Today's Yesterday's NYT has an article that's sure to generate some discussion on feminist blogs: The lead of Empty Nests, and Hearts reports that "[o]ver the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids." The article goes on to critique the lack of flexibility in our workforce for what makes sense for women, so that women don't have to a.) not have children at all for the sake of their careers or b.) face the probability that their careers will enter a state of arrested development (they'll either be on the backburner, because there's only so much time and energy in one day/one person, or jettisoned completely for several years, and who knows if by the end of that period the opportunities will still be there?).

This problem has been discussed extensively in books, in the Chronicle, on Invisible Adjunct, Misbehaving, and many other places. I'm also reminded of (haunted by?) a post by Halley Suitt in which she writes, "And what about babies? I had one -- when I was 39 and had been in software and information services sales for a long time. If I had to do it over again. I'd have more babies earlier."

Sigh. Anyone got any new ideas for large-scale reform? If so, please share 'em; if not, feel free to lament here.

This is old news, and I'm sure everyone's already seen it, but Jill Walker has put her dissertation online. It's titled Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World, and I just downloaded it and skimmed the table of contents as well as part of the first chapter, and I'm in full agreement with this part of the committee's report: "Another strong point of the dissertation is its lucid and economical writing style, which make it a true pleasure to read." Over the winter break, I've been reading those dissertation self-help books and other advice*, and one of the books emphasized the importance of "telling a good story" in one's dissertation. In my limited reading of Jill's, it looks like she has done that very well. The writing is engaging, almost conversational at times. One section of the dissertation includes definitions of key terms Jill's using, and she begins her definition of "fiction" with the following (p. 27-28):

What is fiction?

Sometimes, when I’m sweating away at the gym, I imagine that I’m an Olympic weight
lifter. The crowd is cheering me on, Mum and Dad are close to the podium holding
banners with “You’re brilliant, Jillikin!” emblazoned on them in huge letters, and if only
I can lift those gigantic weights above my head I’ll win the gold medal I’ve been working
towards for a decade. Actually, of course, I’m pulling handles fastened to pulleys and
weights on a contraption that looks nothing like a dumbbell, and 5 kilos is a significant
load for me. Just as we all do every single day, I am imagining a situation that isn’t real.

Though my daydream was prompted by my being in a gym, my imaginings were
not prescribed by the gym or the apparatuses. I could have imagined completely
otherwise (that I was skiing or lying on the beach in the sun), or not imagined anything
at all. Indeed, my daydream may have been prompted as much by things internal to
myself as to the machines around me. The process of completing a PhD makes
daydreams of lifting impossible weights come easily.

What fun! I wonder if I could get away with something like that. :-) Speaking of my dissertation, in case you wanted an update on it, my prospectus is done and I'm awaiting responses from committee members on possible dates and times for the defense. As you might expect, I'm anxious to get started on the chapters, but I want to get some feedback from my committee first (and I want to get some kind of at least provisional imprimatur from them before I start posting more here about the content of my dissertation). Last semester, I took a writing practicum in the Women's Studies department and got comments on drafts of my prospectus from seminar participants and the professor of the course. They were helpful, of course, but I need to see what my committee thinks. Wish me luck!

* In a comment to his post, Collin writes, "You know, I'm thinking that this [dissertation advice] would be a great wiki project. Maybe it's something I'll get going this spring." Well, Collin, I think it's a good idea too, and I hope you don't mind, but I'm trying to get one started myself (with many thanks to James Farmer for setting it up for me). Anyone who would like to contribute, please do so; I'd greatly appreciate it!

Krista and Lauren point to a thoughtful post by Ayelet Waldman in response to Frances Kissling's essay Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus. They both quote this passage:

To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4 month-old fetus has Down’s Syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby's life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of grey, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.

I agree, but these insights raise questions -- no answers here, just questions -- that I'd like to explore. Reading this post reminded me of the debates over Laci and Connor's law; pro-choice feminists struggled with whether or not to support it. Connor Peterson was a wanted child whose death was against his mother's will, and many pro-choice feminists wanted to support the law wholeheartedly, without apologies or qualms, because of that distinction, but were worried that doing so was an admission of the personhood of a fetus, a step back in the fight for reproductive rights. I think this dilemma is another illustration of a truth.

