The change cometh

What more can I add to all that’s been said about this beautiful week? Not much. Just when I was coming off my inauguration high, Obama’s first executive orders came down. Oh, yes, it’s real. Closing Guantanamo, ending torture, opening government, protecting public lands from oil drilling, lifting the global gag order—sweet rain in the desert.

And then there was the news that Michelle Obama does not plan to spend all her time on selecting ball gowns and redecorating the White House. She has just appointed the general counsel of the National Partnership for Women and Families to be her policy director. The Wall Street Journal describes Jocelyn Frye as “one of Washington’s most visible advocates of expanding family leave and ending pregnancy discrimination” and reads the appointment as a signal that Michelle Obama is “preparing to take an activist stance on such policy issues as family leave and flexible scheduling.”

Looks like Michelle too may have the Obama touch, the ability to make hot button issues safe for prime time, She’s jujitsuing the requirement for the First Lady to focus on family into a feminist agenda.

Build windmills and wipe babies' bottoms

A number of critics have begun to note the macho slant of Obama’s job plan, as it’s being outlined so far. Katha Pollitt, for one, has done so, but then she would, wouldn’t she? (I mean that very much as compliment.) More noteworthy are columns in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and, believe it or not, Forbes.

The economist Randy Albelda writes in the Boston Globe that although we certainly need bridges, roads, windmills, and efficient cars and the jobs that go with them, those jobs will overwhelmingly go to men. Albelda notes that “almost one-quarter of families with children under the age of 18 are headed and supported by women as are the majority of single-adult households without children.” You wouldn’t think that you’d have to point out that leaving out women leaves out most of the country, and the majority of its breadwinners, but you do.

Writes Linda Hirshman in the New York Times, “Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery.” This column is almost enough to make me forgive her for her earlier polemics.

Neither Albelda nor Hirshman include in their criticism the demand that Obama’s jobs plan should include aggressive affirmative action and efforts to pull women into apprenticeship programs in the construction trades. In Forbes, Ruthie Ackerman makes this point. “The answer is not, as Hirshman suggests, to create more low-paying jobs "in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work." The solution is redefine what we consider women's work.”

I can’t help feeling that Hirshman and Ackerman both have it half wrong, and both carry some misogyny around, Hirshman in assuming that women will always do “women’s work” in social work and teaching, and Ackerman in rejecting that work as unimportant. Ackerman would do well to read her fellow Forbes columnist Thomas Cooley arguing for investment in education as part of the stimulus package, not because it helps women, but because it will have the biggest long-term payoff.

Ackerman describes the trades as unsexy. Not to me. A person who knows how to build something—that’s pretty sexy. When my sweetie puts on a pair of Carharts, I go a little mushy. That kind of apparel puts me in mind of the men who worked as part of the original stimulus plan, in the Civilian Conservation Corps, building the trails, bridges, picnic tables, and other amenities I enjoyed throughout my childhood and that my children still enjoy. My daughters ought to get a chance to build such things and say proudly to their daughters, “I built that.”

If I had sons, I would want them to be proud of jobs they'd had caring for children, to point to flourishing people and tell their sons, "I helped raise that." If such work were better paid, such a thing would be far more likely.

How about both and? Get people (including women) building trails, daycare centers, and windmills, and give people (including men) well-paid jobs caring for our elders and children. I want it all. We can do it.

Lenders prey on kids

In case you weren’t already outraged at the bailout for Wall Street, check out this op-ed in the New York Times on how parents are being disproportionately hurt by the mortgage crisis (AKA the predatory lending crisis). According to Eric Nguyen, “Nearly two-thirds of those trying to save their homes in bankruptcy have young children.” Among the many nasty elements of the disastrous bankruptcy bill passed in 2005 was one making it much harder to renegotiate the terms of a mortgage on a primary residence than on investment property.

Nguyen imagines a mother who becomes ill, racks up medical debt, and can’t pay the mortgage on her children’s home, then compares her with a wealthy childless couple who invest in a condo, run up credit card bills, and declare bankruptcy. Who winds up on the street? The kids.

