Wednesday, September 3, 2008

"Questions for a Superhuman Mom: The complicated business of judging Sarah Palin"

Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick, from Slate.com, discuss the contradictions within the "conservative feminist" label for Sarah Palin:
...OK, so who are we to judge the reproductive choices of Sarah Palin or those of her children? How dare anyone presume to opine about her work/life balance? Is that question itself the correct feminist response—along with another query: Would men ever be judged so harshly?

Publicly, that's why the judges themselves are being judged. On Jezebel they are angry at female opprobrium. Elsewhere, working women are berated for passing judgment on another working woman. Barack Obama has already said that drawing conclusions about Palin because of her daughter Bristol's pregnancy is out of bounds. We agree. Any feminist who takes the position that 17 is old enough to abort a baby cannot also take the position that the 17-year-old's mother is somehow responsible for her pregnancy.

...The Sarah Palin candidacy could have been a moment for women to celebrate, in glass-ceiling terms if not policy advances. But it never should have stood for the notion that the only way a woman is going to make it to the White House is if she's the best mom in America first...
Read the rest of the article here.

Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were

"It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness, competition and deeply rooted barriers." Read more in the NYT .