Celebrate International Women’s Day: Happy IWD to everyone! Here’s the 100-year history and hundreds of events taking place in more than 50 countries.

Lucinda Marshall has reflections on the importance of IWD — and plenty more at Feminist Peace Network. Women’s eNews’ weekly Cheers & Jeers focuses on equality gains and disappointments around the world. Carolyn Byerly writes about the lack of U.S. media coverage.

State of Black America: The State of Black America report was issued this week by the National Urban League. The 2008 edition is subtitled “In the Black Woman’s Voice” and includes essays on the economic, social, psychological and medical challenges that black women face. An executive summary, abstracts and order form can be found in the Urban League’s publication section.

This AP story describes some of the essays. Julianne Malveaux’s “The Status of African-American Women” was republished in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

Legislation on Drive-By Mastectomies Stuck in Neutral: “Despite an online petition with 20 million signatures supporting federal legislation that could prevent insurance companies from covering only these so-called drive-through — or outpatient — mastectomies, Congress has been slow to act,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “But after more than 10 years of proposing similar legislation, proponents of the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act are hoping that with Democrats controlling Congress, the measure might finally be approved.”

Conflict of Interest Much?: “A dispute over food industry influence has resulted in the resignation of the incoming president of the Obesity Society,” reports The New York Times. It seems that Dr. David B. Allison came under fire after the society, which represents obesity doctors and researchers, learned Allison had written an affidavit “as a paid consultant on behalf of the restaurant industry, which is trying to block new rules in New York City that at the end of March will require fast-food and other restaurant chains to list the calories of menu items.”

Plus: “According to some experts whose views are public health heresy, the jury is still out on how dangerous it is to be fat. ‘The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated,’ said Dr. Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey,” reports the AP.

Maternal Instinct Wired into the Brain: That’s the headline, anyway, on this incomplete New York Times summary of a study that appeared in Biological Psychiatry. On the upside, it’s a great example of the added-value of commenters, who smartly question the lack of context and potential implications.

Texas Twofer: Rachel points to two Texas stories — the first about a woman kicked out of a mall’s salon for breastfeeding (a violation of company policy and a state statute), and the other about a mother pushing for a policy change after the teenager who raped her now 12-year-daughter was allowed to return to school.

What’s in a Name?: Last month, the Rape Crisis & Abuse Center in Ohio switched back to its old name – Women Helping Women, with the added tagline “Serving Women & Men Who are Victims of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault & Stalking.”

The change was originally made because the agency also helped male victims of domestic violence, but the new name was considered too off-putting and fundraising dropped, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer. “It was the word,” said Executive Director Ann McDonald. “The word rape scares people.”

An editorial in support of the agency’s decision reads in part:

Besides clouding the fact that the center also works heavily with victims of domestic violence, the old name created distance – the very thing a victims’ advocacy group can’t afford. “We need people to hear us,” McDonald says.

Critics may say the center should have maintained its name on principle, that refusing to back off the word is one way to shatter the stigma. But in this case, a challenge to semantics isn’t as important as keeping a vital service viable and alive.

Call for Abstracts: The Black Women’s Health Imperative invites abstracts from individuals interested in presenting a workshop at the national black women’s health conference, June 20, 2008. The abstract must address topics within one of the three conference tracks: mental health, HIV/AIDS and overweight and obesity. The deadline is March 28.

Recent reports have noted a booming business in India for women who are paid to act as gestational surrogates, who receive compensation many times a normal salary in the region to carry out a pregnancy for women in other countries (including the United States).

In the U.S., we have an uneasy relationship with anything that smacks of paying people for their bodies – prostitution is generally illegal, payment of egg donors has inspired much ethical debate (including suggestions that payment is okay, but only up to a point), adoptions must be carefully conducted to avoid the appearance of “buying babies,” and an organization offering financial incentives to drug-using women to be sterilized has been widely criticized. State laws in the U.S. on surrogacy vary, but several prevent compensation of the surrogate. While each of these issues has its own special considerations, the overarching concern tends to be whether payment for the use of a body can ever be anything but coercive when women in disadvantaged situations are the ones being paid for their bodies.

What, then, can we make of U.S. families skirting those rules to pay women in another country to serve as surrogates? One woman interviewed for the Marketplace piece on the issue notes the creepy kind of control that can be had over the surrogates (which she sees as an advantage), stating, “The legal issues in the United States are complicated, having to do with that the surrogate mother still has legal rights to that child until they sign over their parental rights at the time of the delivery,” and, regarding the surrogate’s behavior while pregnant, “…there’s no one policing her in the sense that you don’t know what’s going on.”

Judith Warner points to the language of empowerment being used by supporters of this trend and the conflict of that viewpoint with generally accepted rules of body-selling in the United States, observing:

“In the United States, lip service has long been paid to the notion that women can’t be instrumentalized as baby-making machines. Indeed, one of the ways that surrogacy survives here is under cover of the fiction that the women who bear other women’s babies do so not for the money – which would be degrading – but because they ‘love to be pregnant.’ But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering.”

