Happy Columbus Day?

I have to admit, I was annoyed all day today to be at work while multiple friends and family members had Columbus Day off. I really could have used an extra day to recover from a weekend of pretending I was back in college. But unlike New Year's, the purpose of Columbus Day is not for me to nurse my hangover—its purpose is to honor an egomaniac who miscalculated a journey to Asia, lied to his backers about the land he came upon, and enslaved and murdered countless natives without provocation.

Howard Zinn quotes the celebrated hero's log on the first page of A People's History of the United States. Columbus wrote of the Bahama Islands' Arawak men and women who greeted him and his sailors:

"They...brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want."

While wanting to celebrate Columbus Day by sleeping in and watching trash TV all day would certainly honor the selfish history of our great nation, the human in me is happy I worked through this ridiculous holiday. Now, what are we going to do about Thanksgiving next month?

Villain or Victim?

Due to my daily, rather loud coughing fits and love for complaining, my co-workers have traced the plague that’s making its way around my office to me. They’re calling me Typhoid Amy. Before I was given this lovely new nickname, I did go to one of those Take Care clinics at Walgreens (which are surprisingly nice!)—against my mother’s advice, might I add, who thought I was just being over-dramatic as usual. The nurse practitioner told me I just had some kind of cold or virus and sent me home with a couple of bottles of over-the-counter medicine and “grandma’s advice” to get more sleep and whatnot.

So I’ve been drinking lots of orange juice and not going out during the week… and I worked from home one day. Despite these attempts to kick my cold, however, I’m still getting accusatory looks whenever someone coughs (one co-worker even claimed I got his dog sick, an animal I've never met...), and now they’re bugging me to find a primary care physician—I guess because they’re tired of listening to me cough up phlegm all day…might I suggest headphones?

But I actually think my new nickname is fitting—because like me, revisionist historians say Typhoid Mary didn’t deserve all of the heat she got back in the day, as she was a victim of circumstance. The public turned against “Typhoid” Mary Mallon when she went back to working as a cook after she knew she was a carrier of Typhoid, but historian Judith Walzer Leavitt argues: “To be sure, Mary Mallon was not entirely blameless when she knowingly returned to cooking in 1915, but the blame must be more broadly shared. Much of what Mallon did can be explained by events greater than herself and beyond her control. It is only in the full context of her life and the actions of the health officials and the media that we can understand the personal position of Mary Mallon and people like her.” Being a single woman and an Irish immigrant in the early twentieth century, Mary did not have at her disposal many ways to support herself, and after she was quarantined, “she was not permitted to work at a job that had sustained her, but she was not retrained for any comparable work.”

So just as circumstance must share at least some of the blame placed on Mary, I believe it should share the blame I’ve been saddled with as well. Consider the facts of my life, a century later in Corporate America:

• I spend a great deal of my waking hours inside of an office building, inside of a cubicle, one cube away from the window. According to new research, the “sunshine vitamin,” vitamin D, “has been shown to help regulate the body’s disease-fighting immune system.” And low vitamin D levels have been linked to heart disease and other health problems.
• I spend most of my day sitting on my ass in front of my laptop, with the occasional break to walk to the kitchen or conference room to stuff my face with free pizza, brownies and other miscellaneous treats, offered up at least once a week if we have some sort of meeting or training…or it’s Tuesday. Obviously, this diet and lack of exercise does not do a body good.
• To recover from the passive aggression and spinning hamster wheels experienced during the work week, I often consume a few too many alcoholic beverages. According to my mother and nurse practitioner, this corporate recovery is perhaps prolonging my plague recovery…

So are we villains or victims? It’s quite a predicament, in my opinion.

It has a name, but no one wants to say it

In 1963, Betty Friedan called it "The Problem that Has No Name." Today, many call it solved. But sexism is clearly alive and well: It's just a problem no one feels like talking about anymore.

In her cover story on sexism in the workplace for the April issue of Portfolio, Harriet Rubin writes:

"This has been the hardest assignment I have ever had. For more than a decade, I've covered gender and power in the business world. I've analyzed heroes and villains, sinners and saints, and the rest of us in between. I've never had so much trouble getting people to talk to me. Nobody really wanted to get into it. Not even the people who would seem to have the most to say. In fact, those people especially would rather not mention it at all."

She goes on to illustrate how "From salary to board seats, key indicators suggest that women's advancement in corporate America has been stagnating--or even slipping--over the past few years."

