There Is No Balance. Only Work

At least, that’s how it must look to researchers at UCLA who have come up with a landmark video picture of what work-life balance really means to today’s frantic families. The picture? Not so pretty. On the surface, it’s more than a little bit creepy: Thirty-two families that allowed social scientists from UCLA to videotape [...]

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Do the Clothes Make the Woman? The Fashion of Feminism

Throughout the course of a woman’s life, a question that never ceases to be relevant is the one so many like to say isn’t–or shouldn’t be–relevant at all: What should I wear? But the fact is, it is. Clothes, of course, do more than keep us warm and safe from indecent exposure citations: they are [...]

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Spinning the spinster myth: we can do anything, but what does it matter if we don’t have a man?

Men are single. Women, on the other hand, are unmarried. And that, ladies, is how language screws us once again All of which came to light Wednesday via Maureen Dowd, who used the current flap about the sexuality of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to note how quickly women go from “single” — read: sexy, [...]

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Planned Parenthood (Or, when best laid plans go bust)

So, today I came across a post by Heather Wood Rudulph, over at her Sirens blog, that got me to thinking. In “Over-Planned Parenthood: Complications abound for women in their thirties and beyond who are trying to get pregnant. But are our too-smart, overly analytical brains making matters worse?” Ruldulph bravely lays herself bare. She’s [...]

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Happy’s Last Stand. And Aprons, Too.

Let’s just agree for one last time that all this happiness business in the wake of the “Paradox of Women’s Declining Happiness” study has a very unhappy subtext: Blame the victim. The victim being us. You’re not happy? The horror! There must be something wrong with you. Blame yourself! Blame feminism! Blame your choices! Whatever [...]

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Woman, Thou Art Screwed (if You Do, Screwed if You Don’t).

It’s depressingly familiar territory, dear reader: the ugly double-binds that have women screwed no matter what they do (or don’t do). And a new book, Damned if She Does, Damned if She Doesn’t: Rethinking the Rules of the Game That Keep Women from Succeeding in Business, written by the gender balanced husband-and-wife team of management consultants [...]

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Of Oil Spills and Underpants: The Case for Sweating the Small Stuff

“The secret to life is clean underpants.” So said Ms. A, a wise woman I interviewed recently for the book, and I swear to you, in context, it made a lot of sense. She’s in her mid-60s, and has been there, done a lot of that. A LOT of that. We were, as you might [...]

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Helicopters Gone Wild

This just in: parents take helicoptering over the top. To wit, this post on the NYTimes Motherlode blog that links to a CNN story on moms who quit their jobs to help their kids get into college. No joke. According to the piece, these are highly educated, professional women who take a “college prep leave” [...]

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