Morra Aarons Mele's blogMorra Aarons Mele's blog

Back in the mythic 50s and 60s, housewives like Betty Friedan and Betty Draper were very bored. The Feminine Mystique opens with this description of an average housewife’s day: “Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”

Jake Tapper is the Senior White House Correspondent for ABC News.  He’s a pretty big deal. I follow him on Twitter, as do 39,559 other people. Although his Twitter page has a strapping picture of the reporter on duty in front of the White House, Tapper’s Twitter badge, his personal stamp, is a photo of him cradling his two little kids: a toddler and a newborn. It is such a tender photo, and you could never imagine Walter Cronkite (if he had a Twitter page) using such an image as his calling card.

I’ve read a flurry of articles in the past week to accompany data that show changing gender roles in earning power and marriage.  Many of these articles accompany flip headlines and amusing photos—images of the 1980’s comedy “Mr. Mom,” or tales of high-earning career women marrying men far less high-powered, simply because, apparently, women now can. This is typical media hype: the truth is, in most two-parent families both partners have to work, the burden is more or less shared, and it’s tough.

A conservative Republican (didn’t want to give rape victims access to emergency contraception, questions whether global warming is man-made; called a local gay family with children “not normal”) in Massachusetts is threatening to win the seat that the late Senator Ted Kennedy, “the Liberal Lion” of the Senate, inhabited so powerfully until he died.

It’s freezing in Miami and in the twenties in Houston. The massive onslaught of cold is turning routines upside down cross-country.

Love it or hate it, health care reform affects us all. That’s why BlogHer has worked so hard in 2009 on its community journalism initiative directly connecting women bloggers with legislators to ask their own questions. Now, we're giving you the chance to take it to the White House: This Monday, December 21, I'm asking your healthcare questions to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a live interview.

Hanukkah for the Jew-ish

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It’s the first night of Hanukkah, and I forgot.  I snickered when I read blogger Yulinka's Kitchen description of her community’s response, “This holiday is usually commemorated by saying “Hey, it’s Hanukkah!” on the second of the eight days and then forgetting about the whole thing. “So here’s my challenge for Hanukkah: how do I raise a Jewish child when I am not a religious Jew? How can we learn together?

The blogger Well-heeled brought my attention to this new study with the stunning question: “Could the U.S.’s lack of policy mandating paid maternity leave actually help women’s careers?” I’m going to blame second wave feminism for the fact that we are even having this conversation- and having it over, and over again.

What if a white male single dad had a 10 month-old, adorable baby boy. Say his wife had died tragically and he had no extended family….The dad was in the army, and he was deployed to Afghanistan. The dad had nowhere for his baby to go while he was deployed… what would happen? I bet that baby would not go to foster care.

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