Jill at Feministe comments on how this news fits into a larger narrative about race, class and labor:

“Addressing surrogacy as one service industry among many wherein the bodies of poor women of color are used to further the wants of wealthier white people would require us to look at the systematic racisms and inequalities that prop up the entire global economy. And that definitely does not go over so well. And so instead we get a story about entitled, selfish white women, and brown women who are doing the work we wouldn’t do, but who maybe should consider themselves lucky for getting scraps.”

This story, then, is not just about the strange news of women in India earning unexpected sums for completing a pregnancy – it is about outsourcing work and the conditions in which that work is performed in general, questions of coercion, “racisms and inequalities” (including the double standard in paying others to do what we will not allow our “own” to be paid to do), the control of bodies, and the ethics of payment for the use of those bodies. What’s your take on this issue?

FDA Panel Rejects Breast Cancer Drug: “A Food and Drug Administration panel dealt a sharp blow to biotech giant Genentech Inc. on Wednesday by refusing to recommend approval for the company’s high-profile drug Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer,” reports the L.A. Times. “The cancer drugs are controversial: They extend patients’ lives in some cases only by several months, and they can cost as much as $100,000 per patient per year. In recent years, federal regulators have been willing to approve drugs even if the benefits were only marginal. But that may be changing.”

Health Care Debate Needs to Include Women: “As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic leadership in the Legislature negotiate a health care proposal that they hope everyone can agree upon, it’s important to consider a California constituency that hasn’t received enough attention during this debate: women,” writes Carlina Hansen, executive director of the Women’s Community Clinic in San Francisco, in an op-ed published in the Sacramento Bee.

The op-ed was co-signed by other representatives of the Women’s Working Group on Universal Health Care, a California-based organization that focuses on educating and involving women and women’s organizations in state and local health reform efforts. Check them out.

The Doctor Will Email You Now: “Unlike the banking, restaurant and travel industries, the medical profession has been slow to embrace the Internet’s potential customer service benefits,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “But despite concerns about patient privacy, costs and time constraints, a growing number of physicians are encouraging patients to go online to do things such as check lab results and immunization records, request refills and appointments, and e-mail their physicians with non-urgent medical questions.”

What Says Love Like Diamonds in the Delivery Room? In another example of All The News That’s Fit for Wealthy Heterosexual White Women, the New York Times turns attention to “push presents,” given to the mother following childbirth. Art commemorating the baby’s birth — I get that. I also understand, as one commenter points out, the desire to celebrate the birth with something that can be passed down for generations. But the materialism depicted in this story is disturbing. What’s nine months of pregnancy and labor worth? How about at least six months of paid maternity leave — now that’s priceless.

Plus: New word association game — read the word “push,” visit Pushed Birth.

Environmental Toxin Can Collect in Breast Milk: “Scientists have discovered the mechanism by which a chemical known as perchlorate can collect in breast milk and cause cognitive and motor deficits in newborns,” reports HealthDay News. “Used since the 1940s to manufacture explosives and rocket fuel, the contaminant is still widely present in the water and food supply, experts say.”

The study by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University appeared in the Dec. 3-7 advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s more from the EPA on perchlorate.

A Special Delivery: “‘Juno’ is the only film in recent history in which the protagonist seriously considers termination,” writes Jennie Yarbroff in Newsweek. Of course if you’ve read any of the reviews (which are almost uniformly stellar) you know that consideration is as far as it goes.

EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum writes in her review: “The old-school feminist in me wishes Juno spent more time, even a tart sentence or two, acknowledging that the options taken for granted by this one attractive, articulate teen are in fact hard-won, precious rights, and need to be guarded by a new-generation army of Junos and Bleekers, spreading the word by text message as well as by hamburger phone. Separate but equal truth: This movie is so delightful and good-hearted a portrait of the kind of new-generation army I’d like to hang with that I accept the admonition ‘Silencio, old woman.’”

Plus: NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviews crush-worthy Ellen Page, and critic Bob Mondello finds this season’s films are where the girls are.

Environmental and Occupational Causes of Cancer: Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Lowell & Boston University last month published an updated scientific review, Environmental and Occupational Causes of Cancer: New Evidence, 2005-2007. According to the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, the report concludes that “mounting evidence linking unintentional exposures to toxins in our workplaces and general environment contribute to the nearly one and a half million new cases of cancer in the U.S. in just 2007 alone.”

The report synthesizes the recent peer-reviewed scientific literature and finds compelling new evidence linking cancer with specific exposures, namely:

* Breast cancer from exposure to the pesticide DDT before puberty;
* Leukemia from exposure to 1,3-butadiene;
* Lung cancer from exposure to air pollution;
* Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from exposure to pesticides and solvents;
* Prostate cancer from exposure to pesticides and metal working fluids;
* Brain cancer from exposure to non-ionizing radiation; and
* A range of cancers from exposure to pesticides based on early findings from the Agricultural Health Study

Here’s the executive summary and the full 45-page report (PDF).

