted out onto the moving vans; and yet still she soldiers on, undaunted, because real women “don’t give up in difficult situations.”

I suppose you can call all this “feminism.” But, as my husband pointed out this morning, if the inability to concede error or defeat—even in light of irrefutable, empirical evidence and in the face of spiraling support and tanking morale—is feminism, George Bush must be the feminist icon of the ages.  

Mrs. Blair's Baggage

"Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold"

A few weeks ago, back when we were talking about those political wives who stand in the background at press conferences and speeches, staring fixedly into space while their husbands confess to infidelity, criminality, stupidity, I suggested—to the scorn of many readers—that for many wives, particularly those who have some sort of stake in the marriage, the staring-at-the-husband exercise might be worth it: After all, revenge can always be exacted later. Well, it seems that one of the more famous political wives made precisely that sort of calculation.

Cherie Blair has held her tongue for many, many years now—since her husband first became prime minister in 1997, really—and can thus fully savour this moment. After years of subjecting her personal life to the public relations needs of her spouse, she has found a way to hit back, literally below the belt. The Times of London has published extracts  of her new memoir and yes, they are quite vicious, as well as startlingly explicit. Among other things, Cherie accuses Tony of discussing how to announce her miscarriage to the great British public, even as she lay "in pain and still bleeding," and says he reacted to the news of her pregnancy with the immortal words "We'll have to tell Alastair" (Alastair being Alastair Campbell, Blair's press spokesman). She also announces that her fourth child was conceived at Balmoral Castle—one of the Queen's many homes—because she'd removed what she delicately refers to as her "contraceptive equipment" from her luggage, fearing that the servants would unpack it all, as they had on a previous visit. But then, "as usual up there it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another ..." 

The most obvious point to make about all of this is "I thought she was Roman Catholic," but I'm not going to say that. I'll only say that Cherie must have been really quite angry, all of those many long years, to have published this sort of stuff, given that she must know perfectly well what the British press is going do with it. First reaction of prominent female columnist, for example: "self-serving, smug, opportunistic, vain, shallow-thinking, nasty ..." Anyway, you get the drift. She won't be admired or loved (she isn't anyway) but perhaps she'll enjoy a few precious moments of satisfaction, finally seeing her version of events in print.

*Correction, May 14, 2008: This entry originally referred to the London Times. The newspaper is known only as the Times, though outside Britain it is often described as the Times of London.

"A Woman Is Like a Tea Bag"

... you never know how strong she is until she is in hot water." This quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is Hillary's latest feminist argument for her candidacy. As she continues to campaign and tries to turn being behind into a virtue, she keeps reminding voters of "women who didn't give up in difficult situations, who fought for equal rights, broke into male-dominated professions and succeeded when others told them to quit," according to AP. She reads letters from supporters urging her to hang in there, even as the delegate math closes in on her.  

What do you think of this latest deployment of feminism? For the moment, it seems fair enough to me. It is a sign of her toughness that she's still out there—and poised to win West Virginia tomorrow—and making the strong-woman link explicit can only help to rally the women who support her. But at some point in the next month, barring an unforeseen Obama implosion, Hilllary's perseverance is likely to go from sort of admirable to entirely delusional. Sure, make our day, show you can take the heat of losing. But if Hillary tries to hang up the Democratic nomination all summer, that won't be feminist. Just selfish. I feel reassured that she knows this, or at least knows that a lot of Democrats feel that way, since her advisers last week started promising that she'll only go until June. No tea bag is forever. Nor should it be.

The Motherhood Crunch: Worse for Scientists?

In which sector do women have it worst? According to a new report by economist Sylvia Hewlett and her co-authors, science comes out looking bad as usual, this time in the private sector. Women are 41 percent of entry-level hires in science, technology, and engineering firms. But 52 percent of them leave. Hewlett, the founder-director of the Center for Work-Life Policy, points out that women's careers stall out somewhat more between the ages of of 35 and 44. (That's when 46 percent of women leave these jobs, as opposed to 40 percent between the ages of 25 and 34, and 40 percent between 45 and 60.)

The timing of the drop-off matches the findings of Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at UC-Berkeley, about women with kids in academia. Mason shows in her book Mothers on the Fast Track that mothers more often leak out of the pipeline to tenure after they get their Ph.D.s, and when they come up for associate professor, than when it's time for the tenure decision. It's that 30s and early-40s crunch, when jobs are most demanding and so are kids, if you have them. Mason asked science postdocs, who tend to be in their 30s, about whether they were thinking of leaving the field. Fifty-nine percent of women with children said yes, compared to 39 percent of men with children and 39 percent of single women without children. Those numbers look at lot like Hewlett's drop-out figures.

