NOW launches mothers and caregivers
economic rights agenda

The National Organization for Women recently added a new issues section to its web site on the organization's ongoing work for mothers and caregivers economic rights. The launch of NOW's new web resource coincided with the appearance of NOW President Kim Gandy and NOW Mothers /Caregivers Economic Right Committee Chair Laurie Pettine on the March 31 broadcast of ABC's Good Morning America. The program was a follow up to Diane Sawyer's February 2006 series on the "mommy wars," which juxtaposed interviews with Linda Hirshman and the editor of Total180!, a lifestyle magazine for at-home mothers.

NOW invites members and supporters to sign the Mothers Matter, Caregivers Count petition, which urges policymakers to support "policies and programs that enhance the quality of life for women and caregivers."

National Organization for Women
www.now.org

Mothers and Caregivers Economic Rights
"NOW coined the slogan "Every Mother is a Working Mother" decades ago, and is continuing the fight for economic justice for mothers and others who do the caring work of our society."

Issue brief:
Mothers Matter and Caregivers Count

A Feminist Future:
Policy and Program Goals for Mothers and Caregivers Economic Rights

NOW Mothers Matter, Caregivers Count petition

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New web site facilitates online activism by and for mothers

MomsRising.org, a new mother-focused web site modeled on MoveOn.org, offers one-click activism on progressive issues related to motherhood, children and family policy. Founded by Joan Blades of MoveOn and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner (author of The F-Word), the March 21 launch of MomsRising was timed to coincide with the publication of Blades and Finkbeiner's new book, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want - and What To Do About It (Nation Books).

According to the web site, "MomsRising is working to build a massive grassroots online resource to move motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country's awareness, and to provide grassroots support for leaders, as well as organizations, addressing key motherhood issues." Debut action items include a petition to " political and business leaders" in support of "common sense family-friendly policies that protect and invest in mothers, children and families," a petition to television networks to "Stop the 'Mommy Wars' and Report on Real Issues" (coordinated with MOTHERS), a survey on family health care needs, and voter registration drive for 18-year old high school seniors (organized by Mainstreet Moms). Excerpts from the Motherhood Manifesto, which is the basis for the MomsRising six-point action agenda, are available on the web site. MomsRising also provides a section where mothers can post and read personal stories and anecdotes about work and family and selection of nifty t-shirts with the MomsRising logo ($15.00 - $20.00).

MomsRising
www.momsrising.org

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Caryl Rivers on the "Opt-Out Revolution"

Uprising Radio offers streaming audio of Caryl Rivers April 1, 2006 keynote address at the Women, Action and Media Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rivers picks apart the junk science behind stories and commentary by Lisa Belkin, Maureen Dowd, and Caitlin Flanagan, and analyzes other misleading news coverage of women, work and family. Rivers is the co-author of Same Difference and She Works/He Works.

Selling Anxiety: How the Media Plays Up Myths About Gender
A talk by Caryl Rivers
Audio, Uprising Radio, 5.apr.06

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Other news and commentary on women and the media

Women Happier as Homemakers? Time to Recheck Data
Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, Women's eNews, 22.mar.06
A recent study bandied about in the news media finds women are more happily married when their husbands win the bread. The finding is so different from related research that our commentators call it an "outlier" not to be trusted.

Everyone seems to know what women want, until you check the research
Reyhan Harmanci, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14.mar.06
"Women's trend stories are among the media's favored form of social-science reporting. But for every splashy, scary trend story, there's another one hiding in the shadows. One is simple, the other is complicated. One is built on sketchy anecdotal musings, the other on larger, longitudinal studies… Guess which one makes the front page?"

Myth of the Opt-Out Mom
Stephanie Coontz, AlterNet, 3.Apr.06
Despite what naysayers would have you believe, the number of mothers who also work outside the home is actually on the rise.

The NYT's Woman Problem
Garance Franke-Ruta, AlterNet, 22.mar.06
Is The New York Times still pro-choice? You wouldn't know it from reading the op-ed page. "Over the past two years, voices from NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Organization for Women, EMILY's List, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were entirely absent from the public conversation about abortion on the Times opinion pages. Pro-choice female academics, authors, and religious leaders were also largely shut out when it came to the topic of choice -- as were pro-life or abortion-ambivalent women."

