The XX Factor: What women really think.

Did Women Cause Edmund Andrews' Mortgage Mess?

New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and headaches of borrowing, and throughout the story, a basic disbelief that he, a reporter *who covers economics,* could have been caught up in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he wrote about for the Times.

His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)

Maybe the Duggars Are The World's Largest Rorschach Blob

Little McMansion on the Prairie

I'm admittedly coming very late to the lengthy, sugar-daddy exchange, but maybe for that reason, after reading all the posts at once, I think it's worth acknowledging what a privileged, upper-middle-class discussion this is. After all, these days, most people scarcely dare dream of keeping their lousy, $7-an-hour job, much less of self-actualization. The desire for nannies, private schools (and for the record, my daughter, to date, has benefited from both, so I’m not casting stones)—such accoutrements are beyond the reach of 90 percent, maybe even 95 percent, of all Americans. And I wonder if this normalization of luxury desires, which Paul Krugman has lamented as one aspect of the new (now surely passed) "Gilded Age," isn’t part of what’s gone wrong in our country over the last 30 to 40 years.

When I was growing up in Dallas, even the wealthiest families in town often drove average, American-made cars. Yes, teenagers were as fashion-conscious as today, but keeping up with the Joneses didn't cost an arm or an iPod. (I still remember when you could buy clothes on layaway at Casual Corner.) Even affluent families often saved up for years for major home purchases, such as a new sofa or dining-room table. By contrast, as the real-estate bubble expanded, shelter magazines exhorted us to change our entire look—from, say, shabby chic to ultra-cool modern—every few years, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Furniture from Ikea is almost disposable. As a kid, I don’t recall a single family (including my own) that replaced its kitchen or bathroom counters. And there were plenty of fine home cooks who somehow managed without a Viking stove or All-Clad cookware.

Yet, in recent years, many average, middle-class families often seemed to want it all—and by “all” I don’t mean work-life balance—but the German (or at least Swedish) car, the multi-thousand-square-foot home, the remodeled kitchen or bath, the beautiful Eames furnishings, the designer shoes and handbags, every foodie kitchen appliance (whether anyone in the home actually cooked or not), in addition to the scheduled kids, the nanny and "best" schools. Even for those on a budget, high design has trickled down to the masses and can now be purchased at Target. Some of that, no doubt, is all for the good: I have no problem with everyone getting to enjoy a Michael Graves teapot.

But in my own life, I yearn to be satisfied with less and struggle with how to hold on to what really matters (which typically costs surprisingly little) in the distracting, expensive clutter of American life. Recently, I was reading the Little House books to my daughter, who is now 5, and kept having this pang for a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor swept clean by a straw broom, no more clothes or furnishings than one could carry in a covered wagon and instead of the usual Christmas bonanza of plastic toys, a tin cup, a piece of candy, and a shiny new penny. That’s a fantasy, too, of course—and equally out of reach. But nowadays when I dream, that’s what I often think of, not Sugar Pa.

Teen Parents in School

Did anyone else see the piece about teenage parents in high school in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday? It's rare to get the kind of close-up look offered by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School, where 70 girls—almost all low-income black or Hispanic students—out of a 2,000-plus student body are either pregnant or already mothers and now have an in-school day care facility, Tiny Titans. He focused on an issue blurred in the Bristol Palin coverage: mainstreaming adolescent parents and its dilemmas. Welsh was unsettled less by the absence of stigma and more by the not-so-tacit atmosphere, and assumption by the girls, of approval. Sure, there is a required "family life" course at school that duly covers the dangers of teenage sexuality and pregnancy, and the Adolescent Health Center is a few blocks away. But as a social worker in the support network put it, "I don't personally accept it, but once a girl is pregnant, I have to be all open arms."