Making women into sex objects is one thing, but making violence against women attractive and titillating is another.

That’s just what the marketers of the recently released thriller “Captivity” have done, however. The film chronicles the abduction and torture of a young model. We’ll let the the synopsis from the official film website take over from there:

Everyone wants her. But someone out there has been watching and waiting. Someone wants her in the worst way. Out alone at a charity event in Soho, Jennifer is drugged and taken. Held captive in a cell, Jennifer is subjected to a series of terrifying, life-threatening tortures that could only be conceived by a twisted, sadistic mind.

“Captivity narratives” actually have a long history in American culture, originating with tales of “proper” white women being kidnapped by Native Americans. So it’s unfortunate but not surprising that we see Hollywood once again perpetuating the cheap thrill that this scenario provides.

What is surprising though is the shameless way the film is being promoted. As Ann at Feministing described last week, the original, jaw-dropping billboard for the film prompted a number of critiques, including this piece in The Nation by Annabelle Gurwitch and Jill Soloway’s commentary at the Huffington Post. Both women happened to be driving in cars with young children when they saw the billboards.

“I was driving a carpool of third graders to school when my son pointed at a large looming advertisement and asked, ‘What’s that, mom?’” writes Gurwitch. She continues:

I craned my neck — it was pretty high up, but still visible from the car — and glimpsed some extremely violent and disturbing images. What was being depicted exactly was hard to make out …. A woman crying, maybe; someone encased in a mask with tubes inserted in the nasal passages; and finally what looked like a female body lying inert, her body draped over a bed. The poster read: “Abduction, confinement, torture, termination.” Naturally, as a left-wing liberal, I assumed it was detailing abuses at Abu Ghraib and the anguish this has inflicted on the spouses of the prisoners. But no, it was advertising a movie.

To the children, however, I replied, “That person has just found out she’s very ill. She goes to the hospital and is placed in a full-body cast, and when she gets home she sees her medical bills, which are so exorbitantly high that she passes out.” Were they convinced, confused, politically indoctrinated? I’m not certain, but the rest of the ride to school was very, very quiet.

Gurwitch is obviously trying to bring a little bit of levity to the situation here, but her responses inspires Ann to pose a serious question directly to her readers — “How do you talk to your kids (and others’) about sexist images in the media, particularly disturbing or violent ones like the Captivity ads?” The extended discussion that ensues is valuable.

Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and other feminist narratives, called out the same posters as well as the trailer for the film back in May. While he doesn’t discuss its effect on children specifically, he does see the marketing campaign as insidiously playing upon embedded sexist attitudes in American culture.

Interestingly, Vanessa at Feministing had already written — several weeks before Ann — about how disturbed she was by the film’s marketing campaign. But she was criticizing the revised version of the film’s advertising — not knowing anything about the original billboard campaign.

The marketers of the film apparently got the message, but they didn’t learn the lesson.

N.H. Becomes First State to Repeal Parental Notification Law: New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch signed legislation last week repealing a law requiring that a parent be notified before a minor has an abortion. “The 2003 law never took effect because of a court challenge, and the repeal took effect immediately,” reports the Washington Post. “I strongly believe parents should be involved in these decisions, providing important support and guidance. Unfortunately that is not possible in every case,” Lynch said.

HIV Testing and More: RH Reality Check has published a package of stories about HIV testing. Plus, The Choice of Sex Selection marks the first post in a series looking at sex selection in India.

Sing it Loud: More than 1,000 activists attended SisterSong’s national conference in Chicago last month on women of color, sexuality and safety. “At a time when HIV and other sexually transmitted infections disproportionately affect African American and Latina women, the gathering stressed the importance of talking openly about sex instead of allowing societal taboos to prevent conversations about risks and safety,” writes Jeff Fleischer at Women’s eNews.

“Everyone is telling us what not to do, but who’s telling us what to do?” says Loretta Ross, the national coordinator for Atlanta-based SisterSong, a collective of some 80 organizations focused on reproductive health for women of color. “‘Just say no’ ain’t worked for drugs, sex or politicians.”

My Mother’s Symptoms: The American Cancer Society and other groups recently identified a set of symptoms that might point to ovarian cancer. The symptoms were all too familiar to Agnes Krup, who writes at Women’s Voices for Change about losing her mother to ovarian cancer 20 years ago.

Sick Children, Working Moms: “Guilt-ridden mothers share stories of sending ailing kids to day care or school out of fear that staying home with them would result in discipline on the job,” writes Ellen Bravo at The Nation. “These stories don’t surprise me. But what was startling was hearing how many kids drag themselves to school sick to keep a parent from losing pay or getting fired.”

How to Pee Standing Up: Rachel at Women’s Health News does it so we don’t have to. Here’s her review of the P-Mate, a portable urinating device.

OUCH: Tara C. Smith of Aetiology reports on an article in the August issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases about what can happen when a bikini wax goes bad — and, as Smith notes, “it’s every bit as bad as you think.” it’s quite a revealing piece (no pun intended). “The paper,” writes Smith, “is as much about the psychology of beauty and the lengths one will put themself through as it is a report of the infection.”