Finding the Feminine Voice in the Media
Michele Larsen, About.com Women's Issues
"Newspapers (the most female-friendly of all media) have women filling 35 percent of the supervisor slots. In television, 24 percent of producers, writers and directors are women. The numbers plummet when it comes to radio, where only 14 percent of news directors are women. As you may well imagine, a look at the top dogs offers an even narrower perspective. According to a 2001 study by Annenberg Public Policy Center, when it comes to top executives in American media, women sit in 13 percent of those cushy, leather chairs. …That’s the short answer. The longer, more in-depth look at who doles out information in America comes when you study not just the storytellers, but also those who tell stories to the storytellers. The he said, she saids -- the sources."

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Women's Law Center grades state progress on
child and dependent care tax provisions

According to a new report from the National Women's Law Center, families in 23 states were eligible for some increased tax assistance in meeting the high costs of child and dependent care this tax season, thanks to improvements in these states’ child and dependent care tax provisions over the past four years.

NWLC's state-by-state report card and report, Making Care Less Taxing: Improving State Child and Dependent Care Tax Provisions, reveal that while most states have made some progress since 2002, there is still vast room for improvement. In fact, most state tax provisions received grades of C+ to F. The report card ranks 31 tax provisions in 27 states based on the tax assistance they provide to working families that must pay for costly child care and other dependent care in order to be employed. The full report outlines ways in which state policymakers and advocates can develop the best tax policies for families with child and dependent care expenses.

National Women's Law Center
www.nwlc.org

Making Care Less Taxing:
Improving State Child and Dependent Care Tax Provisions
National Women's Law Center, April 2006
56 pages, in .pdf

State-by-state report card
4 pages, in .pdf

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New report on women and political activism

The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) issued a report earlier this month outlining strategies to encourage women's political activism and urging groups concerned with social justice to cultivate women's political leadership.

According to the report, groups can successfully encourage political activism by providing women ways to feel comfortable expressing anger and outrage in public life, something women report they are often afraid to do. This activism goes beyond voting and can include trying to influence and negotiate with public officials, building coalitions, and public speaking in political venues such as city council meetings or community forums. The report is based on interviews with women involved in interfaith community organizations, and reveals six strategies to increase women’s leadership:

• Point out role models for women’s leadership -- in communities, in history and scripture, and in national movements for social change.

• Provide dedicated space for women to address and explore their discomfort with anger and outrage about politics and political life.

• Develop opportunities for women to interact and build alliances with women of different racial, ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds.

• Increase women’s confidence with public roles by creating targeted opportunities for them to lead.

• Provide mentoring for political activism that includes support for women’s leadership and political skills development.

• Consider the ways that women’s lives differ from men’s, design programs that recruit them where they are, and engage in issues that are relevant to women’s lives and well-being.

Institute for Women's Policy Research
www.iwpr.org

Called to Speak:
Six Strategies That Encourage Women's Political Activism
Amy Caiazza, Ph.D., Institute for Women's Policy Research, April 2006
Issue Brief, 7 pages, in .pdf
Full Report, 76 pages in .pdf

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Working families with children less likely to
be homeowners now than they were in the 1970s
New study details U.S. homeownership trends

54 percent of U.S. children live in working families -- families earning the equivalent of a full-time minimum wage up to 120 percent of the area median. According to a new study of U.S. homeownership trends over a quarter century from the Center for Housing Policy, the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference, low- to moderate-income working families with children are less likely to be homeowners now than they were in the late 1970s. The report, Locked Out: Keys to Homeownership Elude Many Working Families With Children, also found that, despite expanded efforts to boost homeownership by the last three administrations, the homeownership gap between white and minority working families with children widened to 26 percentage points between 1978 and 2003.

In 2003, the homeownership rate for upper-income families with children was 91 percent, while the rate for their low- to moderate-income counterparts was significantly lower at 60 percent -- yet in 1978 some 62.5 percent of low-to moderate-income working families with children owned their homes. Between 1978 and 2003, homeownership for working families with only one earner decreased from 60 to 55 percent, and remains much lower among single parents than couples with children and lowest (33 percent) among minority single parents. For both white and minority working families, housing cost have increased more rapidly than income growth for both renters and homeowners. The proportion of working families with children paying more than half of their income for housing has also increased significantly, nearly tripling for white and minority homeowners in the last 25 years and increasing from 1 to 13 percent for minority renters.

