Neal Pollack's Alternadad

Neal Pollack's Alternadad is reviewed by Michael Agger in Slate. Some of the issues the book deals with are similar to what we are going through.

Pollack embarks into parent-land from a different starting point than those two. Like many men of his generation and class, he marries a woman with similar ambitions. Regina is an artist and teacher. They both partook of the extended American adolescence, and their "artsy-fartsy" life together is fun, filled with concerts and road trips. Their marriage has an ungendered, unscripted equality. They do what they want. Slowly, Regina leads Neal down the road to reproduction. Unlike a lot of dad writing, Pollack describes a critical stage: the hazy confusion of the "should we get pregnant?" time and the gray period once the seed is sown. Women's lives change at conception (and even before), but men have a nine-month grace period when they awake to the old-fashioned bread-winning commitment they still feel. Pollack describes this economic awakening through conversations with Regina. Note how he captures the drastic mindset of the newly pregnant—and note too that they're not talking about whether to buy a Bugaboo

What's fallen away from marriage for artist-intellectual-professional types are the traditional genders and gender roles. But, as new moms have been observing for years, the arrival of a child has a nasty way of reinstating the old dynamic. Pollack, who feels the need to make money and provide a safe place to live, is among the first to relate the re-emergence of breadwinner angst among men. (Although he fights this pressure by smoking pot and forming a rock band.) Regina is divided by wanting space for her artistic ambitions and her feelings of being a "bad mother." Parenthood, which looks from the outside like a step into maturity, is actually a descent into a new set of insecurities. Including renewed tension with your parents, who are often willing to overlook a funky wedding ceremony but want to see you step in with tradition and/or religion when a grandchild appears. An infamous chapter in Alternadad details the three-way gunfight among Neal, Regina, and Neal's Jewish parents over whether Eli should be circumcised.

some feedback from my aunt Geeta,

reading Pollack on altenadad reminded me of the articles on mothering i was
telling you about. In African communities i believe they have a category
called 'othermothers' - these women take over the chore-work of mothering,
sometimes paid most times just as gestures of exchange and neighbourliness.
These are semi permanent arrangements. In the alternadads it was not clear
to me what this entity actually does. The article on fatherhood that we
read in class talked about a new category of "androgynous fathers' -
interesting because it in a way reifies the same stereotype of nurture
being women's work and men who do it are necessarily androgynous. Why not
androgynous mothers too? Anyway the 2 interesting thing pointed out in that
article (which i will mail to you) are that the idea of a hands on dad is a
very upper middle class phenomenon - so class is a factor, and 2. in time
(within a few years of the birth) the role of father as bread-winner
becomes an issue with not only the men but the women too. It seems these
ideas are hard wired and we want conformity to these patterns. My students
on the whole agreed that despite new age talk - neither women nor men are
there yet.

Harvard has a Woman President

Harvard has a woman president. Quite ironic, considering ex President Larry Summers statements.

Catharine Drew Gilpin was born on Sept. 18, 1947, and grew up in Clarke County, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley. She was always known as Drew. Her father, McGhee Tyson Gilpin, bred thoroughbred horses.

Dr. Faust has written frankly of the “community of rigid racial segregation” that she and her three brothers grew up in and how it formed her as “a rebellious daughter” who would go on to march in the civil rights protests in the 1960s and to become a historian of the region. “She was raised to be a rich man’s wife,” said a friend, Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard. “Instead she becomes the president of the most powerful university in the world.”

The Financial Times writes about her appointment here.

When she took over Radcliffe, which is the smallest of Harvard’s 10 schools, with no full-time faculty or students, the institute faced a budget shortfall of more than $3m. Ms Faust laid off staff members and transferred training programmes to other institutional homes, while closing down others.

Ms Faust has also undertaken considerable fundraising. Radcliffe’s endowment for the 2002 fiscal year totalled $49.3m, and it is now worth over $473m. While some of that growth is attributable to Harvard’s money managers, it is also a clear testament to her fundraising ability.

