Joan -

Ann Coulter is a sow and while my B/P rises when I read your stories, I also realize that you have to go on fighting the good fight, for what is true.

Evelyn Sharenov

I read this piece in the NYT yesterday; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what uproar and crying for mommy this will bring.

So why is this a black-white controversy? Like eating dinner with the family - if you don't, your children will grow up in juvie detention...and if you do, they'll graduate from Harvard? If I work and I'm a mom I'm bad; if I stay home I'm good?

Here's the deal - there are relationships that are healthy, normal, nurturing and mutually satisfying. Then there are relationships with mothers that foster continued dependence and lack of accountability (see Ms. Hilton), learned reliance and helplessness, delayed independence, personality disorders, poor modeling, and what not, including eeew moments.

Closeness with one's parents - mother and father, stepmom and stepdad - is, in and of itself, not the problem (even if I find it, backed up by personal experience in several generations of my own family, icky) nor anything particularly new.

Several years ago when I reminded a friend of mine of how close she had once been with her mother, discussing sex, drugs, rock and roll (ummm, let's see, that would put this in the 1960s), she was frankly disgusted. There's nothing new here. The media is the message. But it's the nature of the relationship itself that has meaning.

Sadly, there are many moms I can point to who seem intent on fostering lifelong apron-string connections to their daughters through guilt, blame, anger, hysteria, etc. ("You're father left us, I need you" type women). These will not be healthy adult ties, although they may be quite close.

Healthy independence on the part of a young woman is indespensible in our world. One of the most important factors in a feminist woman's life is her ability to care for herself, emotionally and financially.

Evelyn Sharenov

Another Jew-hating Jew and without a date for the prom! Spare us! I need another martini to finish reading...oh, nevermind, I just won't finish reading. Screw the martini.

Evelyn Sharenov

Susan Faludi has written a precise and tragic history of feminism since 9/11; this doesn't mean that her publisher would agree to print a book three or four times its length.

One thing not addressed is that an author must chose what to put in and what to leave out because publishers have ultimate power over what we read. How long will Faludi be on the best seller list (if at all) or on the talk show circuit or interviewed in magazines. There's a fundamental misassumption that Ms. Faludi didn't want to write the book that Rebecca Traister demands. Do we know what Faludi cut from her original ms? She included much of what is germaine to her thesis.

Springsteen - well - his CD doesn't cost more to produce and will be as popular as any Springsteen CD because it's Springsteen. Any comparison amounts to apples and oranges.

A brief footnote - Bush's female appointees are known for their lip-smacking adoration of Bush's conservatism and Bush himself. He may just as well appoint Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly and Kate O'Beirne.

Evelyn

Buried in this story is the fact that the family in question was turned down by health insurers due to pre-existing conditions. For my dollar, this should be against the law. And while we're arguing about SCHIP, we're actually arguing about a red herring, which is how the health care industry is administered in the nation. Via insurance companies. Get rid of them; nationalize healthcare. It's time. It's more than time. It's the only solution to the problem. Where are our brains? What are we so afraid of? Rather, what are our politicians so afraid of?

Evelyn Sharenov, RN, BA, MS

This is an excellent existential analysis of the most interesting television drama to come along in - I don't know - maybe my entire life. Anyone raised on reruns of "I Love Lucy" - granted, still one of the funniest series of all time - can't help but embrace the realities of Mad Men.

Ms. Havrilesky's fine piece on Mad Men reminded me of rereading "The Women's Room" by Marilyn French this past summer. I was assigned to write a retrospective of the novel as part of a multi-author essay for BITCH Magazine. Coincidentally, this was TWR's 30th anniversary. The novel didn't have the same punch it had when I read it in 1978. But Mad Men does.

I was a child in the years that Mad Men portrays. Anything that reminds us of the realities of our corrupt society, including male domination through the subordination of women (using any means available - lifestyle and psychoanalysis being the two that come immediately to mind) while pointing out the underlying mediocrity of our 'dream', is important television - television being the medium that pushes the most messages to the most people. This as we watch sociocultural movements that took us part of the way forward turn tail or simply fall apart from lack of attention.

Well done.

Evelyn Sharenov

If you think that there aren't men who cajole, suggest, wheedle, watch-over-the-shoulders-of or downright threaten women to vote the way they want them to vote, you are very much mistaken. I work in the field of 'mental health' as an advanced practice nurse and I see shit like this all the time. I'm saddened that this flies so under your radar. Just because there are voting booths does not mean a thing for women's voting rights if there are violent men standing just outside the curtain - let alone those states that vote solely by mail. Are you kidding or what?

Granted, Mick LaSalle is too stupid to live, but there are other things going on here.

esharenov

a liberal female voter of a certain age