It made me wonder if schools have considered even more mainstreaming, with a twist. What might be the impact of having teen mothers—after they're done boasting about their pregnant bellies (as they evidently do) and deep into dirty diapers—help give those "family life" classes? Welsh quotes one mother who sounds ready to give her classmates an earful about "how difficult their lives are going to be if they have a baby." Are there enough others to be a group of peer advisers? If the adults can't convey disapproval, maybe the kids could help—and convincingly.

Poor Meghan?

Awhile back I wrote that Meghan McCain had learned to negotiate the difficult terrain of being a political daughter by oversharing on surface-level stuff, and keeping quiet on the truly personal. Looks like she hasn't quite stuck to that-on Hannity and Colmes, she revealed a bit more about the grudges she holds as a political daughter. She's mad about the Atlantic cover controversy, saying"I have a problem when it gets dirty and you're doctoring photos."  Most  striking is what she said about her support for Kerry and Gore, framing it as more of a vote against Bush, who ran a nasty smear campaign against her dad in the South Carolina primaries,  than for the Democrats:

MCCAIN: I can be behind my father all day every day.

COLMES: Sure.

MCCAIN: . until the end of time. I just couldn't get behind President Bush. I just couldn't. It's personal.

COLMES: Yes. You couldn't get behind President Bush?

MCCAIN: It's personal. I was 19 at the time.

HANNITY: And it's a primary 2000.

(CROSSTALK)

COLMES: Hold on, let's.

MCCAIN: It had to do with my little sister, and like, you know, you were just saying that the wounds of a political child run really deep. And there are things that I don't know if I'll ever completely get over.

COLMES: Was it because of what happened in 2000 during the campaign?

MCCAIN: Yes.

COLMES: That you two -- what about your dad now? Is he -- looks like he may have.

MCCAIN: No. He's a great forgiver, move on-er. No. Yes.

Her decision to stump for her dad was obviously one made out of love and personal, rather than party, loyalty.  And now she's got to stand there and justify her dad's politically expedient apostasy by saying he's a "mover on-er," and she's got to somehow justify to herself that even though she's been deeply hurt by negative campaigning, it's ok that the McCain campaign isn't exactly taking the high road these days. When I wrote about her earlier,  I was impressed with the amount of agency I saw her taking-exploiting the publicity system lest it exploit you first isn't exactly a feminist battle cry, but at least it's not passive.  Now, all I can think when I read this is "Poor Meghan, she's trapped."  But am I getting played like a flute?  Now's probably not a bad time to be reminding people that the McCains have been on the receiving end of smears, and Meghan, at her own admission, didn't go in to this thing a political naïf.  This wasn't her first interview, and it wasn't the first time she's talked about the way the 2000 election affected her. Should I put back on my armor of cynicism?

Book-larnin'

There you go again, you pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers: trying to “understand” current events through the study of “history” (undertaken at Yale, of all places!). Sure, it’s fascinating to read about the Renaissance origins of the image of the mother-as-regent, fiercely protecting the husbands and sons who are really in charge of the realm. But isn’t it enough just to understand deep in our gut that Palin makes people feel, in some inchoate way … er, something vaguely positive about women and values and family and babies? Something warm and wonderful and maverick-y that inheres in her very person, independent of (indeed contrary to) any action she’s taken in office or any policy she espouses?

The smell of my daughter’s clean laundry makes me feel warm and wonderful about families, but I’m not electing a pile of it vice president of the United States. I’ve had it with hearing about Palin’s family. I want to know what the next administration we vote into office is going to do for our families—yours and mine.