Hewlett thinks women are tripped up in science, tech, and engineering by the usual suspects: an entrenched sexist culture, the demand to work extreme hours, lack of support, etc. Of the 1,493 women she surveyed (along with 1,000 men), 63 percnet said they'd experienced sexual harassment. Men and women complain at nearly the same rates that they're isolated and lack mentors, but women are substantially more likely to say that the path to career advancement is mysterious, and to worry over juggling work and family (that last stat is 57 percent of women vs. 14 percent of men). Hewlett makes a strong pitch that companies can address all of this—and that rather than chasing workers from around the globe, they should, especially since this is a sector of the economy that's still growing. Her accounts of model programs makes you think that if a firm just makes it clear that it cares about retaining women, it can. Hewlett also found that it doesn't take that much: If a mere 10 percent of women are managers, for example, "all the key variables change dramatically."

Baba Wawa and Me: In Defense of Difficult Old Broads

Which is why I hate to see her batted down so easily by Caitlin Flanagan in June's Atlantic Monthly, though in "The Uses of Enrichment," her review of Walters' new memoir, Audition, she does allow that the TV frontierswoman has "elicited more irreducible statements of self from more notable people than have all the giants of New Journalism.'' Nicholas Lemann is more generous in his piece, "I Have to Ask,' in The New Yorker: "Walters knows how to put on a show. Although nothing in Audition comes as a shock—Walters doesn't turn out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic—it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent; it has just the right number of personal but not icky revelations, and they enrich, rather than spoil, a sense of intimacy.'' The show was for us, wasn't it? And aren't her unlovely manners so symptomatic of what the women of her generation—the one before Hillary's—had to sacrifice to get there first? (As for her "accidental'' career, what a lot of nonsense; busting your backside for so long you can't even remember how to take a night off only happens on and with purpose.) Not that her shrieking makes you think, "Ah, now there's a strategy to emulate," but more like, "See what it was like for them?'' Even if my twinge of sisterly compassion did not make me want to jump up and offer her my seat or anything; that would only have confused her.

May I Never Hear the Phrase "Democratic Primary" Again

Following up on Anne A. and Melinda H.'s posts earlier in the week: Let me confess here that I have entirely stopped reading primary coverage. Wake me when it's over. I am more than a little outraged (OK, so I'm cranky today) that so much of each day's NYT front page is devoted to the primary horse race and to the psychological profiling of the candidates, the voters, the pollsters. ... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.

And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?

I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
 

Reversal of Fortune

Try to imagine the Obama-Clinton race reversed at this point: She is the clear nominee, but he just won’t get out of the race and starts trying on different personas and makes increasingly incendiary racial comments. Actually, it’s impossible to imagine because if the situation were reversed, Obama, as with all the other candidates who knew it was time to get out, would have gotten out, his dignity and reputation intact. A while ago, the first time it looked as if Clinton was not going to make it, Emily B. observed that even if she lost, Clinton was the first woman candidate to have run a serious campaign for the presidency, and the skill, intelligence, and strength she brought to the race would well serve future female candidates. It doesn’t look that way now, however. The horrid, grasping way she is finishing this contest is harming the party and turning her into a reviled, even comical figure. Is she so devoid of an inner life that the prospect of returning to being a high-profile, multimillionaire senator fills her with dread because it means accepting she will never achieve the ultimate fulfillment of her ambition? I suppose she can stay through next week to rack up the votes of her beloved “white Americans” in West Virginia and Kentucky and then still manage to graciously bow out. But as Peggy Noonan wonders, is there anyone who can get her to accept reality?

The Evil of Banality

I am just sick to my stomach today from reading about the ongoing trouble with relief efforts in Burma. The details keep changing, but the United Nations had to at least temporarily suspend its relief effort because the ruling junta has seized food and other relief supplies to "distribute on its own." More like a "shakedown," as blogger Spencer Ackerman calls it. The end result? One U.N. official says he "has never seen such delays" in a relief effort, and the New York Times is pointing out that it took only 48 hours to set up an "air bridge" of flights to Indonesia after the devastating tsunami in 2004 while only a handful of flights have been allowed into Burma in the six days since the cyclone.

It seems like a cover for either nefarious purposes or utter incompetence, but the junta is claiming the delays are being caused at least in part because of complications in issuing visas. Are you telling me that paperwork is holding up the efforts to save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives? No one can work on the weekend to issue some visas? Or, even better, can't a military dictatorship issue a decree putting a temporary moratorium on the need for visas?

Welcoming EJ Graff to XX Factor

Just a quick note to welcome EJ Graff to our midst!  EJ, thanks for the great post. I just finished reading a terrific law review article by Judith Kaye—the chief judge of New York's Court of Appeals—and Anne C. Reddy, looking at why women haven't caught up to men at law firms. Well worth the read.  

No Nightmare Ticket