Over at the Women's Media Center, Gloria Steinem provides an informative heads-up about the forthcoming multimedia blitz around the $2 million study that aims to be an update on Kennedy's famed 1960s report on the low status of women.We should all be forewarned that the media will soon be devoting serious time to bringing us their own special slanted views on women through their interpretation of the new 400 page study: The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything. Goddess only knows if the talking pundits will actually read the study.
One can pray that Chris Matthews, Jack Cafferty, Keith Olbermann and the other prime-time woman-hating bros will be too bored with the story to bother treating us to their own special cave-bro analysis.
The bad news is that by its title and promotion, this report risks portraying women's arrival at 50/50 as an irresistible force that by itself “changes everything.” . . . Read the whole thing. . .
Feminist News Politics Media
Steinem: It’s Not a Man’s World or a Woman’s Nation - excerpt: Will this $250,000 poll and estimated $2 million project succeed in creating real change where so many others have failed? The report itself headlines such warnings as “Plenty of study, few results: Real family friendly workplace reform is long overdue.” It lists some of the many prestigious calls for, say, a national system of childcare; an area in which every other modern democracy has long done better than the United States. In the Nixon era when women were a third of the paid labor force, for instance, Congress passed childcare legislation, only to see it vetoed as “family-weakening.” Now that women are half of all workers with incomes that are necessary to 80 percent of families—indeed, 40 percent of babies are now born to single mothers—childcare is still nowhere on the list of priorities in Congress, and we have also become the only industrialized country without any requirement of paid family leave. . .
The bad news is that by its title and promotion, this report risks portraying women's arrival at 50/50 as an irresistible force that by itself “changes everything.” . . . Read the whole thing. . .
Feminist News Politics Media
