The XX Factor: What women really think.

The White House: "Family-Friendly" for a Few?

I read Liza’s summary of Mimi Swarz’s take on mature women in the most powerful workplace in the world with some interest. After all, I’d previously written on the preponderance of single women in the Obama White House, lamenting the fact that a bold-face name like Melody Barnes put off marriage for years, in order to run policy in an administration poised to overhaul health care, energy action, and the economy ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

The Feminism of Penicillin

When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."

Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.

Recession-Era America: Rich in Love?

Jessica nails the millionaires-playing-at-poverty trope so beloved by the New York Times Style section of late. But for sheer editorial laziness nothing beats the recession-as-moral-uplift story. Here is Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson explaining that recessions might free us from the shackles of consumerism and "expand our horizons—like an escape from the dungeon of our own desires." Here is the New York Times' Shaila Dewan explaining that forced time off might "work as a kind of recalibration" for Americans who too often choose "money over time." Here is Main Street explaining that "recessions can often bring families together."

 I suppose that some downwardly mobile families really will rally around the campfire for a recession-fueled round of "Kumbaya." But the poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative has some serious problems, the most obvious being that divorce rates tend to jump and birth rates tend to fall during economic downturns. (Gerson's column makes a very big deal about the fact that the divorce rate fell during the Great Depression, but this is atypical.) Self-reported measures of subjective well-being have plummeted since the start of the financial decline, suggesting that partners and parents are more anxious than they were in times of plenty. And, of course, less disposable income also means less spending on family vacations, day trips, and romantic evenings out. There seems to be some idea, lodged deep in the American psyche, that moneyed people spend all of their time alone in bathtubs full of cash. As it happens, Americans spend quite a bit on consumption experiences enjoyed as families. "Cutting back" surely means cutting back on these expenditures as well. I would not pin my hopes on an upsurge in family whittling.