IN AN INTERVIEW in the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Bristol Palin makes single motherhood look great. A baby is extra work, but doesn’t interfere with a woman’s independence. A few decades ago, popular culture celebrated the single young career girl, the Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas who got her own apartment presumably before getting married and settling down. Now that popular figure has a baby too. Bristol Palin is inspirational, not for abstinence but for the single woman who wants, or is compelled, to raise her baby herself.

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz writes:

… Bristol is hardly unhappy, despite her hectic schedule and lack of sleep. “I love my baby more than anything,” she says, which is obvious from the cuddles he gets. “He’s like a Gerber baby. He’s the cutest baby in the whole world.” Read More »

RESPONDING TO this entry on the decline of the family meal, Mabel LeBeau writes:

I haven’t figured out if by modern definitions I’m feministic or feminine or merely female in gender, but have found the most effective way to conduct a family meal is participation by the father figure. If Father is the one to initiate conversations, officially nod approval over the meal, settle disputes over who gets to pass the bread first, provide approval for individual family member’s self-validation and ‘say grace,’ it’s rather pointless to call it a family meal in our home if Daddy doesn’t show up. Read More »

THIS IS a famous, intensely evocative photo, taken in 1894, of Alexander Graham Bell, Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller (seated). Bell introduced Keller to her famous teacher. Keller wrote in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, about her first meeting with Bell:

Child as I was, I at once felt the tenderness and sympathy which endeared Dr. Bell to so many hearts. That interview would be the door through which I would pass through darkness into light…

… [H]e is never so happy as when he has a deaf child in his arms. His labours on behalf of the deaf will live on and bless generations of children yet to come; and we love him alike for what he has himself achieved and for what he has evoked from others.

She dedicated the book to him. Read More »

THE FOOD JOURNALIST Michael Pollan approvingly quotes a statement blaming feminism for wrecking a culture of shared food and civility. His assertion seems far too timid given that millions of children now eat chicken nuggets in front of the TV. But Anna Clark at Salon objects:

Blaming feminism for luring women out of the kitchen, stealing the ritual of the family meal, and thereby diminishing “one of the nurseries of democracy” is both simplistic and ridiculous. It’s true that shared meals are powerful spaces for building relationships and “the habits of civility.” But if we’re going to talk about who’s to blame for our current culture of processed food, why not blame untold generations of men for not getting into the kitchen, especially given Pollan’s characterization of the family meal as having a meaningful role in cultivating democracy? If it’s so important, why is their absence excusable?

That’s right.  Men have been doing nothing all these years while women slaved away in the kitchen. Here’s an all-points bulletin: Do not accept a dinner invitation from anyone named Anna Clark. Unless you like chicken nuggets.

  Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

There is a movement in the United States to bring about civil unions not just for homosexuals but for heterosexual couples too. It’s interesting to observe how this idea has been instituted in France and its effect on French society. France has not abolished marriage but it has done the next best thing, given couples the option of forming their own contractual relationships according to their own terms. France has created a legal relationship form called the “Civil Pact of Solidarity” in English, or PACS using the French acronym. Read More »

Alexander Graham Bell, Mabel Bell and their children

IN MARCH 1876, after more than a year of sleeplessness, harried experimentation and a neck and neck race with a competitor, Alexander Graham Bell filed the U.S. patent for the first working model of the telephone. It was the culmination of intense and varied interest by three generations of Bells in projection of the human voice.

On July 9, 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was officially inaugurated and a new era in modern communications began. Two days later, a new era in Bell’s personal life began when he married nineteen-year-old Mabel Hubbard in the parlor of her parents’ home on Brattle Street in Cambridge. It was the first time Tom Watson, Bell’s famous assistant, wore white gloves. Bell gave his wife 1,497 shares in the telephone company as a wedding gift. The Bells’ marriage lasted for forty-five years and in that time, Mabel never once used a telephone herself. She was completely deaf.

As part of my series “Famous Couples,” I look at one of the more interesting couples in the history of modern invention.  Read More »

FROM THE SMOKING GUN:

For the second time in recent weeks, a chapter of the Pi Beta Phi sorority is being accused of drunkenly trashing a facility during a formal dance. At a March 6 party sponsored by the group’s Ohio University chapter, attendees engaged in sex acts, used plates as “missiles” during food fights, vomited on carpets, defecated in urinals, and tried to tear off the clothes of a female bartender, according to a letter written by the director of the West Virginia art center where the formal was held. Read More »

JOHN P. WRITES:

I’d like to offer a contrarian view of your post on graduation levels of men and women.

If I understand correctly Jesse Powell’s statistics are aggregate graduation rates for all undergraduate degrees. However, most undergraduate degrees are awarded for liberal arts courses, history, psychology, sociology, English, etc. I don’t have the stats handy but I’m pretty sure that if you look at graduation rates for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields you will find they are preponderantly awarded to men. Read More »

PEOPLE who make bread are the happiest people in the world.

Look at this painting by the Dutch master Jan Steen, The Leiden Baker Arend Oostwaert and His Wife. Notice how glowing Arend is and how sallow his wife. That’s obviously because he is the handler of the dough. Kneading dough is an unparalleled sensual experience and Arend’s countenance speaks of this ancient reality. I mean, it’s almost unparalleled. Anyone who makes bread from scratch at least once a week is guaranteed sanity and a better disposition than if he didn’t make bread once a week. People who never make bread suffer from repression. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like. Making it is good enough.