Some statistics:

• Pay Gap: "The gap between men's and women's earnings narrowed steadily in the 1980s, but since then gains seem to have been followed by a drop every couple of years. Progress slipped in 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available."
• Leadership Pipeline: "Positions responsible for profit and loss often feed into top leadership spots. Of female corporate officers, 27.2 percent held those posts in 2007, down from 29 percent in 2006."
• In the Boardroom: "The number of women holding Fortune 500 board seats increased steadily between 1995 and 2005 but has been essentially flat for the past three years. Women still hold only 14.8 percent of all Fortune 500 board seats."
  
• At the Top: "The number of female corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies has dropped in each of the past three years. Last year, the number of firms with more than three female officers fell by 31, while the number of companies with zero female officers increased by 10."

Rubin writes:

"Mark Walsh, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Air America Radio, was surprised by these statistics. 'I'm on two public boards and a ton of private boards, and the mantra is diversity. But as I think about it, when we interview females in the mix, the offer of a board seat usually goes to the nonwhite men--Latinos and African Americans. We think, Great, we've done diversity.' He concludes, 'Women have taken a backseat. They're not being allowed to drive in terms of corporate governance.'"

Parallels in the race for the Democratic nomination can obviously be drawn, but let's not go there. What a shame that "isms" have to fight each other for the spotlight. Are we that easy to divide and conquer? History would say yes: First-wave feminism shifted from abolitionist roots based on abstract principles of equality when more tangible, i.e. popular arguments, which required the exclusion of nonwhite sisters, proved more effective in gaining votes for women's suffrage; and Margaret Sanger found more support for birth control rights when she shifted the argument from a woman's right to control her own body to the government's right to control the fertility of female immigrants. And today I hear that some hard-core Obama and Clinton supporters are saying they will vote for McCain if their favorite loses the nomination. What a shame.

My point, though, is that the feminist backlash has painted sexism a non-issue and feminism so very uncool. And the progress of generations is suffering. Let's not keep stalling the fight to fight over who has more to overcome, and let's focus on overcoming--because there is still work to be done, however unhip it may be these days.

After reading Rubin's article, I read a blurb in Marie Claire about a new book called Save the Males, in which columnist Kathleen Parker "argues that it's time to give back some of the power." She tells the magazine:

"Boys hear how awful they are day in and day out. We seem to understand that girls need high self esteem to perform in school and society, but we pretend that boys don't. Teachers need to dial back their girl-coddling, and society needs to better balance boys' needs with girls."

Just because Parker's argument seems like a breath of fresh air after years of stifling feminist rhetoric, that doesn't make it correct--or revolution-worthy (although I have to admit I haven't read her book). I don't know about boys' self esteem problems in elementary schools today, but I do know the person doing all the talking in my 200-student Women's Studies 101 lecture was the one and only male--extremely confident in his many opinions about women's issues. A complementary statistic to the blurb is that "60 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded in this country in 2012 will go to women." But as Rubin's article indicated, women may be graduating from college, getting jobs, even achieving promotions--but the top earners and decision-makers continue to be predominantly male--and that pesky glass ceiling seems to actually be lowering rather than shattering, contrary to what everyone expected.

I had the luxury of reading Rubin's article in glossy print, but it's also available online--along with 50-plus (when I posted this blog) heated comments, many of which illustrate how much many people wish us "angry feminists" would just shut the hell up (reader quote: "God, will the feminist whining ever stop?"), and some of which insightfully point out how the article should have also blamed women's backslide on corporate America's failure to provide and promote a work-life balance that is attractive to women (and men!) who don't want to put their careers ahead of their families.

Nevertheless, it's a good read, although I enjoyed it more without the bitter and sexist comments attached to the online version, which almost dissuaded me from writing this blog. I have to keep reminding myself that just because an issue or opinion is "uncool," just because people don't want to hear it or attack you for naming it, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or shouldn't be discussed: In fact its unpopularity is precisely why we must refuse to shut the hell up.

The big game

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, by Lynn Peril, is full of amusing excerpts from old-school prescriptive literature and magazine columns telling girls how to behave—mostly to succeed in the spheres of popularity and husband hunting. Sort of a pop culture history of women’s education in America, it also says a lot about how dating has changed through the years.

