Liberated and Unhappy

By ROSS DOUTHAT

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26douthat.html?_r=2&em

Phyllis Schlafly at 84

By Andrea Sachs

As the most visible and effective critic of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Phyllis Schlafly squared off against the National Organization for Women and other pro-ERA groups in one of the most bitter battles of the 1970s. Critics denounced her as a hypocrite: though she lauded stay-at-home mothers and wives, she herself was a full-time political activist and lawyer. Nonetheless, Schlafly's grass-roots efforts prevailed, and the ERA went down to defeat. Now 84, Schlafly remains a force in conservative politics, with a busy lecture schedule. She is the president of the pro-life, anti–gay marriage Eagle Forum, which has 25,000 members. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs reached Schlafly at her home in St. Louis.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1889757,00.html

New job for laid-off moms: stay-at-home motherhood

Jocelyn Noveck - Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Soon after New Yorker Geralyn Lucas was laid off from her television job in January, she took her two-year-old son to the playroom of her apartment building. She realized she had never been there before. Within minutes she had inadvertently broken all the cleanliness rules. "I wore shoes," confesses Lucas, 41. "I brought food. I changed his diaper. I didn't know those things weren't allowed." When she took Hayden to his playgroup at a toddler center, she had to ask the little boy for directions to his class. And when she went to the pediatrician's office, the nurses were so used to seeing the nanny that they didn't recognize Lucas.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=446400

Parents who put their children before work will rescue British society

Gill Hornby

Parenting is vital and absolutely not something to outsource.
Well, at last. For every parent who has ever put family over career, this is your moment. Everybody who has ever been asked "And what do you do?" at a dinner party, who has answered "I stay at home with my children" and who has spent the rest of the evening looking at a turned shoulder – now you can gloat. If you have ever been told the funny story about how the toddler cried when the nanny left the room and the mother entered, and you didn't get the joke, now you know: it wasn't funny after all. The Children's Society's report into the living conditions of young people in Britain today has published some radical thoughts.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4438133/Parents-who-put-their-children-before-work-will-rescue-British-society.html

Women can do math careers, they just put motherhood first

Carolyn Moynihan

Why are women under-represented in fields such as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry and higher mathematics? Four years ago the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, got into big trouble for suggesting that it may be because of innate differences between men and women. While feminists reached for the smelling salts and consulted anti-discrimination law, researchers from Cornell University got busy and reviewed more than 400 articles and book chapters to reconcile conflicting evidence on why women tend to choose less math-intensive fields (such as biology, medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine), and why, when they do choose math-intensive careers, they are more likely to drop out as they advance.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/women_can_do_math_careers_they_just_put_motherhood_first/