The report notes that working families with children tend fall through the cracks of the housing support system, earning too much to receive housing subsidies available to lower income households and too little to benefit from many of the tax deductions available to higher income households. The report concludes with several policy recommendations to increase the supply of affordable housing.

National Housing Conference
www.nhc.org

Working Families With Children Less Likely To Be Homeowners Now
Than They Were In The 1970s
Press release from the Center for Housing Policy, 22.mar.06

Locked Out:
Keys to Homeownership Elude Many Families with Children
Barbara J. Lipman, Center for Housing Policy, March 2006
Graphic summary report, 60 pages in .pdf

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Podcasts, fact sheets on caregiving crisis
for low wage workers

A large body of research clearly demonstrates that the structural changes to the U.S. economy over the past 20 years resulting from globalization, industry deregulation and the computerization of the workforce have led to harsh working conditions, reduced benefits, and fewer opportunities for advancement for workers in low-wage jobs. The Fairness Initiative on Low Wage Work, a collaboration of research, public policy, and advocacy groups working on low-wage work issues, has compiled a compendium of resources -- including original fact sheets, issue briefs and podcasts -- on economic and employment conditions that affect low wage working families. In a March 20 podcast, Jody Heymann, Director of the Project on Global Working Families and author of Forgotten Families and The Widening Gap, and Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families, discuss the urgent need for paid sick leave for low-wage working parents. The Fairness Initiative also provides an expert database for writers and journalist reporting on low wage workers.

The Fairness Initiative on Low Wage Work
www.lowwagework.org

A View from Low Wage America: Podcasts

Fact Sheets:
-- Overview of the failure of low-wage work to provide the basic
provisions for health, safety, and wellness that most working people
take for granted. -- Who Are Workers in Low-Wage Jobs --
Myths and Facts about low-wage work.

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Around The Kitchen Table on Families in Poverty

Around the Kitchen Table, an e-journal on social and economic issues facing American workers and families, devotes its April 2006 issue to Families in Poverty. Ray Boshara from the New America Foundation discusses the need to build assets as part of an effective poverty reduction strategy. Nancy Cauthen from the National Center on Children in Poverty discusses the realities of many children living in poverty today, and Beth Shulman, author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans writes about the current state of employment. AKT is published by Demos, a research and advocacy group promoting democratic ideals.

Around The Kitchen Table: Families in Poverty
April 2006

Demos
www.demos.org

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Other news and commentary on caregiving and low-wage work

Work-Life Imbalance Acute for Hourly Wage Parents
Anju Mary Paul, Women's eNews, 4.apr.06
"The conflicts between work and home can be extreme for bus drivers and telephone operators, according to a study whose author says such workers are often overlooked in work-life policy discussions." Coverage of the Center for WorkLife Law report, "One Sick Child Away From Being Fired."

Caregiver Role Brings Purpose -- and Risk -- to Kids
Joseph Shapiro, NPR, Morning Edition, 23.mar.06
"It turns out a lot of kids are caregivers for parents and other family members. A survey last year found that at least 1.4 million children between the ages of 8 and 18 provide care. One-third of them help with medications. Nearly two-thirds say they help someone eat, get in and out of bed, get dressed, take a bath or go to the bathroom." Audio download and program transcript available.

The Budget and the Damage Done
Rose Aguilar, AlterNet, 22.mar.06
The 2006 budget clipped the wings of many organizations that provide basic services to the poor. Bush's 2007 budget could ground them permanently. From the article: "At least 400,000 children nationwide will lose childcare under Bush's budget, according to the National Women's Law Center. This is in addition to the 250,000 children who have lost child care assistance since 2000. The budget predicts 1.8 million children will receive childcare in 2011, compared with 2.45 million in 2000."

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How the secondary earner tax affects married mothers
and other timely news and commentary

Tax Law Pushes 'Secondary Earners' to Drop Out
Kristin Maschka, Women's eNews, 12.apr.06
Income tax season makes Kristin Maschka recall the birth of her daughter and how she ended up becoming a "secondary earner," an effect of the I.R.S. tax code that makes many mothers ask, "Does it pay for me to work?"