Walk With Your Work: I’m pretty much tethered to my computer desk/laptop, so this walk-and-work set-up, as reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, sounds kind of cool. Or it’s a reminder I should really get outside more. (Via Spine-Health)

And Another Thing: That would be the name of Katha Pollitt’s new blog at The Nation. Good times ahead …

The latest issue of The Mothers Movement Online asks the question, “Do men mother?”

In notes from the editor, Judith Stadtman Tucker writes:

While robust social research confirms that fathers can be excellent and affectionate caregivers, caregiving men still bear the burden of having their performance compared to the specter of the ideal mother, whose mythic capacity for domestic omnipotence and self-denial is tied to gender in complicated ways. Real world mothers bear the brunt of this as well, of course — among our favorite complaints, pressures to conform to unrealistic standards of maternal perfection top the list — but at least we don’t have the cultural construct of masculinity to contend with.

In this excellent essay, Jeremy Adam Smith, who blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic (a really neat site) and who has a new book coming out titled “Twenty-First-Century Dad,” begins by describing his experience at the local playground in 2005 with his infant son. Attempts to form a manly play group with other dads failed as not enough kids showed up each week for it to be considered a real playgroup.

“And so I plucked up my courage and I set about finding mothers who could join us,” writes Smith, continuing:

Dads were scarce on the playground, but in truth I wasn’t alone. Generation X dads spend twice as much time with children than did their Baby Boomer fathers. The result is a huge generation gap (though, ironically, it was previous generations of fathers who pioneered more developmental and caregiving roles). When Kerry Daly of the University of Guelph interviewed thirty-two young Canadian fathers in the early 1990s, he found that many dads rejected their own fathers as role models. “In light of the perception that parenthood had changed so dramatically from the previous generation,” Daly finds “a tendency to search for specific instances of good fathering behavior among one’s peers.”

At the same time, however, “the men in this study viewed their mothers and wives as providing some of the more practical and tangible guidance for how to provide care for children.” One father tells Daly: “I think my mom for the most part did a better job of getting me ready to be a father. When the child came home, there was more input from my mother in helping me out on how to handle things; where my father was pleased for me, you know, ‘it’s your child,’ and that’s what I got from my dad.”

Daly’s findings are not isolated. In 2006, Trent W. Maurer and Joseph H. Pleck studied the connections between parenting identity, the feedback parents receive from others about their identity and behavior, and behavior by interviewing 47 fathers, whose average age was 38, and 56 mothers, average age 36. “The more involved fathers perceive other fathers to be,” they conclude, “the more they attempt to model the level of that involvement (and the more models they have).” Maurer and Pleck suggest that such peer influence is one of the most decisive variable influencing fathers’ caregiving behavior — perhaps just as important as their wives’ expectations.

Are men who take care of children mothering, or are they merely pushing the frontier of fatherhood into new territory?

It’s not an idle question, for it goes right to the heart of the relationship between gendered identity and gendered behavior. Those who seek to expand the definition of “fathering” to include caregiving tend to emphasize male distinctiveness, like supposedly male qualities of rough physical play, risk-taking, and careless housecleaning. Another group tries to extend the definition of “mothering” to include men, which severs the mothering role from biology and sets up “mother” as a role into which either a man or a woman can step.

Go read the rest. And, stealing from the editor’s notes, here’s a look at some of the other essays featured in this issue:

In the Commentary section, Erica Etelson spells out how Democrats can reclaim the family values agenda by supporting progressive work-life policy, and Jean Kazez explains why Linda Hirshman is wrong about relieving the tax burden on secondary earner wives.

In Books, Carolyn McConnell reviews Ann Fessler’s “The Girls Who Went Away,” which is based on the author’s interviews with women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. Deborah Siegel reviews Pamela Stone’s “Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Their Careers and Head Home,” which relays the findings of Stone’s in-depth study of 54 high-achieving mothers who left the paid workforce.

Tucker adds that “‘Opting Out?’ is by far the most important book on women, work and family to be published this year, and is an absolute must-read for activists and advocates.”

How’s that for a recommendation?

It was the article heard ’round the blogosphere.

In 2003, the “opt-out revolution” was coined by The New York Times with the publication of Lisa Belkin’s controversial magazine cover story about wealthy, Ivy League grads choosing to stay home with their children.

Since then, there’s been much written about whether the opt-out revolution exists (see E.J. Graff’s comprehensive analysis in CJR or recent appearance on NPR’s “On the Media”) — and, if there has been an uptick in the number of women “opting out,” then the driving force for many is likely the lack of family friendly work policies and affordable childcare.

Today Belkin charts a new trend for The New York Times: opting back in. More businesses, writes Belkin, are accepting the nonlinear career path and are offering women more flex and part-time opportunities, making it easier to re-enter the workforce.