Mommy Wars

What any of this has to do with the feminist movement, I don't know. Isn't feminism all about women having choices, the freedom to live our lives as we choose without having to stay within some circumscribed set of societal parameters? Can't both of the Walkers' lifestyle choices be considered just that, choices? Rebecca chose to live as a lesbian without a biological child, and now she chooses to be married to a man with whom she has a biological child, fine. I doubt very much that she checked with the Misguided Angry Feminists Council before she made either of these decisions. The feminist movement never made me want to swear off motherhood, burn my bra, hate men, or denounce women who made choices different from mine or choices with which I disagree. The last time I checked the feminist movement has never tried to control my womb, so why is it the feminist movement's fault that Rebecca allowed her mother to solely shape her image of motherhood, and for that matter womanhood and self? I love my mother but I am not my mother, my worldview and life experiences are very different from hers. Did she make some mistakes in how she raised me? You bet. Does she also get credit for the better parts of me? Absolutely. Our mothers may define us as little girls but we define ourselves as women. My mother could never make me want or not want children, and if I were to solely blame her for either of those choices, it would be intellectually dishonest. I would never give one person so much power over me but if I had, I would also give myself some of the blame for allowing it to happen. I'll leave it to others to decide if Alice Walker deserves all of her daughter's criticisms, but I think if Alice had just supported and respected Rebecca's choices they probably wouldn't be where they are now. Women supporting and respecting one another's choices has everything to do with feminism.

California Dreaming

For the rest of us: Did anyone see Pam Belluck's New York Times article on Sunday about lesbian and gay Massachusetts married couples? Except for the fact that it was primarily illustrated with photos of male couples (not her fault), the story was almost embarrassingly on target. She was entirely accurate about the ordinariness of lesbian and gay couples' attitudes toward marriage, now that the initial rush and excitement is over: As she notes, the numbers marrying have fallen off precipitously, the pent-up demand having been spent. Now we're marrying in more ordinary proportions.

But I got a call from a reporter today who was surprised by our ordinariness, asking: Isn't there something unique about how gay and lesbian folks respond to marriage? Well, no. Remember that we were born and raised in every ZIP code in the country, in every possible subculture, from the Bronx to Bellingham, Wash. We tend to relate to marriage the way our social peers or siblings do. The Cambridge politico gals—the ones who wash out and reuse their Ziploc bags—are going to have a different take on marriage than the Dallas debutante couples who get their hair freshly dyed every four weeks, whose take take will be just as different from that of the D.C. black-church-choir male couple. We are no more unified about our attitudes toward marriage than the rest of you. 

But what Belluck did nail, embarrassingly so, was the different attitudes that men and women bring to marriage—amplified when both halves of the pair are the same sex. Whether it's nature, nurture, or culture, men and women do have some different predilections. A couple of weeks ago, when y'all were having that monogamy discussion, I bit my tongue about this. But Belluck has now outed us, so I'll chime in.

1. More women date with an eye toward serious partnerships. You know the joke, right? Q: What does a lesbian bring on her second date? A: A U-Haul. Everywhere that same-sex partnerships have been recognized, female couples sign up at twice the rate of male couples. That's two female marriages for every male marriage. That doesn't mean every woman is marriage-minded—generalizations can never fit everyone in a given group—but women do seem to be, quite literally, twice as interested in marriage as men.

2. Men marry without seeing it as necessarily monogamous. Here's the other half of that joke: Q: What does a gay man bring on a second date? A: What second date? Many gay male couples—not all, as my gay male friends have insisted to me!—leave room for the occasional meaningless sexual encounter. God bless 'em. I hope they are all wearing condoms.

3. Women are serially monogamous. If anybody cheats, it's over—but only sexually, not necessarily emotionally. I used to joke that the waiting period for female-female marriage licenses ought to be two years: If they're still together by then, they should be safe until about year seven. Here's the embarrassing part: Belluck finds a few lesbian couples who've broken up and yet who remain each others' families. (She even airs the dirty laundry of women who leave their gals and start dating men instead—many butch women I know have had to return their toasters when their gals went straight!—but she leaves out the problem of the "straight" married lady next door who starts hitting on you.) One such couple in her story is buying a duplex so that they can still raise their son together. Oy, lesbians and their exes! By the time you get to middle age, you are never dating just one woman; you are dating her entire family of exes and exes' exes. Those are going to be your in-laws, so you might as well make a good impression on them early. They have the key to her house. They walk her dog when she's away. If you have kids, they will babysit for you when you need a night alone together. Learn to love them.

