Monday, May 12, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Sometimes, the obvious is lost on me. Anne, I enjoyed your post about Cherie Blair's back-atcha memoir. But I wasn't sure what to make of what you wrote about her announcement that her fourth child was conceived at Balmoral Castle because she'd decided to leave her birth control at home: "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."Only, you did say that. Sorry, but are you calling her out for being a poor Catholic or a hypocrite? For failing to follow all church teaching, or trying to follow any of it?
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
... 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.
-
sponsorship
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."
-
sponsorship
On the evening of Sept. 23, 1994, I went to the movies with my husband and another couple. As this was a couple of years before the birth of our twins, this in itself did not make it a night to remember. Yes, we were going to see the re-released My Fair Lady at the first possible moment—and at the big, beautiful old Ziegfeld. Still, even Miss Never-Met-a-Show-Tune-She-Couldn't-Belt-Into-Submission is not that big a geek; no, there was more. There we were, all settled in and waiting for the guys to return with popcorn and diet beverages, when we heard a familiar voice shouting, "Right there! Two seats!'' So sorry, we told the overdressed TV icon, but they were already taken. "You can't do that! Saving seats is not allowed!' she yelled and started climbing over people on her way to us. Would I have to throw myself over the chair? Would my husband end up on Baba's lap? Thankfully, John Warner appeared just then, in suit and tie, to rescue his companion from further bad behavior. Tugging at his date's elbow, he led her away as gracefully as possible while apologizing profusely and promising he would find them good seats elsewhere—and as she loudly declared she had no intention of sitting way down in front. For some time, we watched him shuttling up and down the main aisle, trying to relocate singles and salvage the evening. And eventually, he succeeded—yay! This was before reality TV, of course, so it seemed all the more thrilling and inappropriate; if this was how Ms. Walters pursued a good seat for a movie she'd seen before, what must life be like for Diane Sawyer? As spectacle, even the freshly restored Audrey Hepburn could not compete. And as high-maintenance, "you may fetch my slippers now' companions went, well, Henry Higgins had nothing on this dame.
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.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?