“It’s a movement that’s still in its infancy. And it is hard to separate lip-service by companies from true commitment for the moment. But should it take hold — should the stopping and starting, the ramping down and revving back up of a career become the norm — it would transform the workplace,” writes Belkin, adding:

Numbers are driving the trend. There has been a 6 percent falloff in labor force participation among married mothers, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But those women are not leaving permanently. They stay out an average of 2.2 years, according to research by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, whose book “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success” (Harvard Business School Press) is just out. Then they try to opt back in. “Ninety-three percent of off-ramped women are trying to get back on track,” Ms. Hewlett says, and while 74 percent do find work, only 40 percent find work they call satisfying. [...]

Her new book is an upbeat chronicle of how dozens of major companies are setting out to improve those numbers. A looming worker shortage, brought on by the imminent retirement of the baby boomers, means off-ramped employees, already trained and battle-tested, will be increasingly valuable.

This means more of what we have already seen: flexible work schedules, telecommuting, job sharing. Women in particular, but also a substantial percentage of men, have made it clear that is what it will take to keep them loyal.

The story was already number 12 on the Times’ most-emailed list as of mid-morning, and it’s a safe bet that it will continue to rise in the rankings. But while the issue is always a hot topic, as Belkin herself notes, it’s far too soon to accept that there is a permanent shift underfoot. And the low percentage of women who find “satisfying” work opportunities is troubling. But Belkin concludes somewhat optimistically:

I have been writing about life and work long enough to know that a change in policy is not the same as real change. I hear regularly from workers who were all but laughed at when they tried to take advantage of a flexible program that was nothing but corporate window dressing. Or who work for a company listed in Working Mother’s “100 Best Companies” but who are at the office nearly every weekend. This week I got a typical e-mail message from a woman, in her 40s and trying to return to the workforce, who finds that “interviewers still think your brain has the consistency of baby food just because you’ve spent some time off with a baby.”

So I am too jaded to believe that this small handful of trendsetters will bring transformation overnight. They will not change the fact that too many employers still look at a resume gap as a disqualifying mark; or that women who leave and return pay an average 18 percent salary penalty compared with those who never pause; or that men feel constrained from asking for flexibility because it carries a stigma; or that the only way to eliminate the stigma is for men to start to ask.

But whatever distance is left to travel before these exceptions become the norm, we are five years closer than when Ms. Stepnowski opted out. And I am not so jaded that I don’t recognize that this is a promising, and important, start.

It’s great to read that some enlightened companies are stepping up, but women at all economic levels will benefit only if there is a real shift in political consciousness — and this need to take place at both the state and national levels.

Belkin doesn’t mention MomsRising.org, which was founded a year ago to advocate for changes in public policy. But as the Washington Post noted this past weekend, the organization is already effecting real change with its blend of house parties and coordinated political activism.

“More than 90,000 people have registered, galvanizing around six main issues: family leave, flex time, health insurance, child care, fair wages and children’s activities, such as better after-school programs. Their proposals are not new, but together they create a “motherhood” agenda that has attracted a fresh enthusiasm,” writes Donna St. George in a profile of MomsRising that was published on Mother’s Day.

Said Kristen Kiefer, a mother of two in Manassas: “The reality is that, no matter what your situation is, everyone struggles with this.”

This nascent mothers’ movement sealed its first legislative victory last week. In Washington state, MomsRising members vigorously lobbied for paid family leave for working parents. Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) signed a measure Tuesday making the state the second, after California, with such a mandate.

“The Washington state experience shows moms truly can make a difference, and that is thrilling,” co-founder Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner said, recalling the effort: 14,000 e-mails to lawmakers, hundreds of telephone calls, 600 hand-delivered cookies and a mass display of decorated “onesie” infant leotards.

Some PBS stations have aired (or may soon air) the Motherhood Manifesto documentary film by MomsRising. You can check listings here. Or you can purchase your own copy for only $6.

What Do You Get for the Mother Who Doesn’t Have Everything?: An increase in the minimum wage, for starters, writes Lauren Seemeyer at Womenstake.org, a new blog by the National Women’s Law Center.

Global Commitment to Safe Motherhood: “Mother’s Day is bittersweet for those of us who work in the field of maternal health,” writes Jill Sheffield, founder and president of Family Care International, at RH Reality Check.

Everything Conceivable: The Washington Post’s Liza Mundy had an incredible story published in last week’s magazine section about the relationship forged by two families after an open adoption. Mundy and Ann Goldfarb, the adoptive mother, and Hava Leichtman, the birth mother, participated in an online discussion on Monday with readers.

Mundy is also the author of a new book, “Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World,” which is reviewed here by Debora L. Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.” Plus: Here’s an interview Mundy did with Salon.

A Third Gender in the Workplace: That’s how mothers are treated, writes Ellen Goodman. “On Mother’s Day 2007 there is still a deep-seated bias that puts the image of a ‘good mother’ at odds with that of an ‘ideal worker.’”

How to Handle “The Return”: For the past five years, Amy Joyce has written the “Life at Work” column in the Business section of The Washington Post and she also hosts a weekly online chat about people’s lives on the job. So she knows a thing or two about the pressures involved in deciding when and how to return to work after giving birth. But now that she’s about to have her first child, it’s all personal. A terrific column by a great columnist (whose work will surely be missed).