5. Same-sex couples are less likely to go nuclear when they argue. OK, this is from a Science Times article earlier in the week, not the Belluck article, but this also rings true to me. If you're not blaming the entire sex for being incomprehensible, you have a little more room to laugh. My ex and I used to take each others' side in the really common arguments. It made us laugh and it helped. Until it didn't. The other point in this article also rings true: We argue just as often, and in many of the same ways. Consider what they call the "demand-withdraw" approach: One side pushes for more intimacy and the other withdraws. Two women or two men have that too. It broke up my own marriage.

Because of all the above, I'm going to guess that lesbians divorce more often—expectations are higher—and that gay male marriages last longer—they are less likely to marry in the first place, more likely to forgive straying. But I haven't seen numbers on that yet.

Once again to the Californians: Good luck, and may you persuade your neighbors that they have nothing to fear from the married women next door!

Not Her Mother's Feminism

Two things bother me about the Rebecca Walker essay (which last week stirred up a hot intergenerational discussion on a feminist listserv I'm on). First is her conflation of her mother and feminism. I'm sorry, but when did Alice Walker become the spokesperson for and avatar of the second wave? One older (in her 60s, I think) feminist writer on that listserv wrote that her version of feminism didn't posit motherhood as slavery; rather, her feminism meant trying to enlarge the world so that men and women didn't have to divide up the worlds of work and family because each would be involved in both. In that vision of feminism, men and women both would be important in children's lives--as would some social responsibility for children's futures, including early childhood education, flextime, and all the other things necessary to allow families to integrate work and childrearing (and, let me add, being human). That's the feminism that I learned and subscribe to. Walker, instead, personalizes her mother's mistakes (or her perception of those mistakes--hard to know whether memoirists are reliable narrators) as if Alice Walker's bad behavior stood for the mothering failures of the entire second wave. Um ... nope.

Second is the way Walker elides her relationship with Meshell (note: new spelling). Of course her past life is public and all over the Internet; there's no way she can pretend she has only been heterosexual. But in this Daily Mail piece, her lesbian "phase" is elided from her neotraditionalist narrative, in which she is lost until she finds full life satisfaction from mommy + daddy = baby. Oy. (Note for later blog post: Today California begins marrying same-sex couples! Hurray for the Golden State!)

My novice impression is that the younger Walker is melting down and has some institution in her future. But I don't know the woman, and who am I to psychologize without a license? Her mental state is none of my business. Her politics ... well, it isn't even a politics. It's just whining.

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 (California's domestic partnership 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 I 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' here. 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 Massachusetts, 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 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 14-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 matchup 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?
 

Happy Mother's Day

Hey y'all,

I am delighted to be joining this brilliant assembly. For my first post here, I'd like to point out that Mother's Day is coming up. A year ago I wrote a great deal about how the news media gets working mothers' issues all wrong—talking about these issues as personal problems for individual women, rather than shared economic and public policy questions for a 21st century economy. I was asked to give a short talk on this today... and for my debutante moment, I am posting the talk below. At the bottom I'll give some links to my articles last year, and to research sources for some of the facts here. It's long for a blog post, I admit. Sorry! I didn't have time to be brief ...

Mothers work: Get used to it. Too often, issues faced by working families are treated as personal problems for individual women, private questions of how to balance irreconcilable duties, work and family, things that don’t go together by nature. The consequence: We live in the most family-unfriendly of the developed nations.

But women with children have always worked. Centuries ago, in the Wwestern European and American traditions, for instance, married women with children—at least in the classes of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that most of us descend from—would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers). Early in the 20th century, they might have done piecework, gone out into domestic service, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. But with industrial and consumer capitalism, work left home. Married men got shoved out of the house to work for salaries and wages. And in white, middle- or upper-middle class families, married women got shut in.

