Image by Stewf via Flickr

Normally I believe there are no innocent players in the on-going war between Israel and Palestine because I hold each government responsible for the constant escalation of tensions and hatred.  But today the “Save the Children” organization released a report on the number of children made homeless from the war in the Middle East; reading it you come to understand just how many innocents there are.

 ”Save the Children” is an international organization that I first came across when I was editing a series on child soldiers and child slavery in Africa.  The group collects reams of information on the well-being or lack thereof of children.  They’re committed to bettering the lives of children which can sound like a Junior League project until you realize that here in the U.S.  many states project the number of prison cells they will need to build in the near future based on the literacy failure rates of 3^rd graders in their schools..

 Think about that.

 This latest report by “Save the Children” is called Broken Homes and it addresses the impact of the loss of homes in Palestine, through demolition and displacement, on children and their families. According to the report, demolitions began in 1967 and have escalated since 2000.  In 40+ years, civilian and military authorities have razed 24,000 homes.  4,000 of them-or one-sixth-have been destroyed since the beginning of this year.

 Broken Homes details some of the facts surrounding these demolitions including:

• More than half (52%) of the homes were demolished in a collective demolition where a series of homes or neighborhood was razed
• Only 13% of families had a chance to collect their belongings before demolition began
• Children whose homes have been demolished show a decline in their mental health, suffering classic signs of trauma, becoming withdrawn, depressed and anxious
• The majority of families whose houses were demolished were repeatedly displaced for long periods of time – over half the families (61%) took at least two years to find somewhere permanent to live
• Over a quarter of families had to split up so they could all find somewhere to stay.
• Once a house is demolished, the family not only loses their home and its contents but is also liable for the costs of the actual house demolition.  This can run into thousands of dollars.

A lot of these demolitions take place near settlements, which makes the situation even more fraught (for an interesting report on settlers’ relationships with Fundamentalist American Christians, check out the NPR story from last Friday. 

Reading “Save the Children” report made me remember a group of Israeli mothers and grandmothers who are fighting their own battle for peace.  Machsom Watch, which means literally “Checkpoint Watch”  is a group of about 400 women-mothers and grandmothers, aunts and sisters-who monitor the checkpoints between Israel and Palestine for any human rights abuses.  They do so in the face of hostility from some settlers and from army generals who see them as roadblocks in the army’s path toward prevention of suicide bombings.

Maybe if the governments of Palestine and Israel started looking at the war through the eyes of these women and children, instead of through the barrels of guns, negotiations might focus more on the citizens and less on the size of the politicians’…egos.

Cathy McMorris Rogers is the 5th ranking House Republican, Vice-Chair of the Rep. Conference–and one of a group of women who’ve given birth in Congress in the past two years.

TheHill.com – GOP committee race down to McMorris Rodgers, Kline.

I get that Sarah Palin is enough to send most liberals screaming from the room.  Of the approximately 131 million votes cast in the 2008 election, her ticket only lost by ten million.   That’s enough to make any Democrat-or MSM journalist-bite their fingernails to the quick.  Party leaders are obviously looking for ways to attack her and weaken her base so she doesn’t threaten the White House in 2012.

But why do the attacks have to focus on her children and her mothering style?

Letterman’s jokes about Palin’s 14 year old daughter getting knocked up by Rodriguez were way out of line.  But even worse is the continued defense of those remarks.  The Huffington Post has accused Palin of creating a tempest in a teapot.  Donny Deutsch, speaking on MSNBC, said it was obvious that Letterman was referring to Palin’s 18 year old daughter-as if that were any better-despite the fact that it was her 14 year old daughter who was with her at the baseball game (Deutsch of course went on to call Mika Brezezinski a super hot vixen to her face, leaving her speechless on the set. Is someone paying him to be an asshole?).

Deutsch also defended the Letterman remarks by claiming that Palin started it all by bringing her children onto the stage with her at the RNC.  Never mind that all politicians do this.  Never mind that Obama was lauded for it.  Palin started the ball rolling, he says, which I guess is another way of saying she asked for it.

I only wish we got half of what we asked for as women.

This is latest front in the ongoing struggle for equality:  the Bad Mother offensive.  It’s a new and more insidious version of the whole virgin/whore complex that has kept this country in its thrall since the Puritans landed and Hester was handed her A.   Motherhood has been positively beatified in the past decade.  It’s the career of choice for many Gen X’ers and a fabulous excuse if you don’t want to work.  Actually, not working when you’re a mother is very much encouraged these days.  Just look at how Michelle Obama has been lauded for her choice to forgo her brilliant career and focus on fashion and gardening and her girls-despite the fact that first ladies like Cherie Blair continued to work and even give birth while their husbands held office.  Hillary Clinton was excoriated for not staying home to bake cookies when she was first lady-and asked to iron a shirt when she was running for President.   Sarah Palin was damned for taking an infant on the road and handed the bad mother of the year award when her 17 year old became pregnant.

As motherhood has evolved into a career, the standards for being a good mother have increased exponentially.  It is no longer enough to give birth to a child, occasionally wash his or her face, feed them cheerios and get them to school most days on time.  No.  Motherhood is so much more than that.  This has given rise to incessant attacks on so-called bad mothers-Kate, Octo-mom, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears-any woman who steps outside of a 1950’s personification of blissful motherhood.  For the record, I’m not hearing the bad-dad attacks on Jon, Brad or Kevin, among others.  The mere fact that they change a diaper elevates them to the dad pantheon.

Ladies, we’re moving backwards.

When Geraldine Ferraro ran for VP in 1984, no one went after her kids.  Her husband, yes.  But she wasn’t criticized for her parenting skills.  Sandra Day O’Connor wasn’t questioned about her daycare provider. Sally Ride wasn’t asked why she wasn’t having children instead of going into space. Pat Schroeder, when asked how she intended to manage her career as a Representative and Mother shot back, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.

