Oct 19 2012
By Alina Adams at 1:33 pm
As part of our month-long series dedicated to Women, Work & Money, Alina Adams talks about the changes in her family’s income over time.
Every subsequent child born into a family is supposedly better off. Their parents are further along in their careers, and there’s more money to go around for everyone.
Not exactly true at my house. When it comes to our October focus on Women, Work & Money, my third child is actually the most underprivileged. Read the rest of this entry →
Sep 5 2012
By Alina Adams at 3:21 pm
Confucius (allegedly) said: Do a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Who am I to argue with Confucius?
So, that’s precisely what I did. Because I loved television, I studied television in college, and then I went to work in television. I loved to watch figure skating, so I became a television figure skating producer. After my oldest son was born and the travel associated with skating competitions became unmanageable, I switched to working in soap operas–because I loved soap operas. In the meantime, because I loved to read, I also wrote books, primarily figure skating mysteries and romance novels. Read the rest of this entry →
Sep 4 2012
By Renee Septimus at 4:41 pm
No one wants to consider pregnancy and birth as “illnesses” and yet maternity leave is, for working women, the equivalent of prolonged sick leave. I have a problem with that. Although women do need to recuperate from birth, and need time to bond with their infants, I think that maternity leave penalizes those other workers who do not have babies during the time they are on the job. It gives new mothers a “perk” that others do not enjoy and forces co-workers to assume more of a burden by expecting them to do their own work, and that of their absent colleague.
And apparently, I’m not the only one who feels so. This Sunday (two days after I wrote this piece) the NY Times ran an article on this very same issue. “Parents are a special class, and they get special treatment,” the article quotes.
Please, Kveller readers, do not verbally lynch me. I am on your side. I realize I am expressing a very non-PC point of view, one at odds with current thinking and existing policy in many countries. But, truthfully, maternity leave just does not seem like equitable treatment in the work place. In the broader context of “work,” it does not seem fair, and may actually hurt women by making women of child-bearing age less attractive to employers because of the anticipated time off. Read the rest of this entry →
Jul 19 2012
By Jordana Horn at 2:50 pm
What do Marissa Mayer and I have in common? Yes, she’s going to be Yahoo’s new CEO, and I’m not, so that’s one small way in which we are different. But we are both seven months pregnant–her with her first child, and me with my fourth. Mayer’s new job–and the timing overlap with her pregnancy/imminent maternity–has set talking heads’ tongues wagging.
Read the rest of this entry →
Jul 18 2012
By Carla Naumburg at 12:23 pm
By now we all know that Marissa Mayer was just hired as the new CEO of Yahoo!. I had never heard of Ms. Mayer, and I barely remembered what Yahoo! was, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing about either of them, except for one thing.
Ms. Mayer is knocked up. And Yahoo! knew about it when they hired her.
Mothers around the world rejoice whenever a preggo gets hired, and I’m happy to march in that parade. But that’s not what interests me about this story. No, what actually brought me back to the keyboard was a post I recently read about Ms. Mayer’s plans for her maternity leave. According to the author, “She’s planning on taking a mere few weeks, and she’s been vocal about the fact that she plans to work much of the time.” Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 25 2012
By Ariel Pollock at 12:17 pm
So, I spent last weekend in Vegas.
Um, you might say, isn’t that a strange choice for a babymoon? Indeed it would be–but this was no babymoon. I was sans-husband, and in Vegas for a full week–longer than any human being should ever be in Vegas. Especially human beings that have another human being, almost fully formed, living in their belly. But I had a work obligation, so off to Vegas I went, just shy of eight months pregnant. Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 22 2012
By Deborah Kolben at 2:14 pm
The same year I finished college, I also attended my friend’s graduation at Barnard College. While the commencement speech that year at the University of Michigan had been sort of lackluster, I expected that at Barnard I would be inspired. That perhaps I would be talked into a more ambitious plan than following a boyfriend to New Mexico to live in an adobe hut and work at a clothing store (CP Shades to be more specific and the indignity more acute).
Instead, the speaker at Barnard was Joyce Purnick, a longtime columnist for the New York Times and the first woman to head the Metro section at the paper. That day she addressed the lawn full of wide-eyed young women about to enter the work force and told them: Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 21 2012
By Gabrielle Birkner at 12:08 pm
Would women be better equipped to fight the war if more highly educated mothers went back to work?
Get out your virtual pitchforks. I’m about to defend Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Last week, the writer-turned-lawyer curried ire with many a stay-at-home mother (#sahm, in Twitter verse), when she denounced “1% wives”–referring to America’s most privileged, educated women–as collaborators in the “war on women.”
In her red-meat-for-the-blogosphere polemic, Wurtzel argues that “being a mother isn’t really work” because it’s not selective. “A job that anyone can have is not a job, it’s a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation),” she writes. Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 19 2012
By Jordana Horn at 1:39 pm
Being a “real feminist” is apparently when you write an article for a national publication deliberately denigrating other women, and get paid to do so.
That was what I learned from reading Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay in The Atlantic, “1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism And Make The War On Women Possible.” The essay is fairly mean-spirited. Here, for example, is the first paragraph:
Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 14 2012
By Renee Septimus at 1:22 pm
I love the show Mad Men, and am amused that Sally Draper and I are about the same age. Nostalgia is not my reason for my being such a fan. Rather, the storytelling is great, the characters are complex, and the narrative is compelling.
We baby boomers thought we invented sex. Don and company prove us wrong. We thought women were treated primarily as sexual objects and had a hard time getting ahead professionally, even if they were smart and capable. Peggy and Joan prove us right. We thought that our mothers didn’t do very much at home (I still wonder about that) and Betty shows us what the consequences of that can be. And, in the Mad Men world, and my own world at that time, the only mother who was “working” did so because “she had to.” Many of the rest of us, like Betty’s family, had “Negro maids” to do the housework and child care. Read the rest of this entry →