Oh, and by the way, who voted for the bankruptcy bill? John McCain. Barack Obama voted against it. (Shamefully, though, his running mate Joe Biden voted for it.)

McCain is scary: installment #5,543

This doesn’t really need any commentary: Feministing headlines it “McCain: "Isn't rape hilarious?!" McCain allegedly told this joke in 1986:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"

Here’s his campaign’s response to the story resurfacing, which pretty well confirms the story's true:

He's long said that he's said and done things in the past that he regrets," Rogers said. "You've just got to move on and be yourself -- that's what people want. They want somebody who's authentic, and this kind of stuff is a good example of McCain being McCain.

Yup, that’s just what I’d say. Let’s sure not let him be McCain in the White House.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town…CNN ran this headline about a recent Obama press event: “Obama talks about glass ceilings, child care, equal pay.” Moms Rising has sent out an alert asking folks to send Obama a thank you for talking about these issues. Contrary to what some may think, Obama ain’t the second coming. He’s a cautious, savvy politician and he’s going to disappoint us. But, jeez, he doesn’t make rape jokes. Or say he doesn't want to talk about his position on birth control, or think the cause of the gender pay gap is women's underqualification.

Pregnancy and punishment

In a taste of things to come in the general election, the right-wing has pounced on remarks Barack Obama made about teen pregnancy. Here’s what Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Pennsylvania last weekend:

"I’ve got two daughters; 9 years old and 6 years old,” Obama said. “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.

According to the Carpetbagger Report, Sean Hannity, a correspondent for Pat Robertson’s TV show, Hugh Hewitt, and some right-wing blogs are attacking Obama for suggesting that having a baby is “punishment.”

As a pregnant woman (now for the second time), let me school Hannity and Co.: Pregnancy is seriously intense, a takeover of one’s body by an alien being. If you want to be pregnant, it’s a miracle. If you don’t, it’s akin to a nine-month-long rape. And then there’s the child at the end of it. Absolutely, being forced to bear a child unwillingly is a punishment, indeed a life sentence.

Here’s to Obama for seeing this truth and speaking about it. Still, I don’t care for his assumption that getting pregnant as a teenager must be the result of a “mistake.” If he means it would have to result from some error in using birth control, he’s just wrong on the facts. No method of birth control is fail-safe. If he means the mistake was having sex—and given his use of code words about teaching “values and morals” I have to assume that’s what he did mean—I think he’s wrong too, in a deeper way. I don’t see sex as immoral. I see the hatred of the body, and of bodily pleasure, especially of the female body and female pleasure, that underlies most preaching of chastity as a far bigger moral failing than exploring bodily pleasure, even as a teenager. Sure, there are lots of pitfalls to teen sex, high on the list being the risks it poses to girls from misogynist boys, a misogynist culture, and, oh yeah, the difficulty of obtaining birth control and abortion thanks to right-wingers like Hannity and Co.

Fairness to Obama requires noting that he wasn't primarily talking about abortion. He was responding to a question about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.

Women Prime Victims of Subprime Mess

From the start of the mortgage crisis, I was skeptical of the main defense supporters of subprime lending offered—that it enabled people who otherwise couldn’t buy houses to do so. The stories in the press of actual people caught up in the crisis didn’t fit this picture; they nearly always were about people who already owned their homes and had gotten enticed into refinancing with subprime mortgages.

But along with most of the press, it didn’t occur to me that the subprime debacle might be a women’s story. Thanks finally to The New York Times for its coverage of the sorry truth:

Subprime mortgages, which are driving the foreclosure rate, have gone disproportionately to women. … Though women and men have roughly the same credit scores, the Consumer Federation of America found that women were 32 percent more likely to receive subprime loans than men. The disparity existed within every income and ethnic group. Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to get subprime loans than comparable white borrowers.