That brings us to the part of feminist history that many of us already know: for the college-educated classes, women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. By the 1970s, feminists had knocked down the barriers to women entering the professions in large numbers. But the workplace still isn’t fixed. A good chunk of discrimination now tends to kick in once a woman gets pregnant or takes a maternity leave.

Researching the book I collaborated on for author Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that, once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that, when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: "Do you feel stupider?" Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down.

These aren’t just anecdotes. Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously portrayed as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three. In an associated experiment, if she was late or had absences, she was fired sooner than any of the other three. Researchers have found that women with children who work full time have a significantly larger wage gap compared to men than do women without children who work full time. Last I checked it was 70 cents compared to 77 cents. Meanwhile, men with children get paid more than men without children. Fathers earn more—mothers earn less. There’s a mommy penalty—and a daddy bonus. We call this discrimination. 

This exists not because women with children "choose" lower-paying work in lower-paying job tracks. (We can talk about job segregation another day.) Rather, it exists in part because the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment, to kiss any boo-boo. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and so is being a professional worker—can you say ‘crackberry’?—then the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Working mother” is treated as the social equivalent of “deadbeat dad”: someone who is failing their God-given responsibilities to their children. 

But the United States cannot and will not go back to a time in which women with children do not work in the waged workforce. Over the past century, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of women with school-age children are on the job. That’s because the vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income.

Now, let’s flip this and think from the point of view of the best interests of the children: 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. That means most American families need flexibility to care for their kids. And yet, on a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, after-school programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Jody Heymann, the U.S. is one of only four without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on 19th century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t 21ss century school schedules match the 21st century workday?

But the news media and public policy makers still don’t see working families’ issues as economic or public policy questions. Consider: If fathers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed under the heading of labor, business, globalization, world trade, all public issues. But if mothers get pushed off the job—because jobs disappear or are redefined during her maternity leave, or because bosses stop promoting a woman with children on the assumption that she will soon refuse to travel or cut back or go part-time—if mothers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed as women making private emotional choices. How natural: She just wanted to stay home with her baby.

In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. And that has consequences. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone. This focus makes as much sense, according to media critic Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”

For more info:

The Opt-Out Myth, E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. (This includes footnotes and links to the supporting research.)

The Mommy War Machine, E.J. Graff, Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007.

How the Billable Hour Hurts Women and Families

Obama's Cool Mama

Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:

In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.

Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses,  “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.

Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.

Rule No. 1 of Public Humiliation: Bring a Date

On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart showed footage of a few of Eliot Spitzer's predecessors in the "Parade of Shame,'' who, as he said, were "all following the one simple rule of public humiliation: Bring a date.'' Then Samantha Bee gave us the scene we've all been waiting for: Her real life hubby, Jason Jones, in pearls, standing meekly by as she apologizes, sort of. "Last night I engaged in activity that failed to live up to the high standards I set for myself as a wife. I was with a man—men, a group of men, maybe a lady or two, I don't really remember. Definitely, though, several men. It was a betrayal of my marriage, even if it left me satisfied in a way my husband, who you see next to me, never has...I also want to apologize to our daughter - I think 'our daughter —definitely mine ...''

But killing as this stuff is—and Lewis Black had a funny riff on it, too—each time they cut to footage of the Spitzers at their news conference, it only compounds my feeling that the sight of his dutiful wife is too sad to bear. Over and over, there she is, so mortified she's unable to lift her eyes from whatever piece of paper her louse husband is fiddling with. Doesn't it seem like this was longer than two days ago? My real problem with this scandal is not that it's none of our beeswax, but that I can't get past wanting to bake something for Silda—and then I hate feeling like that, too, because nobody wants pity-inspired sticky buns. In fact, knowing we're all feeling sorry for her is probably the thing she hates most, or OK, second-most, or maybe third. And I totally reject this whole "great men have great appetites" argument—bah, that's what every two-bit cheater who ever took home a waitress told himself. These Luv Guvs just have bigger egos, more of a sense of entitlement, and lots more disposable cash.

