The XX Factor: What women really think.

Daughters Devalued

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

If you're interested in reading a refreshing burst of honesty today, you could do worse than Aaron Traister's piece about the different reactions he received from people when he told them he was expecting a son and when he told them, a couple years later, that he was expecting a daughter. Americans tend to think we're above the prejudices that drive people in China and India to use sex-selective abortion, but as Traister's piece shows, we're far from the angels we'd like to pretend we are. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Stupak Amendment Reveals Fault Lines in Feminist Movement

In reading all the accounts from fellow pro-choice women—like Emily's from earlier this week—bemoaning the Stupak abortion restrictions, I noticed that many of the women who were outraged by the concessions of the health care bill used the terms feminist and pro-choice almost interchangably. Over at Salon, Kate Harding writes, "Feminists have been up in arms about the latest assault on access to abortion," but if you take one look at the website for the group Feminists for Life, one of the first things you see is the banner proclaiming "Women the Winners in U.S. House Amendment Vote" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

What if women had gone to space first?

A post from the DoubleX staff:

According to a recent issue of Wired magazine, women performed just as well as men in late 1950s astronaut training tests. What if a woman had been the first American in space? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Americans Are Pro-Paychecks, Anti-Dirty Houses

A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:

Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress have released a report about women and work that manages both to be interesting and not at all surprising. The report perfectly captures Americans' contradictory attitudes about women working: We're fans of the money women bring in, but we don't show a strong willingness to make the necessary adjustments at home so that women's unpaid labor isn't as necessary ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

A Response from Katie Roiphe

This is a guest post from Katie Roiphe, responding to the various critics of her recent DoubleX essay, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic."

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that credit for the interesting brouhaha surrounding my last piece belongs to the inventive subtitle writer, and not to me. I am, however, a little surprised that people would be so blinded by a flashy subtitle that they would not be able to read the substance of the piece itself ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Naomi Wolf Explains Why Angelina Jolie Is Better Than Every Woman Ever

In this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, Naomi Wolf has penned an absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf’s analysis, most fully embodies “having it all.” It’s just about impossible to read this piece and simultaneously remember that Wolf is a serious feminist and thinker. She has bent her erudition to the plainly ridiculous, plainly thankless task of explaining that, because Angelina Jolie is a symbol of both goodness and sexiness, she is a better, more complete woman than Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently, if Mother Teresa had made time to screw hotties between her busy orphan-caring schedule... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Why Can't Guys Mentor Women?

Meghan, thanks so much for posting about the importance of female mentorship. I'm no physicist (anymore) but with many friends plus a mom in science, I am especially sensitive to the need for and frequent lack of XX mentorship in these disciplines. We've all heard reports that Americans lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent. Then there are the other, real disadvantages talked about in the Fisman/NBER report.

Some of this, of course, has to do with... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Barack's Angels?

Every day the media attention paid President Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist gets a little more bogged down in reviving cheesy literary archetypes. Articles like this one unerringly paint Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the tempestuous “Fiery Latina” to Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s tender “Den Mother,” and then contrast both to Diane Wood’s brainy “Bench Balancer.” Why do these three types seem so eerily familiar?? Hmm. Might it be because... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Linda Hirshman: I Didn't Call Anyone at Jezebel a Slut

A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Empathy: It's Contagious

Here's a really interesting study showing that proximity to women appears to shape male views on policy. I recently wrote about a study showing the influence of female judges on their male counterparts in gender discrimination cases. Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight, here's a bunch of fascinating studies showing that fathers of daughters tend to support more liberal programs, ranging from... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Feminism Is Not a Monolith and Neither is Double X

Yes, Virginia, Feminism Really Is Dead.

Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's what you'd think, judging by today's launch of DoubleX.com. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?

At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Obama the Feminist Role Model

From David Leonhardt's cool and meaty interview with the president. Obama says:

And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important....

I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.

LEONHARDT: Did Michelle ever make more than you did?

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.

Probably only for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time that I was in the State Senate.... But when I started campaigning for the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.

Gloria Steinem to Get Tramp Stamp?

This from an interview by Joni Evans on wowowow.com with Gloria Steinem, 75:

wOw: In your wonderful book, Outrageous Acts, you advocate that we should do something outrageous every day. Your quote: "Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice—or at least to realize I had one—I discovered a new answer to my earlier rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get? The answer was: a lot." Are you still doing outrageous acts? What did you do on your birthday?

Steinem: ... I’m thinking of having a tattoo for my birthday. I like the art nouveau-looking ones that I see on women’s backs just below their jeans—it’s rebelliously known as a tramp stamp—but if it hurts, I won’t do it. My real birthday present to myself is going back to Zambia to live with elephants for a few days.

