Equality Myth

Don’t be fooled by the title. In “What Hath Feminism Wrought,” a post yesterday on the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a new book (“What Hath God Wrought”) about the history of the antebellum south. It includes a long exploration of the links between abolitionists and the early women’s rights movement, and ends at the 1858 Seneca Falls Convention, where attendees came surprisingly close to prioritizing ordination over the right to vote. Coates quotes from the Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” a re-write of the Declaration of Independence to include women. It’s chilling. Read it:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. 
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. 
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. 
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. 
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

With “the roof having fallen in” on Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, as Howard Kurtz puts it in today’s Washington Post, it’s Rick Stengel’s Time Magazine that’s become, as Stengel puts it, the newsweekly “category of one.”

So how does Time manage to stay profitable while the rest of us drown? Various ways. But one of them has to do with talent—male talent!

While he had to trim the roughly 200-person staff by a quarter over four years, relying more on freelancers, he has assembled a team of high-profile writers. These include a spate of journalists from The Post, including Michael Grunwald, David Von Drehle and Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman. Stengel also brought in Mark Halperin from ABC, Michael Crowley from the New Republic and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek.

Time has lost a few big-name contributors as well, including Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan and Bill Kristol. And Stengel, a speechwriter for Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign, has no prominent conservative to balance liberal columnist Joe Klein.

Maybe we’re a wee-bit sensitive here, but, um, we get it, OK? Great—really great!—men have kept Time going. But what about Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the—as Kurtz describes it—“fascinating look back at the cultural impact of ‘The Pill’”? Or Aryn Baker, the controversial author of the magazine’s recent Afghanistan cover, who Stengel once called “dazzling”? Honestly, the same men making the same decisions and writing about the same men making those same decisions just gets old. Which brings us to this question: could more women have saved Newsweek? More on that to come.

-jessica

The lovely folks at Drexel University have taken on a massive undertaking, and it launches today, the 90th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. “Vision 2020” will start with a conversation/conference around the issues of women and leadership. Delegates will convene on Philadelphia, talk about best practices, and then return home with a specific mission and plan to help women break through the glass ceiling/detach themselves from the sticky floor. By 2020, they hope, the landscape for women in America will be radically different, and the promise of suffrage will finally be achieved.

As part of the project, they’re inviting people to write “equality insights,” or thoughts on what should happen in the next decade, and they invited us to contribute. The result is here.

But our favorite? The amazing Anna Quindlen, who writes, in part, that:

There’s been a fire in the belly that that pushback breeds, a willingness to step off that treadmill of custom.   It’s created a new breed: the Inside Outsiders.  Powerful, accomplished, yet among their male peers still in some essential way apart.  Often you will hear them say, “I never expected to wind up here.”  That’s been a good thing, and I hope it will continue among new generations of women whose expectations of position and privilege are more optimistic.  For whatever reason, we women may be inclined to run things in a different way, at a time when a different way is badly needed. 

Yes. Any “insights” to offer? Tell us. What do you hope changes most in the next decade?

Ninety years ago today, the 19th amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote. It was revolutionary, for the time—Alice Paul, then a young political activist, was beaten, imprisoned and force-fed for simply daring that women be engaged in political process. But if our grandmothers were born into a world where they weren’t allowed to have a political voice, what will the world look like for today’s young women? On the anniversary of women’s suffrage, a reality check:

* Today’s young girls will learn that while she may be able to vote for president, she still probably won’t be one. Even the 3-year-old daughter of Newsweek’s own (outgoing) editor knows this: after the 2008 election, she cooly informed her historian father that “girls can’t be president.” Ouch. Those faces on our dollar bills—42 men, not a single woman—really say it all.

* She’ll have to work harder if she wants to enter into politics, too. Sarah Palin may call herself a feminist, but women still hold just 16.8% of seats in Congress, and there are less than 20 female world leaders presently in power.

(Read the rest here.)

Well this is sure to cause an uproar. In today’s ForbesWoman, author Jenna Goudreau posits that women who don’t flirt are ignoring “one of their greatest career assets”—a valuable strategic tool (if used effectively), she says, to climb up the corporate ladder.

“Using flirtation is just smart,” Nicole Williams, the author of Girl on Top: Your Guide to Turning Dating Rules into Career Success, tells her. “If you need someone’s help, use the tools available to you. It’s naive to think it has no place at work.” (Oof.)

The commenters are already weighing in, of course, calling Goudreau shallow (and worse). But the real question is: is she right? Consider what we’ve already got stacked against us: working women in this country still make just 77 cents on the male dollar; we face the challenge of balancing motherhood with career, and whether or not we decide to have children, many of us struggle to scale the corporate ladder. We are navigating the workforce, meanwhile, in a culture of plumped lips and airbrushed bodies that hold us to an unattainable ideal—and where, in a corporate culture that still largely excludes women, female competition is more cutthroat than ever.

