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Emily, Hanna:  Two points.  1. This is, as Emily  put it not long ago, a family-values issue more than a feminist one, because studies are showing that men, too--maybe not those at the crazy-competitive high end of the spectrum, but still, a lot of them--want to spend more time with their children, but feel forced not to by the current order of ...

Dear Emily,   Once, at a dinner party honoring the retirement of a friend of my father-in-law, I sat next to the law firm's former managing partner. You would have heard of the firm; it's one of those with huge offices in New York and Washington and all over the world. And perhaps because this man was himself retired, he was unusually frank ...

Rachael, Melinda,   1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech I want her to make. As Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around  a speech that ...

When did infidelity on the part of politicians become such an urgent feminist issue? From the outrage on the XX Factor over Eliot’s misdeeds, Bill’s affairs and Hillary’s toleration thereof, and, most of all, from the speech on gender that Melinda and Dahlia think Hillary should give, you’d think political philandering was the paramount ...

From the beginning, Spitzer's downfall has aroused the conspiracy theorist in me. A friend who had been skeptical of my take alerted me to this story in the Miami Herald, picked up today in the New York Post, and writes: ''Not sure that it changes my view of how it had to end, but if the Post story is true, you are certainly correct about how ...

I was glad to see the New York Times raise questions about the aggressiveness and anomalous nature of the Spitzer investigation and prosecution, but I was very taken aback by the answers, especially those given by the federal prosecutors. They sounded like they were trying to wriggle out of being held responsible. There are two aspects of the ...

In ''A Room of One's Own,'' Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could ...

Does anyone at XX Factor watch ''In Treatment''? I watched last night's episode immediately after watching Obama's magnificent speech on YouTube, and was struck an echo of the speech in the show. It had me thinking about something like the point you made, Dahlia, about having to apologize for one's crazy elders. Here's the echo: As you all know, ...

Thank you, Ellen.  I remember sitting in front of the television in 1998, during the first few days of the Lewinsky scandal, listening to television commentators all but demand Clinton's resignation, and shivering, and saying to my husband, ''Wait a minute! This is a coup d'état!'' I wasn't the only one. Press critics ranging from the shrill ...

What I liked about the Times article about the Patersons' affairs was this censorious observation by reporter Danny Hakim: ''The admission is likely to be a distraction for the new governor at a difficult time.'' It's a classic instance of what I call the dissociative mood, a grammatical tone that is struck when something that should have been ...