Get It, Girls
"The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being." Rilke

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My girl! On Sheryl Sandberg focused on her place as a female role model even during the huge Facebook IPO announcement: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/sheryl-sandberg-of-facebook-staying-on-message.html?_r=1&hp Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high. Her call isn’t simply about mentoring and empowering. It is also about business strategy. A majority of Facebook’s 845 million users are women. And women are also its most engaged users. So Ms. Sandberg is playing to a powerful and lucrative demographic, as well as to the advertisers who want to reach it. Inside Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., she is considered a not-so-secret weapon for recruiting and retaining talented women as well as men. 

My girl! On Sheryl Sandberg focused on her place as a female role model even during the huge Facebook IPO announcement:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/sheryl-sandberg-of-facebook-staying-on-message.html?_r=1&hp

Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.

Her call isn’t simply about mentoring and empowering. It is also about business strategy. A majority of Facebook’s 845 million users are women. And women are also its most engaged users. So Ms. Sandberg is playing to a powerful and lucrative demographic, as well as to the advertisers who want to reach it. Inside Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., she is considered a not-so-secret weapon for recruiting and retaining talented women as well as men. 

All the Single Ladies

Kate Bolick’s article in The Atlantic is well-worth the long read if you’re pondering gender and marriage. She summarizes a lot of the important, current dialogue of feminism: what is the new shape of marriage? are there enough suitable male partners for the modern, successful woman? why is the 1960s marriage widely seen as the marriage model anyway? can single be enough?

Kate’s summary of social historian Stephanie Coontz’s history of American marriage is important. They both argue that a mom-in-kitchen, dad-at-work marriage was a reality for only a minority of American history. Why do we focus on that model so much? Is it because it was most recent? Or because our gender roles are connected to that model most strongly? I think both, but knowing the history makes me more sure that marriage is fluid, changing, and will adapt to the modern woman.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

Kate’s stats on men were the most extreme I’ve read, and pretty depressing:

An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.

And her honest examination of the single woman is the best part. Kate talks about “all the single ladies” and tries to find a place for them in today. Should single women be enjoying their solo days as a phase before they finally find a mate, or can we accept single as a permanent status? I think she lands on the idea that single women who don’t settle for a mate can and must accept their single lives as enough, and that doing so requires some societal or at least peer group acceptance of the lifestyle (Kate goes abroad to find such acceptance).

[T]he single woman is very rarely seen for who she is—whatever that might be—by others, or even by the single woman herself, so thoroughly do most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status.

This is not to question romantic love itself. Rather, we could stand to examine the ways in which we think about love; and the changing face of marriage is giving us a chance to do this. “Love comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part that craves that piece of chocolate, or a work promotion,” Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and perhaps this country’s leading scholar of love, told me. That we want is enduring; what we want changes as culture does.

I can’t do it justice. Read it all or at least skim.

Postpartum Clinic at UNC

” On Monday, a University of North Carolina hospital in Chapel Hill will open the country’s first free-standing perinatal psychiatry unit.”

Each year, Raines sees hundreds of women suffering from postpartum depression.

“I’ve had women come in here for a session and have said, ‘All I want you to do is give me the name of an adoption agency, because there’s got to be a better mother out there for this baby than me,’” she says.

Props to UNC and Dr. Meltzer-Brody for addressing this need.