Which brings us to this: If we acknowledge that we’re being judged on our looks anyway—and that they’re indeed crucial to our career success (see recent disturbing Newsweek survey)—why wouldn’t we use them, own them, empower ourselves through them? Wouldn’t that be—dare we say it—the feminist thing to do?

It’s not as cut and dry as Forbes’ “Secrets of Professional Flirting” (oof, did they really need to go there?) but it’s something to think about. And it doesn’t make you a slut if you do.

We’ve been on vacation, so have been merrily holding our fingers in our ears pretending not to hear the brouhaha down in D.C. over Brad Peck’s lovely little blog post last week about the gender wage gap and why it’s our own damn fault for insisting on having damn babies all the damn time. Today, with a big sigh, we finally looked at it more closely, specifically to see if he had, in fact, apologized, as was reported.

Well hello total non-apology apology!:

The post was unclear in its message and I would like to apologize to those for whom it has caused offense.

We’re sorry we were offended, too, Mr. Peck. Really. Cause you’re toooootally right. Equal pay for equal work is definitely more about our Scrooge-like fetish for money than, you know, justice.

-jesse

Guest blogger Jillian Weinberger weighs in on the Paycheck Fairness Act, endorsed this week by the Obama administration as “a common sense bill”:

The fourth season of Mad Men premieres on Sunday, but this week, as Obama urged the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, I found myself reflecting on season three—when Peggy demands a raise from Draper.

It may be 40-plus years since the Equal Pay Act prevented employers from discriminating based on sex, but when it comes to pay parity, we’re hardly any further along from the Mad Men days. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that while the pay gap has certainly narrowed since Peggy’s time, the chasm is still wide: in 2009, women earned only 80 percent of men’s weekly wages, and in some jurisdictions, it’s even worse. (In Louisiana, for example, women earn just 65 cents on the male dollar.)

All of this is yet another reason why we need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, now up before the Senate—which would close existing loopholes in the 1963 law. As the National Women’s Law Center has put it, the Act would give women “the same remedies for [pay discrimination] that are currently available” for those who suffer based on race or origin. But critics, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and Rep. John Boehner, from my home state of Ohio, I’m embarrassed to admit), have a different view: Boehner (ed: what a name, what a name…) contends the law wouldn’t actually empower women, but “empower trial lawyers whose junk lawsuits will clog up the courts.”

When Peggy demanded her raise, Don Draper lost his patience, denounced her as ungrateful and overly demanding, and ushered her out of the room. By invoking the specter of “junk lawsuits,” critics of the Paycheck Fairness Act hope to do the same to millions of women who deserve equal pay for equal work. Americans have certainly made great strides since Peggy and Don walked the hallowed halls of Sterling Cooper, but sex-based pay discrimination continues to haunt us. Women need legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act to ensure that they can challenge unfair and illegal practices in the workplace.

Jillian Weinberger is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. 

So askmen.com just released the results of its annual “Great Male” survey, and damn if their results aren’t fascinating.The best bits:

• When asked what defines a “real man” in 2010, a full fifty percent said “being a great father and husband who takes care of his family.”
• Similarly, the ultimate male status symbol? Having a family, which ranked higher than a high-profile career, a beautiful wife, a sports car, or a nice house.
• And ninety-four percent said that they either are in a relationship with a woman who makes more than them or that being in one wouldn’t bother them.

Given the “mancession,” what’s going on with boys in school, and the gains that women have made in the last couple of decades, we’re going through a critical moment of re-evaluation when it comes to men and women and the roles that we play. And these responses feel eerily like the responses that women might have given fifty years ago, no? Are men the new women? Is this shift going to end with a full role-reversal? Maybe.

But not so fast. Cosmopolitan magazine did a corresponding survey this year, and damn if it isn’t the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen. The Great Female Survey doesn’t ask nearly the same number of questions, and sticks to stale stereotypes and gag-worthy ideas about what’s important to women today. “Money Matters” is limited to a single question about who should pay for a date. Vomit.

The few interesting findings are relegated to a random miscellaneous other insights category. They are:

• 46% of women say that a beautiful house is the ultimate status symbol. A successful husband or boyfriend came in second place, with 29%.

• 44% of women define a “real woman” as someone who can “do it all.” Being a good mother and wife who takes care of her family came in second, with 33%.

Cosmo, this is interesting. How many women wish they had a C-cup, not so much. Ugh. If a site as vapid as askmen.com can make one of the leading magazines for women look dumb, we’ll hold off on declaring victory just yet. Where, oh where is the modern-day Sassy? We miss you! We need you!!!

-jesse