Happy (Feminist) Mother’s Day!: “In the seemingly never-ending debate about women’s place in society, I am grateful to these male role models who value ‘women’s work’ so much, they freely chose it for themselves,” writes Ruth Conniff at The Progressive.

The Mother’s Day Gift I Want: “For more than half a century, the media have used Jewish mothers as convenient targets for a humor that, while sometimes affectionate, easily veers into misogyny and anti-Semitism. Scapegoating the Jewish mother as a colossal maternal tyrant represents a failure to understand the complexities of motherhood that ultimately harms all women,” writes Joyce Antler, author of “You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother” and founder and former director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Brandeis University.

Web Offers Mother Lode of Data: Websites offer advice on everything from shopping for strollers to political activism on behalf of family-friendly policies. Just as important is the chance for parent-parent contact, notes Eleanor J. Bader in this Women’s eNews essay.

Childless — And OK With That: Also at RH Reality Check, Lauren Drummond celebrates “all the choices about our bodies and motherhood that we have in this country.”

Plus: A new University of Florida study looks at how important motherhood is for women’s happiness in midlife. The study of nearly 6,000 women between the ages of 51 and 61 will appear in the June 7 issue of the International Journal of Aging and Human Development.

“Contrary to warnings we hear about being lonely if you don’t have children, our study finds that childless women and mothers generally report similar levels of psychological well-being in their 50s,” said Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, lead author and a UF sociology professor. “Whether you are socially integrated or have concerns about paying the bills – those things play a more direct role in shaping psychological well-being among women in midlife.”

Just call her E.J. Graff, feminist myth-buster.

After debunking the idea that women in huge numbers were “opting out” of the workplace for a more domestic life, Graff, a senior researcher at the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism, is now taking on the media’s latest construction: the “Mommy War Machine.”

Graff identifies a number of recent articles and talk-show topics that resurrect a long-standing story: the “juicy tale of mothers who work and moms who stay home, dissing each other on playgrounds and in school parking lots with junior-high-level bile.”

But this war is a fiction: “The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds — and the marketing machines — of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s. All while the number of working mothers has been rising.”

Listen to Graff talk about “The Mommy War Machine” on Monday’s edition of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Plus: “Ask This,” a project of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, is running a series by Graff that suggests ways for reporters and editors to focus on what Ruth Rosen has called the “care crisis” in America. Here’s part one, part two and part three.

E.J. Graff, senior researcher at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, has an excellent story, “The Opt-Out Myth,” in CJR magazine that goes beyond debunking the conventional wisdom about waves of women choosing to leave the workforce to raise children.

Graff deftly weaves together statistics and studies that show how the “moms-go-home” storyline focuses on a “tiny proportion of American women — white, highly educated, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs.”

The stories also look only at the lives of married women before divorce and fail to provide any historical context. “Their opening lines often suggest that a generation of women is flouting feminist expectations and heading back home. At the simplest factual level, that’s false,” writes Graff.

Most importantly, Graff explains the consequences of misleading media coverage :

The problem is that the moms-go-home storyline presents all those issues as personal rather than public — and does so in misleading ways. The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upper-echelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences and the resulting social policy needs from view.

Here’s why that matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.

Brandeis’ Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism has posted a more complete version of the story, along with links to the original research and resources.

The Washington Post ran a disturbing page-one story yesterday about the first planned uterus transplant in the United States, raising a number of questions about the ethics of performing a difficult and potentially dangerous procedure. The transplant could be attempted as early as this year.

“The desire to have a child is a tremendous driving force for many women,” said Giuseppe Del Priore of the New York Downtown Hospital, who is leading the transplant team. “We think we could help many women fulfill this very basic desire.”

The Post’s Rob Stein writes that the first uterus transplant was done in 2002 in Saudi Arabia, though the 46-year-old patient developed blood clots, forcing removal of the uterus after 99 days. Doctors still considered it a technical success.

A woman who receives a uterus would have to stay on anti-rejection drugs until the baby is born, via Caesarean section — at which time the uterus would also be removed so the woman could stop taking the drugs.

“We are calling it a temporary transplant,” said Del Priore. “This minimizes the time patients have to be on the medications and makes it a much more reasonable risk to take to have a baby.”

The doctor’s own desire for this procedure — and the presumed demand for it — reflects the potentially dangerous power of the images and expectations surrounding motherhood in modern culture. The idea that women are incomplete unless they give birth and nurture their own children not only might lead doctors and women to take medical risks, but it also does not allow women to see their self-worth in other contexts.

Despite the objections raised by some transplant experts, fertility specialists and medical ethicists, writes Stein, “Del Priore and others defend the effort, saying the procedure will be attempted only after careful vetting by independent experts.”

They note that thousands of women cannot bear children because they were born with a malfunctioning uterus or their wombs were damaged by cancer, accidents, pregnancy complications or other problems. Women who want the operation are being screened exhaustively to make sure they fully understand the risks and have seriously considered alternatives.