Talking Taxes
Ruth Rosen, AlterNet, 13.apr.06
Contrary to what the right would have you believe, our tax dollars really are hard at work.

Student Debts, Stunted Lives
Nicholas von Hoffman, AlterNet, 23.mar.06
If students during the '60s had been saddled with the debts our present-day young people carry, there might not have been a civil rights movement. "While our legislators are up nights working on new tax gimmicks to further "capital flows," as they like to call their money-grabbing, they are also burning the midnight oil to throw up financial barriers that will keep the middle class from having children. Forget the cant about family values. Make that childless couple values."

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Perfect girls and growing up to be boys

Over-Achievers With Low Self-Esteem
Amy DePaul, AlterNet, 28.mar.06
A look into the conflicted inner lives of young women who appear to kick ass everywhere -- in school and on the soccer field -- while secretly struggling
with self-worth.

Paradox of the Perfect Girl
Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet, 29.mar.06
While overachieving girls are knocking on the front doors of America's best colleges, admission officers are letting their slacker brothers slip in the back door.

Growing Up to Be Boys
Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet, 23.mar.06
Since the rise of 'lad' culture in the '90s, grown men act like boys -- and are richly rewarded for it. "Popular culture continues to fetishize the traditional, '50s model of masculinity, but in a distilled form -- kick-ass machismo stripped of the accompanying values of honor, duty and loyalty. We seem to have carried with us the unreconstructed sexism of the past -- the objectification of women, inability to connect or communicate -- but discarded its redeeming virtues. Where traditional masculinity embraced marriage, children and work as rites of passage into manhood, the 21st century version shuns them as emasculating, with the wife cast in the role of the castrating mother. The result resembles a childlike fantasy of manhood that is endowed with the perks of adulthood -- money, sex, freedom -- but none of its responsibilities."

Tough cookies
Sarah Karnasiewicz, Salon, 21.mar.06
The director of a PBS documentary about a Girl Scout troop whose moms are behind bars says our obsession with locking up women is harming their kids.

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New public education campaign focused on
reproductive health issues for young women of color

The Pro-Choice Public Education Project's (PEP) new Recognize! campaign aims to raise awareness about reproductive health issues of importance to young women of color and speak directly to the complex realities that many young women of color face today.

PEP is working with other pro-choice organizations, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, to get the word out about recent findings outlining how women of color view their reproductive health. It's critical that the reproductive health and rights of African-American and Latino young women get the attention they deserve.
For example:

• More than one-third of Latinas are uninsured (37 percent), more than twice the rate of white women (16 percent). African-American women are also more likely to be uninsured (20 percent) than white women.

• AIDS is the number one cause of death of African-American women ages 25-34, and the HIV infection rate among Latinas is seven times higher than for white women.

• African-American women have the highest rates of unintended pregnancy, and the unintended pregnancy rate for Latinas is nearly two times the rate of white women.

PEP's Recognize! campaign focuses on three main issues: The role of community and the control that a woman has over her own body in relation to the people around her; Highlighting motherhood as a positive and inspiring responsibility that many young women look forward to, and that means maintaining good maternal health; Recognizing that young women see their reproductive health on a spectrum with other concerns such as lack of health care, HIV/AIDS and general well-being.

Pro-Choice Public Education Project
www.protectchoice.org

Recognize! campaign homepage

She Speaks:
African American and Latino Young Women on Reproductive Health and Rights
Pro-choice Public Education Project, 2004
"Different life experiences driven by the dynamics of race and class have created a historic juxtaposition between the meaning of reproductive freedom for white women and women of color. While white women have had to demand freedom from compulsory motherhood, women of color have had to fight for the right to bear children and raise them out of poverty. Thus, there has been an inherent opposition by women of color to the views held by many middle and upper class white women that the campaign for legal abortion is the most important goal in the struggle for women’s reproductive autonomy. While women of color have historically challenged this narrow position, it remains today as the cornerstone of the modern reproductive rights movement, overshadowing equally important broader reproductive health and justice issues, thereby crippling efforts to reach communities of color and attract and sustain women of color advocates and activists." Executive summary, 10 pages, in .pdf

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Other news and commentary on reproductive health & rights

The Trade in Fertility: India is attracting English-speaking couples looking for surrogates and other treatments
Silvia Spring, Newsweek, 12.apr.06
"Cheaper prices, high-quality health care and the availability of donor eggs and surrogates are drawing an increasing number of couples to Thailand, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and India. In the English-speaking world, India has a big advantage because of the availability of English-speaking doctors. The number of surrogate births in India has more than doubled in the past three years, fertility clinics report. And Indian clinics are performing a growing number of IVF treatments for foreigners frustrated with disappointing results and soaring costs at home."

