Double Dose: The Mother's Day Edition

By Christine Cupaiuolo — May 12, 2007

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.”

Comments are closed.