ProWomanProLife

No no no, not the Mel Gibson movie (does anybody even remember that one?). I think that if someone were to ask me what I as a woman want, I think it would be simple (aside from ice cream, puppies, and a hot tub in my living room of course). I’d like “professional women” to stop telling me what I want. I don’t mean women who are professionals – I mean those who make a profession out of being a woman.

I suppose this article does try to tell us what we want, but I think it hits closer than anything else:

Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

. . .

Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home.”

Which brings us to what women want:

Will this authentic view of womanhood usurp the old political archetypes of what women want? The conversation has begun to rise above self-identified feminists’ assertions as to women’s desires. May it continue and bear fruit. And, whoever wins or loses, this is a whole new playing field in politics, one that more accurately reflects who American women actually are and, yes, what they really want. The American woman wants to annihilate this idea that career is everything. She wants a life. She wants life. And she wants help in being adaptive, not pressure to be something she’s not.

I’m think even a hardcore professional career woman would have a tough time arguing with that.

Read the whole article here.

When Brigitte sent me this link by email yesterday evening, asking if I would like to blog on it, I was sitting at my desk working. It was 8:00 pm, the younger children were in bed and the older ones were watching James Bond “Moonraker”. I saw Mooraker in the plane to France in the summer of 1979, now my kids watch it as a piece of archive. Not that it dates me or anything…

It’s now 8:00 am the next morning and I am sitting at the kitchen counter with my laptop, working. You will agree that I have an expertise of sorts in matters of work-family balance — or lack thereof. My question today is: “What else is new?”

“Culturally, it paints an unhappy picture,” Ms. Bourne said in an interview Monday. “Where are we going to be if people are overworked, burned out, feeling stress and tension and not recognizing it? There is a societal policy implication.”

One of the reasons the women struggled to balance work and non-work is because they often found themselves working beyond a full work day and work week, the scholars say. The women used various justifications to express their acceptance of that situation.

What else is new under the sun? Men have been taking work home for generations. Were we concerned in the 50’s, 60’s and whatever about the societal policy implications of our poor bread-winners feeling over-worked, stressed, and burned-out and not recognizing it? As long as the bills were paid and the work was done, I didn’t think so. All of a sudden, women – who by the way fought to get the privilege of being over-worked and burned-out – get it and we are concerned about the policy implications. Guess what? If we want the lifestyle that comes with the paycheque, we will have to work for it like the men did. Nowhere is this reflected better than in the business world where start-up success is still very closely linked to sweat input. This leaves the female entrepreneur distressed? Maybe she shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

The flexibility in “flexible work arrangement” applies to the schedule, not the output. I, for instance, am working from home this morning: my babysitter is on holiday and my oldest daughter is at camp. My husband – who pays the bills that don’t go away, like mortgage and hydro – needs to work more than I do. That’s not sexist, that’s called “keeping the creditors at bay.” So I am working from home. It doesn’t change what has to be done: I still have a foot-long to do list. As a result, I will likely spread my 8-hour day over the next 12 hours. But I had to fight to get the privilege to work from home, partly thanks to all the well-meaning studies suggesting that we, mothers, should have it easier than the average worker. It’s by making sure that the work gets done that I am now able to work from home occasionally. Flexible schedule doesn’t mean flexible output for fixed income.  It means that you can be trusted to get the job done.

Bold is mine:

Please be advised that the Standing Committee on the Status of Women adopted the following motion from the Hon. Anita Neville at yesterday’s meeting (June 7, 2010):

“That the Committee examine: (a) the climate change impacts on women, and their adaptive and mitigative capacity; (b) the manner in which a gender perspective should be included in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of national environmental policies, in particular strategies related to the impact of climate change on women and the allocation of resources with respect to sustainable development; (c) whether a gender-based analysis of Canada’s policies concerning climate change and sustainable development has been conducted, and if so, its conclusions; and (d) Canada’s role in ensuring that a gender perspective is included as part of the international community’s response to global climate change.”

I eagerly await the results. Particularly regarding my adaptive and mitigative capacity. (Filing under “Crazy out of touch with the average woman.”)

Recently on the Washington Post website a few questions were posed, which included a quote by Sarah Palin, “choosing life may not be the easiest path, but it’s always the right path.”