On TV, Cagney and Lacy, Mrs. Keating and Mrs. Huxtable ruled the airwaves.  They were all working mothers.  Today, Real Housewives and Desperate Housewives and Bridezillas rule the airwaves.

No comment.

This focus on forcing women to be madonnas is as bad as reducing them to sexual objects.  Both ideals undercut women’s ability to function as integrated human beings.  The “bad mommy” meme and the sexual trollope theme place all of the responsibility and guilt for other people’s behavior squarely on women’s shoulders, keeping them so busy beating their breasts in the confessional that they never have time to make it to the conference room.

No wonder women are opting out.

I followed some of the publicity surrounding the roll-out of  the new book, “Womenomics,”  last week (which is different than the website, www.women-omics.com) .  I watched the authors’ interview on “Morning Joe” and the video clip of “The View” and I was left wondering how it’s possible for women to opt out of the workforce before we’ve completely opted-in?

The authors say that the more senior level female managers a company has, the more it makes.  But how many companies have senior level managers?  According to the Fortune list, in 2008 only six women led Fortune 100 companies and 12 women (now 13) were CEO’s at Fortune 500 companies.  What percentage is that? About 2.5%?  Maybe that does correlate, in this economy, with the number of companies making more money.

In the political arena, we currently have four female governors out of 50, bringing the percentage of female civic senior managers to about…well, slightly less than 5%.  Two of the 50 states have never had female representation in Congress and currently 13 states have no female representatives or senators in D.C. There is one woman on the Supreme Court. We have not yet managed to elect a female president or vice-president, despite the fact that last year’s candidates never opted-out or on-ramped so there were no gaps in their respective resumes.

Keep in mind that the number of female college grads is larger than the number of male college grads and that women have achieved parity in law schools with men ( while the number of women winning MBA’s hovers around 30%) so it’s not as if women don’t have enough education to qualify for these upper level positions.

Many of these well educated women have been launching their own businesses-in fact women have significantly outpaced men in starting small businesses in the past few years.  And yet…an article in USA Today several months ago pointed out that less than 7% of venture capital in 2008 went to women-owned start-ups.  And those small businesses? Only 1 in five of the companies with revenues of $1 million or more are owned by women because only 3% of women-owned companies ever reach that level (half the rate for male owned firms which hit $1m).

Even worse, a lot of very small businesses are one step up from freelance-the very same companies hit hardest by the recession.  In a story in the New York Times Sunday magazine this week, a freelance yoga teacher talked about going on food stamps.  If the majority of women own the small and very small businesses that are failing in this economy, will we then see an up-tick in the number of working poor women?  How can they possibly opt-out?

Yeah, okay so the CEO of Sarah Lee dropped out of the workforce and on-ramped to a senior level position after 7 years.  But her story is more of an anomaly than a rallying cry.

I “opted out” by going freelance 19 years ago, after my older son was born.  I had nurtured writing contacts on the side for years while I worked full-time and four weeks after my son was born I was able to start working for myself, as I nursed him in my lap.  When he was eight and his brother was six and I was a single parent, I opted back-in and started my own business.  A lot of times I had to leave them home when I traveled.  I missed birthdays and first days of school.  I even, because I worked a lot in Europe, missed Thanksgiving.  And so one time when I was in line at Toys R’ Us at midnight a week before Christmas, I started feeling a little badly for myself.  My cashier was a young woman who looked to be about 20 and also looked exhausted. We got to talking and I learned that she too was a single parent and was supplementing her 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. morning shift as a waitress by working the late shift-until 2 a.m.-at Toys R’s Us so she could buy Christmas present for her four year old.

I got over myself.

The reality was, I had the right kind of education and I worked in media-an industry prone to attracting people who don’t exactly work 9 to 5 to begin with. Not every woman is that lucky.

There are many more women like my young cashier than there are like me or the CEO of Sarah Lee.

We need a lot more women at the top to help pull up the younger women at the bottom.  I get that some women don’t want to sacrifice their personal lives to do that-but some women do.  And I’m not sure they are being helped by the message in “Womenomics”.  Most women don’t work in media.  Not all women have the educational chutzpah to be able to successfully negotiate with their employer about their hours.  And many, many women don’t have flex-time husbands who can support  them while they decide to throttle back their hours without losing their jobs.  These are the women who can be hurt by the theories the book posits-to say  nothing of the attitude of the authors.

I watched Ms. Kay on “Morning Joe” (an interview that was noticeably not conducted by Mika Brzezinski).  She complained about the unattractive shoulder pads suits and string bow ties that women wore in the 80’s, the first decade that women broke through corporate, medical and legal professions in significant numbers.  Ms. Kay made those women sound silly (and, seemingly worse, incredibly unattractive).  Of all women, the “Womenomics” team should realize it was the women who shouldered through all those barriers who have given other women the option of whether to climb the corporate ladder or opt out and write book about it along the way.

And we need to realize that there are still too many women trapped on the bottom rung of advancement to allow anyone to decide it’s time to take our collective feet on the gas pedal and coast.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Blues are frequently anything but and nowhere was that more apparent to me than when I heard Koko Taylor sing.  Her songs were triumphant even as they listed a litany of sorrows.  My favorite was “I Cried Like A Baby When You Left Me Last Friday Night”, which details all the awful things that happened  since her man left her.  But honey, by the following Saturday, she has a new man and “everything’s all right.”

Female Blues singers like Koko are a rare breed:  balls-to-the-wall, strong, earthy and fabulously talented.  We need more female pols like them.

Koko Taylor, Queen of Chicago Blues, Is Dead at 80 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

Take a listen for yourself:

[youtube url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGMLIg6vDQ4']