Get that? Contrary to the apologists, lenders weren’t offering higher rates in exchange for taking on more risk. They were doing what they could get away with, and they could get away with it because of the whole context of sexism and racism at work in our culture. The Consumers Union attributes some of the gender disparities to the greater income instability women face because of divorce or family medical emergencies (they didn’t mention the added time women spend out of the workforce to care for children or elders). Other experts suggest that mortgage brokers assume that women are less confident to negotiate or shop around, and so they figure they can get away with offering them higher rates (a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course). Pile that sexism on top of the likelihood that a low-income neighborhood is not served by prime lenders and you get a nasty picture of shady lenders preying on the vulnerable: women, people of color, and children. I guess that’s what “women and children first” always really meant.

Because if the subprime crisis is a crisis for women, then it is a crisis for children. A foreclosure counselor for a nonprofit in Baltimore told the Times that his typical client is single and female with two children.

Congress and the presidential candidates, what are you going to do about it? (While John Edwards called for a mandatory foreclosure moratorium, Hillary Clinton has called for only a voluntary moratorium, a freeze on rate increases on adjustable mortgages, but proposes $30 billion in aid to affected homeowners and communities. Barack Obama is not calling for a moratorium, and offering only tax credits to homeowners that would average about $500.)

What will the presidental candidates do for mothers?

You aren’t hearing much this campaign season about issues particularly facing women and parents, and you sure aren’t hearing the candidates offering practical solutions to the stresses facing working mothers. So I trundled my (virtual) self off to the candidates’ web sites to see if I could dig up the candidates’ positions on these issues.

First, the Democrats, at least the leading three candidates. Bottom line first, and then the details: Edwards is the only candidate, Republican or Democrat, who demonstrates that he has thought about the practical and economic difficulties specifically faced by women. The man gets it. Read this list of his proposals addressed to women and weep, as I about did, since it’s a longshot this man will be president:

Require businesses to offer paid sick days. Expand the child care tax credit and move toward universal preschool. Expand home health care and offer respite care for those caring for elders. Compensate women who pay less into Social Security, and therefore under current provision receive less benefits, because they are caring for children or other family members instead of working for pay. End poverty (disproportionately faced by mothers and children) and raise the minimum wage (two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women). Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which seeks to end wage discrimination against those who work in female-dominated or minority-dominated jobs by establishing equal pay for equivalent work. Remove some of the tax penalties exacted on low-income, two-earner married couples by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.

And that’s just the stuff on his page on women. The proposals on his “working families” page are great for mothers too. The only major thing I see missing is paid family leave.

Obama’s offerings are nearly as good, the differences between him and Edwards on this score being largely a matter of presentation. Where Edwards speaks specifically to and about the difficulties facing women, Obama mentions only families and fathers. But, alone among the candidates, Obama mentions paid family leave (his plan is to encourage states to offer it). He, like Edwards, supports requiring employers to offer paid sick leave.

He would not only expand the child care tax credit, but make it refundable, so that low-income families could benefit from it. Obama, too, has a plan to move toward universal preschool and expanded child care funding. He would quadruple Early Head Start and increase Head Start funding. He would also expand funding for after-school programs (which always sounded frivolous to me, until I became a parent and began to wonder what you do with your kid between the end of the school day and the end of the work day).

About his plan to “promote responsible fatherhood,” I’m not too sure. (It sounds awfully like the Moynihan report, and is this where we want policy attention focused? How about rewarding responsible motherhood, or at least removing the penalties on mothers, which in the end amount to penalties on responsible fathers, too?) Elsewhere, he mentions that he would provide a special supplement to the Earned Income Tax Credit to workers who “are responsibly supporting their children on child support,” i.e. fathers. As best I can tell, his “Making Work Pay” tax credit would do little to erase the penalties on two-earner families.

Clinton’s families planks sound nice, in a vague sort of way. “Attracting and supporting more outstanding teachers and principals, and paying them like the professionals they are” is good, but precisely how? Reforming No Child Left Behind, also good, but how? “Giving new parents support and training to promote healthy development for their children” sounds all right, but not like bread and butter to me. Increasing access to early childhood education is great, but she gives no promise to move to universal preschool. She does mention expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child care tax credit, without offering details. She mentions family leave, but says nothing about paid leave. And she, like Edwards, supports legislation to provide those taking care of elders with respite care.

There you have it, folks. Next, on to the Republicans.