Mr Houghton on Sunday highlighted Ms Faust’s reputation as a “collaborative” and “open-minded” leader. This could be viewed as a not-so-subtle reference to the approach of her predecessor, Lawrence Summers, whose outspoken views and sometimes overly direct manner made it difficult for him to connect with a substantial portion of Harvard’s faculty. Mr Summers stepped down a year ago to pre-empt a second consecutive vote of no confidence by the faculty.

more on Aishwarya's marriage to trees

Feministing.com has an interesting analysis on Indian movie actress Aishwarya Rai's marriage to trees.

Er. Yes it is an old tradition. So the question is, do we expect that Rai, since she has had all this Western success, will no longer follow what she believes is her Hindu traditions? Or that she is somehow absolved from familial pressure?

Probably not. Some Indian feminists however believe that she is setting women back.

Meanwhile, Ash’s actions have invoked the wrath of feminists and women’s rights activists in India. Shruti Singh, a Patna lawyer, filed suit against the two families, saying such ceremonies are in violation of the Indian Constitution and offensive to women.
“I agree with her,” says India-born Berkeley resident Shobha Hiatt, a women’s rights advocate. “It is shocking that people as forward thinking as the Bachchans should engage in such archaic practices. It is like moving back in time.”

Mira Sophia

Rising C-section rates in India

The Hindu
describes the rise of Caesarean rates in India.

Obstetricians say the reason for rising caesarean deliveries has more to do with lifestyle change and delayed marriage, than medical reasons. "The chances of women who get married late delivering naturally are less because the pelvic bones and cartilage find it difficult to support the passage of babies," says Dr. Nirmala.

As far as the lifestyle change goes, doctors say women no longer work the way they used to. "Girls, soon after puberty, are discouraged from playing and that has a telling effect on their later days. At homes too girls, unlike yesteryears, hardly assist their mothers in cooking, nor do they sit on the ground to do some domestic work," points out Dr. Nirmala, who says sitting on the ground is important because it helps the pelvis widen.

At the Government Hospital doctors perceive an urban-rural divide. "Rural women who work more on the fields and at homes with fewer gadgets give birth the natural way," says an obstetrician who adds that another reason for increasing caesarean cases relates to women who come to GH for second delivery.

Lynn Cheney Pregnant

Lynn
Cheney is pregnant. Quite a courageous lesbian woman, considering who her father is and the polices that he supports.

Aishwarya's Manglik Dosha

Interesting analysis by Urvashi Butalia in the Outlook, on how the Bachchans have tried to remove Aishwarya Rai’s manglik status before she weds Abhishek Bachchan, and what this portrays of Indian society heading into the 21st century.

For, did the Bachchans, for example, visit temples with such regularity when their daughter Shweta was getting married? Or is it that there's something different about the marriage of a daughter and that of a son?

For even though the Bachchans, like anyone else, have the right to their private lives, it's when they make them public, and when the media works hard to do the same, that these questions begin to be asked. Why does it matter so much that a woman, otherwise perfectly articulate, independent, successful, needs the backing of the gods to marry the man of her choice? Look at the characters involved and their stories: both independent, both successful, both modern, both at the peak of their careers, both with pasts that hold other involvements. They decide to marry, a decision no doubt born of a combination of emotion, logic, reason. And immediately, enter the family, enter the pandit, enter superstition, enter the temple.

So perhaps there's something to be grateful for here, for the Bachchans' temple visits remind us how deep superstition lies in our lives. Can we, in this day and age, really believe that marriage to a tree first will take away the 'inauspicious' nature of someone born under a constellation of stars? While Aishwarya and Abhishek go through their rituals of appeasement, we have the same thing played out in a serial on television, where a man thinks nothing of marrying a perfectly capable woman simply to remove the curse that he is told his kundali carries, for she will then take on the bad luck and he can marry the woman of his choice. And is it surprising that in all of this, it's the woman who is the one up for sacrifice—whether it's marriage to a tree or a life sacrificed, in the end, her sacrifice is needed to make the man happy. Is this the 21st century we are talking about?