According to a International Herald Tribune article:

Rome has found a way for mother to abandon babies they can no longer care for in a safe way:

The baby, who is white, was deposited in a small structure equipped with a heated cradle and life-saving instruments, including a respirator. As in bygone days, it is possible for a woman to leave a baby without being seen, but the moment the child is abandoned an alarm goes off in the hospital’s emergency room, ensuring that the baby receives immediate first aid from a team of specialists.

I think this is a great idea to ensure that women won’t get stigmatized while knowing their infant ends up in safe hands.

It would be great if we started something like that here so we could avoid some headlines like:

Baby found dead at Shreveport apartment 

Baby Found Dead In Bed With Parents 

Police look into infant’s injury

Just a thought…

Long over due:

Top story: A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

I first saw an earlier version of this story when I was reading a blog a few weeks ago. I don’t know what I would have done if wikipedia was a commonly searched source when I was in undergrad or grad school. I finished that part of my education right before wireless connections took over. I used google all the time but it was before google blogs, google maps–before many people “blogged.” The people I knew only had “online journals” at that point.

Sometimes, I do feel like I’m missing out out on a huge revolution in the way scholars are researching, citing, and using all these internet based sources. Simultaneously, I am glad that I do understand the value of a book. I know many students do understand this but relying on the internet to find an answer to a question can be a slippery slope. I am guilty of this arguably lazy dependence as well but one cannot deny the advantages of the web and all of the well-founded resources available. It just takes that discerning eye to comb through all of the links.

Other Stories:

(1) Teaching our young girls: “Being a sexual person isn’t about being a pole dancer”

(2) High school students in the Mexico given dolls to try to bring down the state’s soaring teenage pregnancy rate.
(3) Vietnamese women and Korean men make it work.

(4) The title of this piece made me look twice: Vagina Monlogues are part feminism, part fun.

Right because something can’t be feminist AND fun. A dude wrote and his article was pretty funny:

A reoccurring theme in “The Vagina Monologues” is the idea of women not really “paying attention” or “thinking about” their essence. “When was the first time you noticed your vagina?” they ask. There again, this would be impossible to ask a guy.

When was the first time you noticed your penis?

You mean the dangling appendage that hangs off of my body? Oh I’ve always been pretty freakin’ aware of it.

I mean you’re born with it, and then they cut part of it off. As I’ve written before, it’s like its own independent city-state down there.

But I’m still lost on the writer’s point with the title.

(5) And finally, there has been a lot of media given to the soap opera lifestyles of two blonde women, one recently passed away and the other “losing it.”

Sure some of it is entertaining, but as the dooce said:

I would hope that other women and other mothers are looking at her with a little bit of compassion right now, if only for the sake of those two baby boys who are innocent in all of this. She is their mother.

but I’m swamped at work.  no personal life anymore.

Abortion ban fails in S.D. Senate panel!!!!

Commentary to come soon….!

This article from thursday’s LATimes examined how immediate families of Iraq War soldiers are suffering but also live through their pain and recuperate.  The story chronicled Audrey Delgadillo, 20 year old daughter of an Iraq War soldier, takes care of her four younger sisters.   Whats more is that Delgadillo is filling in for her stepfather AND mother who are serving in Iraq.

Every day, Delgadillo wakes up and takes care of her youngest sisters, a three and four year old.  Her other sisters are 17 and 10 years old and usually make it to school on their own.   In addition to day to day child care, Delgadillo also works a full-time job and looks after housekeeping and financial obligations.

She returns home and checks her list of chores scribbled in her notebook. Some errands are already crossed out.

Clean my room. Mop. Pay house bills. Get oil changes for the Ford and Saturn. Send out mom’s package. Put drawer together. Clean frontyard.

Some could argue that Delgadillo is sacrificing too much for a woman who  is only 20.  She should be out partying with her friends, going to school, and spending time with a boyfriend–she does have a fiance.   But what Delgadillo is doing is providing a strong, female  role model for her younger sisters while their mother is away.  By assuming responsibilities of a primary caregiver, she is showing her younger sisters it is tough but possible to balance one’s familial, social, and personal lives.  Delgadillo is operating as an alternative to the kind of women that the media perpetuates on a regular basis: smart, brave, and not one to shy away from a seemingly insurmountable task which outwardly seems impossible.

Delgadillo does admit she does feel like she is missing out on typical parts of a 20 year old woman’s life but as she told her mother:

I told my mom, ‘Don’t ever feel like you put this on me,’ ” Delgadillo says. “It was my decision, and we knew since she joined the Army that one day she was going to be called.”

At a time when the Iraq war is  ending too may lives in  savage ways and causing so much political and ideological friction at home, this story reminds me that we need to be looking toward our families and the needs of the younger generations. Clearly, Delgadillo is helping her mother raise some lucky young girls who have two maternal figures to look up to.  The Delgadillo family is further proof that the face of the American family is changing whether we can keep up or not.

Whatever one’s political opinions are at the end of the day, it cannot be denied that Delgadillo is only further reinforcing the value  and variety of women’s contributions.

Last month, I took a trip to San Francisco to visit some college friends. I also lived there when I was 5 and again in 2004-5. On the way there, I read the book Citizen Girl (published in 2004) from start to finish. I had bought this book awhile ago and let it languish on my bookshelf while I read other books. Buying books and taking a few months or years to get to them is a bad habit of mine!

Anyway, Citizen Girl really frustrated me. I was excited to read about a young woman around my age who graduated from a liberal arts college try to make it in the big city. Instead of being centered around romance, it turned to the workplace and the quest to find a job that doesn’t make you feel like a puppet/monkey/prostitute/turd and get paid enough to pay rent and the cable bill.