Keeping Track of Our Time

Quick, before we're all caught up in the reading of campaign entrails, I'd like to mention an item on the agenda of the Department of Labor's first budget hearing later this week: the American Time Use Survey, which will be eliminated if the Bush administration gets its way. Don't yawn: This is one of the most fascinating, and useful, data-collection endeavors around. And though there isn't a music video (yet) touting the cause of keeping it funded, there is a group of economists who are using their time to rally support for it. Check out this Web site if you're in need of a worthy cause to get behind when the primary season cools down.

Begun in 2003, the ATUS is a household survey that aims to track how Americans use their time when they aren't working. It's a look into the nonmarket nooks and crannies of life that isn't replicated by any other measurements. As such, it's a source of some of the most revealing information we have about how family life is changing—not to mention a resource for assessing all kinds of policies: Who's doing how much on the home front, with the kids, or with the elderly, for example? And what might that suggest about the role of the government or business? Without any data, we won't have answers. Without the ATUS, it will be easier to forget that those are important questions that need asking in the first place: That's the even larger danger of defunding the ATUS. Katharine G. Abraham, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who is now at the University of Maryland and is a driving force behind the SAVEATUS mission, put it this way to me: "It seems to me that this is a more general phenomenon—that social statistics generally tend to get short shrift relative to economic statistics.  And I also think it's self-reinforcing—if we don't have information on the non-market effects of our policy choices, for example, we tend to ignore them or at least give them less weight than they should get." Time spent figuring out where our time goes is time well spent-and it isn't even very expensive: $4.3 million a year.

Dispatch from the Mommy Wars

Mom who works at home: Bill will be picking up the girls today.

Non-salaried mom: Why, are you out of town?

M: No, just on deadline.

N: Well that's awfully nice of him. I hate for him to have to do that.

M: It's not nice; he's their dad.

N: But, you can't come?

 Is this conversation ever going to change?

Boohoo for Patti Solis Doyle

The pertinent fact about Patti Solis Doyle's explanation for leaving Hillary's campaign (that her little boy cried for Daddy instead of for her) seems to me to lie outside its factual veracity. It's probably a fictionalized condensation of something that's happened many times, to Doyle and to every working parent, especially men (who, if they quit their jobs over a toddler snub, get less moral credit for it than we do). Though I can identify with the pain of being the (momentarily) rebuffed parent, the unspoken assumption that the mother must be the child's default choice (or be a bad mother) makes me want to say, boo-frigging-hoo. So Junior wants Daddy in the middle of the night? Great, more sleep for me!

What really makes me smite my forehead is Doyle's choice to use the anecdote now—and make no mistake, true story or not, the woman is cannily using it to protect herself and her boss. It's getting downright painful watching powerful women shoot feminism in the foot in their attempted support of HRC's campaign. Thanks a lot, Patti, for making the rest of us sound as if we're crying wolf when we talk to our bosses about needing flextime or extra sick days. If "my baby needs me" becomes the new "it's my time of the month," an all-purpose cop-out available only to women, that's just one more way to convince the misogynist wing of Hillary-haters (and, paranoid as Erica Jong may be, they're out there) that we're incapable of holding down the big jobs—like, say, president of the United States.

Benazir Bhutto

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today at a rally near Islamabad. A suicide bomber reportedly shot her at close range then detonated an explosive, killing Bhutto and 20 others. Bhutto was a complicated woman—underneath the traditional veils she was a graduate of Oxford and Harvard, who spoke flawless English. But then under all that she was also a political creature who had mastered the sort of shape-shifting needed to cast herself as a historic figure in the mold of Indira Ghandi or Joan of Arc. This sharp sketch of Bhutto in the New York Times last month suggested that under all the compelling Western-sounding rhetoric, Bhutto was really no different than centuries of predecessors—doling out political favors and reportedly treating the government coffers as the family cookie jar.

