Best Mother’s Day Gift Ever: Reproductive Rights

We celebrate our mothers on the second Sunday in May, ostentatiously paying tribute with dinners, cards, flowers and gifts. The rest of the time–not so much. Anti-choice politicians are particularly guilty in this regard, portraying mothers and potential mothers as rash, uninformed, naïve and/or foolish–in need of guidance from the wise ones in Washington, state [...]

Motherhood and Feminism, Part 1

I did not expect that being a mother would make me more of a feminist. In fact, I feared quite the opposite, worrying that my feminist convictions would wane under the weight of overfilled diaper bags and the expansive responsibilities of caring for an infant. When I had my first child, a son, just after [...]

Not Your Mama’s Memoir

Popular mothering memoirs seem to fall into one of two categories. Either they subscribe to the humorous approach, in which the author focuses on the bodily functions, hormones and general hilarity of pregnancy and child-rearing, or they’re the heartfelt, saccharine, love-fest memoir (and yes, Jenny McCarthy has written books in both flavors). Refreshingly, Bring Down [...]

365 Take-Our-Daughters-and-Sons-to-Work Days

A few months ago I was scrolling through audio files of interviews on my computer when I was startled to hear the recorded cooing of my daughter when she was a baby. I had been hiking through dry arroyos in the desert west of Albuquerque with a biologist who was studying the decline of burrowing [...]

When Mom Goes Missing

“It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” So begins Kyung-sook Shin’s best-selling Korean novel Please Look After Mom, a haunting and deceptively simple book about a mother’s sudden disappearance. After losing his wife at a Seoul train station, a father tries to piece together her slow, ambiguous dissociation and his part in her depression. [...]

Pop’s Diva Daughter as Primal Mother

I’ve been looking forward to the music video of Lady Gaga’s much-hyped single “Born This Way” for several weeks, so, when it premiered Sunday on Vevo I really wanted to love it. Unfortunately, “Born This Way” just doesn’t have the twisted, Mad Hatter brilliance of Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video or the movie-pastiche playfulness and queer [...]

Precious Swan

[Spoilers included.] There is a painful scene in the critically acclaimed 2009 movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which shows our titular heroine (played by Oscar-nominated Gabourey Sidibe) gazing into a mirror and imagining a slender white girl gazing back at her. In the mind of Precious, a 16-year-old poor, black, obese [...]

Huffington Post Censors Mothers’ Rights Activists

This week, Arianna Huffington announced the Huffington Post’s latest section: HuffPost Divorce. Her plug: “Breaking up is hard to do… but reading about it isn’t.” Upon Monday’s launch, however, there appeared a column that women’s rights advocates took very hard: a piece by Dr. Richard Warshak promoting the discredited “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” or PAS. Parental [...]

Alert: Ashtiani Faces Imminent Execution

Never before has the cruelty of Iranian criminal justice system been more evident than now. The International Committee Against Stoning reported Monday that the Iranian government has given the go-ahead for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to be executed for adultery. At the same time, Nasrin Sotoudeh–a prominent human rights lawyer incarcerated in Iran’s notorious Evin prison–has [...]

Which Pumps Won’t Health Insurance Cover?

Ran out of the adhesives to keep your dentures in place? No worries, the Internal Revenue Service will give you a tax break on new ones. Suffering from an attack of the killer zits? The I.R.S. agrees this is a health concern worth giving a tax break for. How about allergic to grass? If you [...]

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