I like that. It’s honest, because choosing life really isn’t always the easiest path. And the right path often isn’t the easiest anyway. It’s usually the more difficult one because that’s kind of the way life is. It is the path that helps people learn how to become better people and persevere and build character, and that’s one of the things I really like about it. You might even call it . . . the rocky road. Like if you’re in Texas right now like I am and the weather is ridiculously hot so that you’re thinking about ice cream all the time.

Anyway, the Washington Post asked about 16 different panelists from different backgrounds to respond to the quote and a question about abortion. One of the panelists, Colleen Carroll Campbell, whose short piece was titled Pro-life feminism is the future, overwhelmingly had more reader comments than any of the others.

It is a consequence of [the abortion-rights lobby and the feminist establishment's] decades-long campaign to make feminism synonymous with a woman’s right to abort her child and to marginalize any free-thinking feminist who dares to disagree.

It only takes a quick look at the comments at the end of her article to confirm that to be pro-life is to be anti-woman (of course!). Never mind the fact that feminists are supposed to be pro-choice and one of the choices has traditionally been life. Choosing life is anti-woman. Woah, my head is spinning.

For many American women, the feminism that once attracted them with its lofty goal of promoting respect for women’s dignity has morphed into something antithetical to that dignity: a movement that equates a woman’s liberation with her license to kill her unborn child, marginalizes people of faith if they support even modest restrictions on abortion, and colludes with a sexist culture eager to convince a woman in crisis that dealing with
 her unplanned pregnancy is her choice and, therefore, her problem.

Many women are not buying it. They are attracted instead to the message of groups like Feminists for Life, which tells women facing unplanned pregnancies that they should “refuse to choose” between having a future and having a baby. They believe that the best way for a woman to defend her own dignity is to defend the dignity of each and every human person, including the one that grows within her womb. And they reject the false dichotomy of abortion-centric feminism that says respect for human dignity is a zero-sum game in which a woman can win only if her unborn child loses.

The intellectual dishonesty of the old feminist movement is what is driving young women away from it. I don’t know about anybody else, but to me it says “you’re not smart enough to make a good decision, so we’re just giving you these two: success with an abortion or failure with a child” and that sort of insults my intelligence. The new pro-life feminist movement respects us and knows we’re smarter and stronger than that – women can both have a child and be successful.

Step forward, Senator Nancy Ruth!

OTTAWA – Aid experts alarmed by Canada’s new anti-abortion stand in foreign policy have received some raw political advice from a Conservative senator: “shut the f— up” or it could get worse.

“We’ve got five weeks or whatever left until G-8 starts. Shut the f— up on this issue,” Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth told a group of international-development advocates who gathered on Parliament Hill on Monday to sound the alarm about Canada’s hard-right stand against abortion in foreign aid.

“If you push it, there will be more backlash,” said Ruth, who fears that outrage will push her boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to take further measures against abortion and family planning – abroad, or maybe even in Canada. “This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”

Me, I thought she’d hit rock bottom with that comment. But apparently I was wrong.

In order to violate them so consistently, you kinda have to have some idea what they look like. That’s the only justification I can think of for this:

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

So of course I went over to this fine pro-woman site to see what they had to say about that. Here it is, in full:

I’m sure they’ll get around to it. Any minute now.

There’s a seminar tonight at Carleton University put on by the Womyn’s Centre. I think the idea is to have normal pro-life men and women go so as to maybe ask a reasonable question or two. Plus, I find these events usually teach me something about the pro-abortion mindset.

So, the information:

Tonight, Monday, March 15

A panel discussion addressing access and legal issues surrounding reproductive freedom and women’s health

Room 214, Residence Commons

6:30-8:30 pm

You and, admittedly, a couple dozen million Canadians besides. The government decided not to mess with the national anthem. A couple of people are unhappy, including the senator who reportedly came up with the daffy idea. Here’s what she had to say:

If it’s been pulled, it’s an example of how much violence I think there is against women. This is such a relatively small thing to do.”

And you, Nancy Ruth of Ontario, are an example of why people don’t take feminists seriously.

_____________________

Andrea adds: “Me, and a couple dozen million Canadians.” But mostly me, I’m quite sure.

Another good column about how women in Canada are doing well, thank you very much.

What the author fails to understand, however, is that I–and women like me–are the problem. What I’m supposed to do is gripe more about injustices levelled against me. And the one injustice I do gripe about, daily, is the one I’m supposed to support with a smile. Alas.

Identify and explain five (5) elements of gender architecture and how they apply to your everyday life.

Failing that, read this amusing piece by Tasha Kheiriddin and chuckle to your little heart’s content.