Read More »

Do you remember the glass slipper and the poisoned apple, the damsel with hair dangling from a tower window and the whole castle fast asleep? The Age of the Fairy Tale is past, dear reader. Today, we only have tales of self-fulfillment, of the social atom seeking fusion. Here is a perfect example.  In a new book, three women describe their quest for motherhood. Complete with donated sperm, abortion, miscarriage, and marriage at the last minute, it’s an anti-morality play that ends in motherhood for all. The New York Times writes:

Three would-be mothers, some “lucky” sperm and — voilà! — three happy families, with all of the pregnancies happening the old-fashioned way. Read More »

BRISTOL PALIN entered a new phase of celebrity last week when it was announced that she has signed a contract with a high-end promoter as a public speaker. She will earn as much as $30,000 per engagement to share her insights into single motherhood and sexual abstinence. Only 19, Bristol is almost assured of success in this new endeavor. Even if her speaking ability is modest, she is likely to grow in celebrity and touch a chord in many.  That’s because Bristol represents a new kind of woman who is looking for recognition and reassurance. 

Though the Palins are now wealthy and famous, this new kind of woman is neither. She is likely to have a high school education, perhaps a community college degree, maybe a couple of years of college. An interesting and lucrative career is not in her future. She will work for most of her life in jobs that are just jobs. Her love life, her friends and children are the center of things. She is enough of a traditionalist to reject abortion, but not enough of a traditionalist to reject sex before marriage.  That’s why she finds herself where she is. She is a mother but not a wife.

She is a heroine because she has rejected abortion. She is a loser because she has had premarital sex in a post-marital age. Read More »

SCIENTISTS HAIL the creation of artifical life, drawing attention to intelligence and creativity. This development is missing the spontaneity of Darwinian processes.

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KAREN I. writes:

It is interesting that Siti “kind of assumes you draw your inspiration” from the fifties. I am sure she is not alone in that and you even agreed, saying “the word housewife conjures images of that era, doesn’t it?” As a housewife today, I wonder why the 1950s are so consistently associated with being a housewife. There is a curiosity about housewives of that era that does not exist for any other time, even though some women have always been housewives. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER compares Michelle’s shocking appearance last night at a state dinner to Victor Mature in a gladiator movie. Our First Lady appears to have been slathered with oil, as if she’s about to enter the Coliseum. Auster writes, “Michelle is to female style and attractiveness what her husband’s presidency is to America–a deliberate transgression, aimed at redefining it as something else.”

Read More »

 CHRISTOPHER ROACH WRITES HERE:

One interesting phenomenon of our times is that the old-fashioned view that one may act on the basis of sincere belief has been hammered out of existence. We don’t even say, “I think” or “I believe” anymore. It’s “I feel.”

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LISA BELKIN, of The New York Times, is to feminist propaganda what the H. J. Heinz Company is to ketchup. If you look at the enormous smokestacks of a Heinz factory, you get some idea of what goes on in there. Heinz keeps churning it out and people keep lapping it up. It’s the same thing with this one-woman factory of feminist lies and inanities. People apparently love it even though it sticks in the bottle. Now I know you will say that’s unfair. Ketchup is good and Heinz is the best. But it’s literally true and you’ll have to take your ketchup sensitivities elsewhere.

The latest Belkinism comes in the form of this article about the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Lisa is ever ready to launch into artlessly contorted logic to prove that women are oppressed despite outrageous favoritism and she doesn’t depart from her high standards here. She is skeptical about the correctness of Kagan as a nominee. Kagan is not a mother and thus her nomination gives the untutored masses the impression that a mommy cannot rise to the highest pinnacles of power. This is pernicious discrimination against mommies. (Like all feminists, Belkin can’t imagine that the welfare of children might be anywhere in the picture.) There are hockey moms and soccer moms and PTA moms. Why not Supreme Court moms? It’s true that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by some fluke of nature, is a mother and so is Sandra Day O’Connor, but Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan are not. That’s unfair. Look at all the daddy judges.

Here is what I propose. Let all the genetics labs and fertility clinics in the country devote themselves to this just cause. Let’s make Sotomayor and Kagan mommies. Even if we have to resort to cloning, let’s get the job done. It’s only fair.

Read More »

SINCE 2000, the male employment rate has dropped by nine percentage points. The female employment rate has declined by less than five points. The difference will almost certainly be less extreme once the recession ends and traditionally male fields such as construction recover. Nevertheless, these differentials have changed radically in the past 60 years. The male employment rate was 57 percentage points higher in 1950, which explains some of what I noted about the fifties here. It is now about 11 points higher than the female employment rate. As of 2007, about 25 percent of women worked part-time while 10.5 percent of men did.

Here is a table illustrating the employment rates for men and women aged 25 to 54. The sources for these numbers can be found here and here. Read More »

Francesco Guardi's Venice Viewed from the Bacino

IN ITS MISSION STATEMENT, the Center for Literate Values, which was recently vandalized by a computer hacker, states:

The literate individual is vanishing. We who teach have seen with our own eyes the decline of analytical finesse and expressiveness in our composition classes over the past two or three decades. We who have children have struggled to keep their moral acumen focused upon the small, persistent inner voice of conscience rather than upon what celebrities are doing or what passes for “cool” on Facebook. All of us have converged upon a basic realization, whether persuaded of it by theory or driven to it by hard experience: i.e., that the West has entered a post-literate stage. Read More »