Dar Williams sweetly coos “When I was a boy…” on our car stereo. My 4 1/2 year-old, who has seen Dar on concert, asks, “Why did she say that? She’s a girl!” I chuckle and go on to explain that back when Dar & mommy were kids people would say that girls who liked to climb trees or play soccer (both activities she loves) were acting like boys. That people would tell them to act like a girl at a certain age and stop playing soccer. “Oh! Well I won’t listen to them and keep playing soccer!”

It’s all so natural to her and I couldn’t be more envious and proud. It makes me wonder what life will be life for her generation - the granddaughters of Title IX. With their neon pink softballs that aren’t pink to girlify the sport but because they just like the color. I think about this more than most because I have one of those jobs I hope is relegated to the history books in 20 years. My job is to keep women in their science or engineering major, to graduate with this valuable degree (starting salaries in engineering range between $20,000 - $40,000) and hopefully find their way back to academia to educate the next generation.
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The basis for tome’s like Linda Hirshman‘s Get To Work and Lisa Bennett’s Feminine Mistake may appear to be nothing more than telling women what to do but if you can ignore the horrible presentation, the real issue is that Hirshman, Bennett and others are seriously tired of seeing women make up the majority of those living in poverty. Not just making up a large percentage, but that women end up there because we take time out of work to care for our family members.

* Women comprise 56% of Americans over 18 who live in poverty. [cite]
* In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were poor. [cite]
* Nearly two-thirds of white women who are poor in old age have not been poor in the earlier years. This demonstrates an increased risk or a newly emerging risk of poverty for many white women. [cite]
* Old age poverty for African-American women reflects economic disadvantages in their earlier years compared with white women. [cite]
* In the United States, the share of elderly women living in poverty is highest among divorced or separated women (37 percent), followed by widowed women (28 percent), never-married women (22 percent), and married women (10 percent). [cite]

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I am not shy when it comes to stating that I am an ambitious woman. My goal is to be the executive director of a non-profit organization that works on behalf of girls and/or women. I also would love to have my own op-ed column syndicated in newspapers…or whatever people are reading in the future. In order to do those two kinda related things, I work my butt off on learning how to run an organization and on my writing. This also means that I put in an eight-hour work day and then put in another 2-3 hours at home on my other activities (mostly writing and reading). I also know that I married an equally ambitious man. Luckily his current job is far more 9-5 than mine and his extracurricular activities are not as numerous as mine (he is much better at saying no than I am).

When we graduated from college we decided that whomever found a job first, that’s what we would do. My husband won and we stayed in Chicago. Since then we’ve both made enough friends and contacts that Chicago, where we were born & raised, has become OUR home. Yet I know that as we progress in our careers a job in another state might land in my lap or a more high powered position will come knocking on his door. If I were to take a job that moved us to Seattle, I think many people would applaud my husband for being the “trailing” partner aka the partner who moves for the benefit of the other partner. But would they do the same for me if he was offered an amazing job that required me to pull back from work, community work, or heck, even quit my job? Given the reaction that Michelle Obama received when she resigned from her high powered job to campaign for her husband, I highly doubt it.
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I have a confession - I was a finalist for the 2006 Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year. The call went out for nominations and many thought it was stereotypical for a cleaning product to name amazing women. Of course I went directly to the fine print and rules. No where did it say that the amazing woman had to keep a clean house. This was important because I’m a lucky gal in that my husband is the one who keeps us from living in a pit of dirty dishes and laundry. If we were to tally up the hours each of us spends on chores I believe it would be at least a 60/40 split (some weeks far more towards the 80/20 end) with my husband on the losing end. I know we’re a rare pair, but among our hetero-couple friends, it’s fairly common for them to be engaged in an egalitarian relationship when it comes to chores and raising the kids. Obviously I didn’t win and it was pretty embarrassing asking co-workers to vote for me on the internet for a chance to spend the summer promoting Swiffers. But I really did want to promote the idea of egalitarian relationships - Maybe that doomed me, eh? I also wanted the cash prize $5,000 for a nonprofit of my choice.

Whether you work in a cubicle downtown or in your fuzzy slippers during nap time, all working moms have to manage housework on top of our paid work. According to a new study by lead researcher Frank Stafford, an economist at University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, when women get married, the amount of housework we do goes up. It goes up again once we have kids (that’s a no brainer, eh?).
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A former boss of mine liked to comment on every decision she made in my presence because she sincerely felt that as a mentor she needed to explain it all to me. One of the trueisms was that you have to manage and make rules according to the lowest denominator. My concern that day happened to be that we didn’t get access to our sick days until after six months of employment. As a new mom, I knew how valuable sick days were, especially when we also had no access to vacation days until that magical six months.

I return to her advise when I hear story after story of mothers or pregnant women being discriminated against. On the surface I can understand how a supervisor “burned” by a new mom who picks up and leaves for stay-at-home-paradise would hold a grudge against other women. Women like Linda Hirshman would say that this proves that women “opting out” is ruining it for the rest of us hearty women who stay in the workplace. Of course, I’m never that eager to blame other women, but would rather look at the system to see what could change.
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I’ve Veronica and I’m a mom with a lot of issues. Every other week I’ll share some of them with you and I hope we have a great discussion. While I will focus my issues around the media’s portrayal of working moms, I won’t limit myself to that either.

My stance is that as a society we are all still adjusting to the idea of working mothers aka women who have small children and work outside the home, either part-time or full-time. Because our society moves at a snail’s pace in reacting to the rapid change that has happened, it confounds a lot of people, especially those in the media, about whether we are selfish or Superwomen. That said, the fact that every mother is a working mother also confounds people. What do you mean that cleaning and nurturing your child is work? That’s what you are built for right? Well, yes…and no.
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