Morra 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.”

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.

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.

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.