“I don’t think it’s really a doctor’s role to tell a patient that their values are not important. It’s up to us as doctors to advise our patients and safely escort them to the best life that they can have,” Del Priore said. Many women who lack a functioning womb suffer terribly, he said.

“It can be just heartbreaking,” said Del Priore, a gynecological oncologist. He described a pregnant woman who started hemorrhaging after a car accident. “She was a newlywed, about to deliver a baby. Suddenly her husband is dead, her baby is dead and her uterus is gone. It’s terrible suffering. I think she deserves every possibility.”

Some ethicists and other experts, while expressing reservations, agreed, as long as doctors are reasonably confident of success and prospective patients fully recognize the risks.

“I think patients deserve autonomy,” said Alan DeCherney, a fertility expert speaking on behalf of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “As long as they know all the facts, it should be their choice.”

Lori B. Andrews, a bioethicist at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, makes a very good counter-point: “This is not like a kidney transplant — it’s not medically necessary to the woman’s life. Without it, the woman can live a healthy life. She still has options. She can adopt. She can even still have her own biologic child with a surrogate.”

And Adrienne Asch, who studies family life at Yeshiva University, adds: “I’m not convinced that science and medicine and society as a whole should be putting so much emphasis on having this particular nine-month experience … Why is that the sine qua non of being a parent? The real work of parenting is in the time after a child is born and is in someone’s home.”

The language the doctors use to justify the risks — identifying having children as “a very basic desire” of women — is the first step along a slippery slope we’ve seen in science fiction texts, where forced pregnancy is a frequent theme.

Yes, the doctors are very careful to make it clear they are just giving women who desire a “natural” birth a choice — and I have no doubt they are sincere. But jumping the gun without a thorough ethical discussion and the guidelines that would result from that is spooky.

Some of the classic sf texts that explore this nightmare in a compelling and complex manner are Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid Tale” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” — which envisions male pregnancy, something which the transplant procedure could theoretically make possible.

One of the most recent takes would be the SciFi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica,” specifically “The Farm” episode from season two.

“Organs can have tremendous symbolic meaning to people. It can vary from individual to individual and culture to culture,” Stuart J. Youngner, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University, told the Post. “The uterus is one of those that has a lot of symbolic meaning.”

So far, hundreds of women have inquired about the procedure, and between 40 and 50 women are currently being screened, according to the Post.

From Tillie Olsen’s obituary in The New York Times, written by Julie Bosman:

A daughter of immigrants and a working mother starved for time to write, Ms. Olsen drew from her personal experiences to create a small but influential body of work. Her first published book, “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961), contained a short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which the narrator painfully recounts her difficult relationship with her daughter and the frustrations of motherhood and poverty.

At the time of the book’s publication Ms. Olsen was heralded by critics as a short story writer of immense talent. The title story was made into a film in 1980 starring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova.

Ms. Olsen returned to issues of feminism and social struggle throughout her work, publishing a nonfiction book, “Silences,” in 1978, an examination of the impediments that writers face because of sex, race or social class. Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood attributed Ms. Olsen’s relatively small output to her full life as a wife and mother, a “grueling obstacle course” experienced by many writers.

“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”

Olsen won a Ford Foundation grant in 1959, the first year it was awarded; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975; and a citation for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976, according to the Times.

Less than two months ago, the author Scot Turow discussed on NPR his great admiration for Tillie and why “Tell Me a Riddle” remains one of his favorite stories: “[A] revelation on two levels: because of its insight and evocation of lives I knew, and because it demonstrated to me how a subject near-at-hand could be elevated to great art.” An excerpt of “Tell Me a Riddle” follows Turow’s piece.

Three New York Times stories worth reading and discussing:

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

Nanny Hunt Can Be a ‘Slap in the Face’ for Blacks

Gender War à la Française Shakes Up Political Arena

29th Carnival of Feminists: Grab a hot mug of your favorite drink and pull up a seat — the 29th Carnival is now up on The Imponderabilia of Actual Life, guaranteeing hours of great reading. The next edition will be on The Feminist Pulse on January 17. You can use the Blog Carnival submission form or email jaymi AT girlistic DOT com.

Problem Not Solved: Groups in Maine continue to protest K-Mart for selling a boy’s t-shirt that some say promotes violence against women. Feminist activist Ben Atherton-Zemon has a good piece about the issue up at Feminist Peace Network, and the Kennebec Journal has lots about the efforts of local high school students:

The T-shirt depicts two panels of stick figures, with a male figure pushing a female figure out of a box, and is captioned “Problem Solved.”

Thalia Matthews and Deanha Giguere, both students at Messalonskee High School in Oakland who spent the past two weekends collecting donations to support a domestic violence shelter, say the shirt sends a bad message.

“Selling the message that using physical violence to solve your problems is OK is not acceptable,” Matthews said at the news conference as her sister, Alyssa Matthews, held up the T-shirt. “I want Kmart to take these shirts off their shelves for good, wherever Kmarts are located.”