The battle to ban birth control
Priya Jain, Salon, 20.mar.06
Using bogus health facts to scare women about the "dangers" of contraception, a fledgling movement fights for a culture in which sex = procreation. From the article: "It is very hard to awaken people to the threat," says Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, "because who can believe that something so accessible can be at risk? But that's what [people] said when they started attacking Roe, and now look at how close we are to losing Roe."

Peddling Deception
Nancy Keenan, TomPaine.com, 31.mar.06
"It’s bad enough that politicians are spending our tax dollars on fake “clinics” whose sole purpose is to mislead, coerce and intimidate women. It’s worse to find out that these dollars are being pulled from real, legitimate, basic health care."

Marriage Equality Moves Forward
Evan Wolfson, TomPaine.com, 29.mar.06
"Three polls released in the past few weeks -- a major national survey by the Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan Field Poll in California and a Zogby poll for Garden State Equality in New Jersey—all confirm that the more we talk about gay couples and the freedom to marry, the more people favor inclusion."

Same-sex couples face unique adoption hurdles
Maggie Jackson, Boston Globe/Boston Works, 26.mar.06
"More same-sex couples are raising children than ever before. What was once unheard of is now a fact of life. Forty percent of same-sex couples aged 22 to 55 are raising children, about 5 percent of whom are adopted… If you include children born in once-heterosexual marriages, raised by single parents and parents of all ages, up to 10 million children are estimated to have a lesbian or gay parent."

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Other news and commentary of note:

Tales From the Nursery:
The health benefits of breast-feeding may not be what you think
Sydney Spiesel, Slate, 27.mar.06
"Breast-fed babies may on average have higher IQ scores, say, but is the difference because of the breast-feeding or some other factor, like coming from a family with a higher income level or more education or fewer siblings? In the studies that have been done to date, untangling the observed effects is a nearly impossible exercise in subjective judgment. That's especially the case for evaluating subtle effects like IQ level, or the much later development of childhood cancer, allergies, or tooth decay."

Milk Me: Is the breast pump the new BlackBerry?
Emily Bazelon, Slate, 27.mar.06
"Nursing may be one of nature's best illustrations of supply-and-demand—a mother's milk supply adjusts to meet her baby's appetite -- but the reality of the practice has never translated into tidy ideology."

Daddy dilemma
Larry Smith, Salon, 6.apr.06
My fiancee is 70 percent against kids. The clock is ticking, and it's up to me to convince her to do something I'm not sure about either. An excerpt from "Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives," based on Salon's popular series, To Breed or Not to Breed.
and:
The "Daddy dilemma," one year later
Lori Leibovich, Salon, 7.apr.06
Interview with Larry Smith, author of an essay about the trouble he and his fiancée are having deciding whether to have children.

Helicopter Parents Now Hover at the Office
Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal Online, 17.mar.06
"Helicopter parents are going to work. From Vanguard Group and St. Paul Travelers to General Electric and Boeing, managers are getting phone calls from parents asking them to hire their 20-something kids. Candidates are stalling on job offers to consult with their parents. Parents are calling hiring managers to protest pay packages and try to renegotiate, employers say."

Are social norms steadily unraveling?
Sharon Jayson, USA Today, 21.apr.06
Is it OK to wear flip-flops to meet the President? "Young people today are less concerned about social approval and society's standards than their peers of generations past, says new research analyzed across six decades."

Acting Your Race
Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet, 13.apr.06
Can we recognize race differences without reducing people to stereotypes?

The Measure of Meritocracy
Rebecca Parrish, AlterNet, 23.mar.06
According to Lani Guinier, our educational system has become a copy of the aristocracy it was intended to undo. An interview with Guinier about her forthcoming book, "Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich."

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