I just read a section entitled “‘More Rules Than a Prison’—Football for the Disinterested,” and found it particularly entertaining:

"For disinterested parties, sitting through a game could certainly seem as long as several life sentences. Articles in magazines like Co-ed and Mademoiselle explained the game of football ... to casual spectators who didn’t want to look like fools in front of dates. While spontaneous enjoyment might occur with knowledge of the rules, learning them was usually presented as a mere expedient to keeping one’s date happy.”

Peril’s references in this section are from the 196os, but it took me back a little less far, to my last relationship. In addition to being thankful that girls no longer have to do football homework to prepare for dates, I was thinking how thankful I am that I no longer have to spend Sundays pretending to watch Packer games and apologizing for being more interested in reading a book than discussing how long we will have to wait for Brett Favre to run for President.

But then I kept reading:

“If the game didn’t end the way a boy wanted it to, it was important for a girl to adjust her mood to his—he wouldn’t ‘appreciate [her] high spirits’ while he suffered the agony of defeat. In such situations, it was important to remember that football wasn’t just a game. To think otherwise might mean going dateless until after the play-offs.”

And that took me back even less far, to when Packer fans had high Super Bowl hopes this past season. I watched their last game with one of my best friends at a bar in Madison, Wis. I went for the beer and cheese curds—and because she had had a rough week and made me promise I wouldn’t give her a hard time about wanting to watch the game. Plus I thought it would be fun to bandwagon on the revelry if the Packers won, and I believe they were supposed to…

But as the game wore on and the Packers played worse and worse, it became apparent that they were going to lose, and I started praying that they would somehow pull it off, not because I like the Packers, but because my friend’s mood started to scare me and because I wanted the party to keep going after the game. But of course they lost. My friend popped out of her chair, threw her arms up, yelled “Where’s the waitress?? We need the check!!!!” and started putting on her jacket. I still had a third of a beer left.

I tried to be understanding of her feelings (even though I seriously just don’t get sports fanaticism), but at the same time tried to lift her spirits and somehow managed to convince her to stay out and go to our favorite bar with me. Because here in the 21^st century, that’s what good friendships are all about: compromise. And never going to the bar angry.

Have we come a long way, baby?

As many of us are nursing New Year’s Eve hangovers and making resolutions, I think it’s a good time to put my two cents in regarding an issue that seems to be a popular concern: those young hussies and their excessive drinking. Now, as a female who enjoys tossing back one or two, or eight, vodka tonics on any given Friday or Saturday, or Wednesday, night, my first instinct is to vehemently defend this behavior that’s so popular on college campuses across the country. Girls just wanna have fun! Stop being so uptight about it.

An article I read on CNN.com last month made me stop and think, however. “Young women drink, party, post” focuses not just on binge drinking among young women, but on the fact that these women seem to be proud of their behavior, posting what the older and wiser might deem rather embarrassing for all the world to see – whether that be mom, dad, grandma or a potential employer.

Partying a little too hard? Not a big deal for most, I thought. Binge drinking and posting pictures of yourself engaging in illegal activity (if you’re underage), which could prevent you from getting your dream job? This did concern me a bit. Then I read a quote from a moderator of the Facebook group “Thirty Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night,” and I became very concerned.

She told CNN she knows some look down on girls who post to the site, but she doesn't care – she knows some consider their partying “unladylike,” but when boys act the same way, they’re just being boys. Okay, maybe I’m reaching here, but this sounds like somewhat of a feminist statement. Are these girls posting with pride because they want to prove they can party like the boys? Is this another case (remembering the Spice Girls) of Girl Power gone bad?

It reminded me of a famous 1920s PR campaign I read about in college, through which father of spin Edward Bernays successfully linked women’s rights to cigarettes. While working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays told the media that a group of women’s rights marchers would light “Torches of Freedom,” and then on his signal, had them light Lucky Strikes in front of waiting photographers. I’ve read differing accounts as to whether or not these women were genuine activists or hired models, but regardless, Bernays helped break the taboo of women smoking (which had been the territory of men, and perhaps “loose” women) and increase the popularity of smoking among women … and all of the related addiction and health problems that followed. Virginia Slims kept the trend going with its “You’ve come a long way, baby” slogan.

Now, I’m all for breaking taboos and ushering women into worlds traditionally inhabited by men only – but the worlds I’m thinking of include the Oval Office, the C-suite and the Norton Anthology – not emergency rooms and frat houses.

I think a good New Year’s resolution is to have another cocktail because you feel like it, because it really is fun, not because you want to get into a club that – in the harsh light of morning, or post-graduation – you probably don’t want a membership to anyway.