I can't decide if I'm more surprised that Steinem is considering getting a tramp stamp or that she doesn't know that tattoos hurt.

Quiverfull Feminism

"The threat of population decline," writes Michelle Goldberg at the American Prospect, "is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies.... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones!"

I wrote a Reason feature on this issue for anyone who is interested in sociological and economic analysis of natalist policy. But for now I'll just say: Liberals ought to be very, very cautious about engaging natalist rhetoric in the promotion of social welfare policies. The claim that Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction might help sell universal daycare or any other policy that can be cast as an incentive to motherhood, but population alarmism lends credence to a number of wildly illiberal arguments. Once you've bought into the idea that a nation-state must defend its existence through native population growth, you've come uncomfortably close to arguing that a particular subset of women has a patriotic responsibility to reproduce. You've also legitimized some legislator's attempt to bribe women into using their bodies in a particular way. There is a reason that the producers of Demographic Winter are traditionalist Christians.

Gradual population decline of the kind we are seeing in Germany and Japan is, I think, manageable. But even if we insist on addressing population decline as some kind of crisis, it's not at all clear that liberal policies like paid family leave are going to turn the tide. The most obvious difference we see between developed countries with relatively high birth rates and developed countries with relatively low birthrates is cultural. Swedes and Americans are relatively more likely than, say, Singaporeans or Koreans, to believe that work and motherhood are compatible. The countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are countries in which childless women are integrated into the workforce but women with children are expected to stay home.

Such attitudes are distinct from redistributional social welfare policies. It may be that Sweden's welfare state is responsible for its near-replacement birth rate, but the evidence for this is not terribly compelling. In order to frame the story this way one needs to cast the high-fertility United States as an anomalous outlier rather than part of the general, culture-driven trend.

I am sympathetic to Goldberg in that population alarmism might be a useful way to argue for policies I happen to support; more open borders, for example. But there are better arguments for a humane immigration policy, and there are better arguments for an expansive welfare state.

Is Feminism More Than a Label?

Emily and Jessica,

I was very interested in reading Sandra O'Connor's interview in the New York Times Magazine, and I wish she had elaborated more on why she doesn't call herself a feminist. I've never been comfortable identifying as a feminist, but neither do I like the implication that I'm anti-feminist. To me, abortion has always been something of a litmus-test on that front. If being anti-abortion means I can't be part of the club, well, so be it.

But it goes beyond that. Sure, I want women to have equal pay and equal access to education and jobs, and protection from violence and domestic abuse. Yet I still end up with the nagging feeling that feminists talk about women having more opportunities and choices available to them, but are mostly supportive only of those who make the "right" choices—having a career, for example—or focus on the right priorities. (I get a hint of this from Jessica's post, when she says that the pro-life movement and even the cardio-striptease phenomenon have "co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism.") The quest for universal day care, for example, ignores the fact that providing such programs for working families will doubtlessly punish with a higher tax burden those single-income families in which women have chosen to stay at home to raise the kids.

Sandra Day and Feminist Foils

Emily, I've been mulling over your question all morning: Does it matter that Sandra Day O'Connor won't call herself a feminist? My gut instinct is that actions speak louder than words, and as a feminist I would vastly prefer better work policies for women than widespread embrace of the term. But I suspect that O'Connor's reticence to self-identify as a feminist is for different reasons than later generations' reaction to the word.

Though you say that Sarah Palin doesn't call herself a feminist, she actually flip-flopped on the matter: She initially called herself a feminist to Katie Couric but refused to label herself when interviewed by Brian Williams. She's even a member of a organization called Feminists for Life. I suspect that deep down, Sarah Palin does think of herself as a feminist, and that's precisely why I think women of later generations may be uncomfortable with the term: Its meaning has become completely muddled.

So many things have co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism—from the pro-life movement to cardio striptease classes—I wonder if women of generations X and Y are afraid to call themselves feminist because that self-definition is more confusing than illuminating. Sandra Day O'Connor may have been defining herself in opposition to the bra burners, but today's young women don't have such a clear-cut foil.

Sandra Says No

The United States Gets Its First Female Solicitor General

The Senate has just confirmed Elena Kagan to be solicitor general of the United States by a vote of 61-31. She's the first woman to be confirmed to the post.

Afraid To Blog While Female? Really?

Susannah, thanks for sharing the article about the SXSW fem-blogging panel. When I read your post, I could think only of our former contributor Melinda Henneberger, who back during the early days of this blog, while commenting on a study comparing men with women on something or other, quoted Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. To wit: "Put on your big girl panties and deal with it." (Which is my way of saying I agree with you, 100 percent.)

I've often thought (jokingly) that "Putting on our big girl panties" should be the motto of this blog.