The book opens with the main character, Girl, working in the non-profit sector for a women’s rights agency for a crazy boss. If the writers Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus were trying to debunk female stereotypes they did a horrible job, as Girl’s boss and coworkers come across as bra burning man-hating women. The men in the book fare no better; the reader meets pervy bosses, jocks, and other John Does. Girl’s love interest is a guy who’s always blowing her off for his friends or guilt tripping her for not taking up too much of his time. If I were an alien and only had this book to learn from, I would think New York City consisted of self-centered men and clueless women. The book goes downhill immediately. One of the lower points occurs when one of Girl’s nasty male bosses (she goes through a series of jobs) convinces her she has to get a bikini wax for work purposes. No she’s not a prostitute, model, or a porn star.

I read the Nanny Diaries and saw many of the plot points recycled. I so wanted to identify with “Girl” as there were many situations in the book that I or my friends have been through. Working at jobs that required tasks way below our intelligence levels. Trying to balance 9-5 work while pursuing are artistic interests at night. Choosing a career path than changing one’s mind moments later.

I’m one among many 20somethings who claim to be dealing with the quarter life crisis. I also know some 30somethings who are also facing an identity crisis in regards to what he or she is doing with his or her lives. I read another book in 2006 when I hit a slump in my professional life and decided to make some changes, mostly good. The book is QuarterLife Crisis. It didn’t really help me in anyway except repeat story after story that I’ve already heard in some form about women and men my age. The authors Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilne did write a companion book that seems to offer some actual advice.

I would absolutely love to read something about someone struggling in the real world like so many of us are. But I keep asking myself, are we really struggling? That’s a large question to answer in another post. It is definitely a confusing time which is possibly why some of the literature I’ve read about this crisis is so muddled and confusing.

Anyone have any suggestions? Read anything good about this issue?

By the way here is a USA Today review from 2004 that tears about Citizen Girl.

OK. If you celebrate V-Day great and if you don’t fine but everyone can appreciate some LOVE!

(1) “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Teaching our elders how to GET IT ON safely, of course:

As the teacher, Monique Binford, delved into an unexpurgated discussion covering issues from vaginal dryness to Viagra, one student’s cane clattered to the floor, another student adjusted his hearing aid and a third fidgeted in her orthopedic shoes. By the time Ms. Binford got around to describing a safe sexual act involving Saran Wrap, a woman shouted, “Enough, already!” and the room erupted in laughter.

(2) Marriage + IHOP = Good Love Timez in California

(3) The greeting card business figures out how to market to the Anti-Valentine Day crowd!

It’s also one more day to pay day for a lot of us.

I was curious about the history of pap smears today, so I (idiotically?) went to wikipedia (I know when will I LEARN my lesson).

Um, there is no history of how the procedure was medically developed.

But the page does provide this info:

• A villain in the Naked Gun films is called Papschmir, an obvious reference to this kind of test.
• Georg Ruthenberg, guitarist for L.A. punk rock band the Germs, Nirvana and The Foo Fighters, renamed himself “Pat Smear” as a reference to the procedure.
• Haru, played by Chris Farley in Beverly Hills Ninja, tries to convince the film’s villain he is a money printing technician by saying he needs to run ‘a pap smear…test’ when he misprints pages of money.
• In the film Slacker a girl tries to sell a pap smear of Madonna’s incidentally played by Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Taylor
• On the TV series Scrubs, Jordan Sullivan is noted to have had seven Pap Smears in two months.

Two stories that provide a fascinating parallel:

From the article Pressing to look closer at blood clots and the Pill:

“Originally there was some hope that third-generation pills would be more effective,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, which filed the petition. “In fact, they turn out to have unique risks and no benefit over second-generation contraceptives.”

Learning that more recently developed birth control pills offer more risks and NO benefits over slightly older pills enrages me. I also learned that several tests that looked into potential side affects and effectiveness of the drug usually only include women who are considered average weight and are of a younger age than 40.

Perhaps more important, the panel wants the F.D.A. to ensure that it gathers data on the safety and efficacy of oral contraceptives from real women — older, overweight, forgetful even — living in a real world where contraceptive choices have real consequences.

A very alarming part of the research that the University of Washington found was that overwight and obese women were 60 percent more likely to become pregnant than women who weighed less on low dose pills.

Another article about sexual health that appeared the day before concerned popular pharmacies in the UK. Pharmacies to sell Viagra to patrons without a prescription on Valentine’s Day. Don’t get me wrong I think men who suffer from ED deserve to have medicine to help them. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing but the vibe I am getting from the media is that the development and marketing of drugs that enhance sexual desire takes precedence over drugs that inhibit women’s ability to become pregnant.

A few years ago I saw a pharmaceutical advertisement that said men could receive their third prescription of Viagra for free. Near that same time, I heard many stories of young women having a hard time securing birth control pills for an inexpensive co-pay price from their insurance companies. Attitudes toward pills intended for sexual use differ drastically between those inteded for men than for women.
Clearly, women suffering from potentially life threatening problems from birth-control pills isn’t considered sexy news, but it is real news that deserves to be heard. Attitudes toward women and birth-control have always confused me. Pharmaceutical companies are quick to market them and present a world where women who take the Pill are carefree and fun-loving BUT without proper media coverage and assertions that is ok to discuss the Pill’s benefits and drawbacks many women will suffer needlessly.

If this goes through, women’s place in academia and in the historical profession will never be the same.

I know I sound cliche but I’m excited!