What kind of woman survives multiple assassination attempts and persists in attending huge political rallies in an open vehicle? Perhaps if your father and brothers are killed all around you, that starts to feel quite normal. 

In a diary she wrote for Slate just over 10 years ago, Bhutto offers a few clues. Balancing her duties as opposition leader in the National Assembly of Pakistan against her responsibilities to her children, she sounds like any working mother: “I do not like my children watching cartoons,” she writes “But I am feeling guilty. I have to catch a flight to Islamabad where the Parliament is based. So I cave in.” But what really pervades this weeklong account is a feeling of walls closing in on her. When she hears of threats to burn down her home in Islamabad, she acts to relocate her children to schools in Dubai. From her veil that keeps slipping off to the inability of an unaccompanied woman to “hail a taxi or drive a car,” in Pakistan anymore, Bhutto seems forever pressed to be smaller than she wants to be. References abound to retorts she doesn’t offer and comebacks left unsaid, “I get angry. Stop it, I say. That's what they want. You are not going to play their game.”

Interspersed between the almost mundane recitations of who in her government has been kidnapped, arrested, or released each day are Bhutto’s frequent references to the small indulgences—the pizza binges and chocolate cakes and the books—Western trappings in which she indulges almost helplessly.

After finishing Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough, Bhutto reflects “Here we are heading towards the third millennium, and the conduct of men and women still mirrors the style of Caesar's age.”
“Does time go forward or backward or just stand still?” she continues. “Do we fight the same demons in each era and in each century only with different methods and in different styles? Are we condemned to a cycle of patterns that keeps turning and ending up where it started?” For Bhutto, at least, the choice was to repeat the patterns set by her family—fighting her way to center stage, and dying larger than life.

In her diary there is an exchange with her then-7-year-old daughter, Bakhtwar, that reveals a Bhutto who may have nevertheless believed she could defy that pattern. As her mother leaves for the airport Bakhtwar looks up at her mother and waves casually, "Bye, it was nice seeing you. Come back soon," she breezes.
"What do you mean," replies Bhutto. "I am your mother. I am stuck to you like that arm of yours for life."
"But, Mama, my arm keeps going away," she complains.
"But it always comes back," says Bhutto.

More on Sibling Rank and IQ

Sibling rank and IQ

I wrote last summer about a Norwegian study on birth order that was being treated as definitive proof that first-born kids have higher IQs than their siblings--and that the IQ edge is due to social rank, not biology. (Actually, the results are about brothers only, since the study was confined to boys, but much of the coverage generalized to girls, too.) At the time, I asked the authors about some numbers that were missing in the paper. I recently heard back from one of them, Petter Kristensen. He charmingly said that the omission "is embarrassing, but I have no one to blame but myself" and sent along a file with the figures.

I sent the numbers to psychology writer Judith Rich Harris, author of No Two Alike. She points out that the numbers Kristensen sent weaken the claim that social rank explains the IQ difference, if it exists. Here's the context from my piece last summer:

The report in Science relies on a clever comparison to prove its key point: that the average 3-point IQ difference between firstborn and second-born brothers comes from the boys' varying "social rank" in the family, not differing biology. Kristensen and Bjerkedal looked at second- and third-born brothers who had an older sibling (male or female) who died in infancy. They found that second-borns who grew up as the oldest child in the family, because of a sibling death, had average IQ scores equivalent to firstborns. And third-borns who moved into second place in the family had average IQ scores like second-borns (one point higher). This is supposed to show definitively that family environment and expectations account for the intelligence boost.

It turns out that the number of third-borns in the study is only 81, and that the data point is shaky because there's a wide confidence interval, which means that the conclusion drawn from the data is relatively unreliable. Harris also points out that Kristensen and his co-author controlled for birthweight, which is a mistake if whatever causes younger brothers to have a slightly lower IQ (if they do) also causes them to be smaller at birth. That's what a biological explanation might show (scroll down).