I wonder how shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric will look. I wonder if the "moral elite" will see "shades of grey" as some kind of admission of guilt. Waldman says of her second-trimester abortion: "I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically." Maybe I've been reading too much Lakoff, but when I saw this, I thought, "pro-life frame." But her feelings toward this fetus were, and still are, very nuanced, a complexity of multiple-truths moral thought of which most pregnant women are capable. She does think of aborting in this case as killing, but chose to have the abortion for several personal reasons. Her decision was "based on [her] own and [her] family’s needs and limitations." She writes, "I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died."

Via Tomorrow's Professor, the top 500 world universities. I don't put a lot of stock in these lists (the criteria seem skewed toward the sciences, for example, and definitely toward research rather than teaching), but I couldn't help looking for my alma maters. Minnesota's at #33 and Tennessee is in the 101-152 range. Alas, UNA didn't make the list.

Since my mom showed me this auto-obituary (username culturecatATgmailDOTcom, password flawrinse if it prompts you) when I was home, it has lingered in my mind:

Being plain-spoken was part of me, and I didn't really know how this felt for others. Scott thought this was a good quality, and he treated me as part of a "co-pastor" team. I loved him for his trust in me to be a leader with him; I did the best I could, using the help of so many of you.

I filled my life with teaching children, loving music, singing and playing the piano, reading, being in the church, cooking, baking, planting and caring for gardens and canning vegetables, soups and fruits and being a wife and mother.

Scotty loved my carmel cakes; Martha loved my fried okra; and Scott loved my homemade rolls and fried pies. I loved all of this wonderful living.

Scott and I had so many challenges and opportunities with our ministry; church picnics, covered-dish suppers, camps, vacation Bible schools, Christmas plays and cantatas, communion services, home visitations, homecomings, singings, revivals, prayer meetings, committee meetings, weddings, baptisms, funerals, sermons, worship services, beginning new churches and Sunday schools and traveling in the snow. I am so thankful I could be part of it all!

I want all of you to know that through it all, you helped make my life meaningful, and for this I am forever and ever grateful to you.

She died at age 93, and I don't know how old she was when she wrote this. I'm fascinated with this woman -- her happiness, grace, and gratitude, and her desire to communicate it to the whole town by what strikes me as a pretty radical disruption of the obituary genre. Rest in peace, Mrs. Jones.

Sunday afternoon, on the way to the airport, my mom and I stopped by my grandmother's house for a lunch of soup and cornbread. For a long time now, I've been wanting to do that once-a-month cooking thing; I hear those who do it save a lot of money. Certainly my grandmother has done it as long as I can remember; in fact, in that picture I linked, she and I are standing in front of the deep freeze, which is packed with soups, vegetables grown by members of my family, pies, and other goodies.

So I was at the grocery store this evening, and, inspired by both my grandmother and Lauren, I was seized by the urge to make a big pot of soup. I reviewed what I already had at home that would be good in soup -- brown rice, beans, chicken broth, and just-thawed chicken -- and I bought two cans of roasted garlic diced tomatoes. I baked the chicken (three breasts) in olive oil and a BIG pinch of Herbes de Provence, threw the rice, beans, chicken broth, and tomatoes in a pot, diced the chicken in the CorningWare dish so that it would sop up the remaining olive oil and Herbes de Provence, then put it in the soup. I added some red pepper flakes, but no other herbs or spices. It's fantastic, and there are now four jars of it in my freezer.

The following are a couple of half-jocular little progymnasmata I jotted down in my paper journal. I had thought about posting them here, but someone I trust told me people might be offended (hey, that's anti-intellectual!). Nevertheless, it is a joke, sort of. I have to post them now that I've read a recent post by Amanda in which she writes:

But well before the end of [MLA], I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else's main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn't take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else's article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.