Added Giguere: “Kmart couldn’t have thought before selling this product. If they would have stepped back and realized that, realistically, one in every three women have experienced some kind of domestic abuse, maybe they would have shied away from this particular product.”

The two are leaders of an advisory board of the Waterville-based Hardy Girls Healthy Women, a group aimed at ensuring the equality, independence and safety of females.

“While it’s easy to invoke the First Amendment defense of the T-shirt, and while we’re not questioning Kmart’s right to sell the shirt or consumers’ rights to buy the shirt, we do think that this is a matter of corporate responsibility,” said Megan Williams, the group’s executive director.

Imagine … a Keroack-Free 2007: From Reuters: “More than half of all sitting Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter calling for the ouster of Dr. Eric Keroack, who was appointed last month to oversee a $280 million program that provides birth control to poor women. ‘We believe the appointment of Dr. Keroack is a horrendous mistake for the safety of women’s health in the United States,’ said the letter, which was signed by 107 Democrats and three Republicans.”

Here’s more about that mistake, and a petition to stop Keroack.

Happy Holidays to Wal-Mart Employees: Wal-Mart announced Thursday that it will include birth control in its basic health insurance coverage plan, effective Jan. 1. From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

The move led to dismissal of a class-action lawsuit filed five years ago in federal court by a Wal-Mart customer service manager in Atlanta. The lawsuit alleged sexual discrimination.

Marcia Greenberger, copresident of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, said it was significant that the nation’s largest private employer will cover the cost of pregnancy-prevention drugs.

“We recognize that their [health-care ] plan is not a strong plan,” she said. “But they have at least taken the proper step of recognizing that for women, contraceptives are an important part of their health care.”

As of January 2006, the company employed 1. 34 million workers in the United States. A 2005 federal report showed that 60. 5 percent, or nearly 811, 000, are women.

Herbal Remedy Fails to Impress Researchers: “The widely used herbal remedy black cohosh does nothing to eliminate hot flashes, night sweats and other symptoms of menopause, either alone or in combination with other herbs, federally sponsored researchers reported Monday,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “The really strong message we need to get out is that menopause is a natural event, it is not an illness, and the symptoms are self-limiting,” said epidemiologist Katherine M. Newton, who led the study.

The study was sponsored by the NIH’s National Institute on Aging and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative. For more on menopause, check out “Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause.”

The Real Value of Public Pre-School: NYT blogger Judith Warner on why it’s not just about the cost/benefits and educational outcomes.

Rosie Trumps the Donald: Joan Walsh sees the good in war between Trump and Rosie:

… It clearly marks a victory in the culture war that an out lesbian can host a daytime show on a major network, chat about her girlfriend, criticize the pope and the president, attack homophobia where she sees it (I can’t peer into Kelly Ripa’s heart but my own heart froze when she ripped rumored-to-be-gay Clay Aiken’s hand from her mouth insisting, “I don’t know where that’s been!”). And where she can puncture big fat hot-air targets like Trump every day, without asking permission. I don’t agree with everything she says, but I’m glad she’s there. Merry Christmas, Rosie.

The Virgin Mother: No, not that one. This story is about the mother Flora, a Komodo dragon, who managed to become pregnant all on her own and is carrying seven baby dragons, thank you very much.

“We were blown away when we realized what she’d done,” said Kevin Buley, a reptile expert at Flora’s home at the Chester Zoo in this town in northern England. “But we certainly won’t be naming any of the hatchlings Jesus.”

Other reptile species reproduce asexually in a process known as parthenogenesis. But Flora’s virginal conception, and that of another Komodo dragon earlier this year at the London Zoo, are the first time it has been documented in a Komodo dragon.

Happy Holidays to everyone. I’ll be back on the 26th.

Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson stands accused of misrepresenting the research of Carol Gilligan and Dr. Kyle Pruett, who were both cited in Dobson’s recent Time magazine guest column arguing against same-sex parenting, “Two Mommies Is One Too Many.”

Media Matters has a good breakdown of Dobson’s cherry-picked assertions and the response from Giligan and Pruett, the latter of whom has asked Dobson to refrain from quoting from his research in “media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission.”

Dobson began his column by noting that he and other social conservatives were asked to respond to the news that Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant and will raise the child with her partner, Heather Poe.

To which I have to ask: Why? What does Dobson have to say that we haven’t already heard before?

Was it enlightening for any Time reader to learn that Dobson believes “birth and adoption are the purview of married heterosexual couples”?

Or that “traditional marriage is God’s design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth”?

Dobson writes near the top that implicit to the invitation to comment on Mary Cheney “is an effort to get us to criticize the Bush Administration or the Cheney family,” and he uses that as cover for writing a supposedly non-political response “about what kind of family environment is best for the health and development of children, and, by extension, the nation at large.”

But Dobson’s views on the best family environment are nothing but political — and pathetically over-played. The fact that he’s misrepresenting research to suit his politics is the only newsworthy item. Maybe Time will invite commentary about his truthiness.