Plus ça change…
It occurred to me the other day to wonder at the discrepancy in wages that I pay to those high-school students who baby sit and those who do lawn cutting and gardening for me. Most of the “lawn and garden” people, who happen to be boys ask for a dollar an hour. Most of the baby sitters, who usually happen to be girls, ask seventy-five cents an hour.
Now I ask myself, is caring for my children less important, less valuable, less a responsibility? Or is lawn cutting and gardening considered harder and more taxing physical work? (Two active children under five can be pretty hard, taxing, physical work, too.) Or is it that boys just ask for and receive high wages from the beginning? And is it that child care is, anyway, considered to be “women’s work” and not deserving of pay? Click!
Marge Mitchell
Baltimore, Maryland
September 1974 issue
“
| — |
These vintage letters to pioneering feminist magazine Ms. bespeak both how far we’ve come in some ways and how little has changed in others. (via explore-blog) I clearly need to start bidding on some vintage MS. Magazines. |
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the ominous lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
“
| — | Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One of my favorites from 2013 so far. Full of interesting ideas, compelling characters and stunning sentences. Plus, it’s just plain entertaining. |
Carried Away
Passion PitThis is fantastic.
Agreed! I have a beautiful Passion Pit memory from last year’s Bonnaroo.
Longreads has kicked off their best lists!
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired’s Gadget Lab.
Best story about a monkey that’s really about the role of government that’s really about nature’s place in the modern world that’s actually, maybe, really just about a monkey.
Probably asking for it from both sides by posting this (which is why it’s a place no one reads, instead of facebook!), but I like a well-reasoned contrarian viewpoint. Obama and Romney are framing this election as a clear choice between two distinct ideologies, and as far as domestic policy goes that seems close enough to the truth (which is my reason for making a different decision than the author of this piece). I wish that distinction extended to the international human rights and civil rights issues outlined here.
Zadie Smith, thought-provoking as always
“ZS: Well, I think it’s an enormous power and advantage women have, this understanding of time and mortality. It’s only a shame that we often do everything we can to abandon or deny this natural advantage. I always think of the menopause: what a gift it is to women to have, in their own bodies, this piece of time-keeping which allows them to fully understand, in their bodies, that death is coming. They’re not very good managers of time, men. Men don’t have that – you see so many men heading towards their deaths in utter shock and incomprehension because right until the final moments they thought they were going to be given some kind of reprieve.”—
From the interview with Zadie Smith by Ted Hodgkinson in Granta. (via courtneymaum)
