Letters to the Editor
Uriel.
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 7
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Sure she would have been a lawyer, sure . . .
[Read the article: My lunch with an antifeminist pundit]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I had to laugh when Kate O'Beirne insisted she would have been a lawyer without feminism. Conveniently, she's ignored the fact that law schools had quotas that limited women to a tiny percentage of the class--if they allowed them at all. My mother graduated from law school in the 50s. She was one of five women in her class--and that was at infamously "liberal" Berkeley. She then went on dozens of interviews to get a job--most firms were willing to hire her as only a legal secretary or a librarian.
It's interesting to note that conservative Queen bees like O'Beirne (and Phyllis Schafly and Laura Ingraham)all took advantage of the hard spade work feminists did to abolish these quotas to obtain the prestige law degrees confer. None of them went to law school before feminism opened the legal doors to more than a tiny segment of women.
It's also interesting to note that Republican women, such as Sandra Day O'Connor and Elizabeth Dole, who did go to law school under the quota system, have never taken the vituperative, misogynistic attitude toward women's rights that someone like O'Beirne does.
As for Traister getting bulldozed--well, yeah, that's clearly O'Beirne's shtick. But since Traister had the advantage of being able to look up information and facts after the interview, why on earth did she type this up as a Q and A. O'Beirne clearly lied and skewed facts to serve her agenda, why didn't Traister point out these out? Surely, that's her job as a print journalist? I mean, who cares if she was a punching bag during the interview?
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Williams isn't whining, but a lot of readers are . . .
[Read the article: Sexual healing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Williams experience pretty much reflects the experience of every mother I know. It's *standard*, not substandard or inadequate, medical practice to tell women they can have sex at the six-week post-partum check-up after a normal delivery. It's also normal, thanks to the major hormonal drop, the lack of sleep and the endless nursing to have no libido. In other words, it's *safe* to have sex, but it's not likely you'll want to.
Having been there, I didn't read Williams as being whiny, but as being honest and funny. I've got to wonder if the complaints have less to do with Williams writing or attitude than the fact that a lot of people don't deal with anything that so frankly links mommies and sex.
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Good Grief
[Read the article: "The Last of Her Kind"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The most common names in England has Catholic associations for pete's sake. There's nothing particularly papist about Sophia--a name that means "wisdom" and thus in keeping with the Puritan tradition of virtue names. As for "Dooley" being Irish--that doesn't preclude it from having WASP associations. The Irish upper classes were Protestant and there's a *long* tradition of Anglo-Irish intermarriage among Protestants and thus Gaelic names.
I have to say as a WASP, myself, Ms. Schwartz' fabulist take on my tribe is just kind of peculiar.
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Bravo!
[Read the article: The happy hypocrite]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bravo to Joan Walsh for nailing Caitlin Flanagan's hypocrisy on its braindead little head. Unlike Flanagan, I'm a full-time mother who also runs a business without a nanny or a housekeeper. Since, unlike Flanagan, I know just how hard it is to really take care of your child full time, I've never had much patience with her sanctimonious guilt-tripping. She's not a full-time mother, she's a lady of leisure who dabbles in writing. She really has nothing to say about real full-time mothering nor mothers who work outside the home.
As someone whose working mother (and grandmother) died of breast cancer, Flanagan's exploitation of her own illness to score cheap shots is grotesque. Yeah, my mother worked and was (gasp!)a feminist. She also took care of her mother when she was dying. My family did the same and we were heartbroken when she died. Is Flanagan's understanding of love really so limited that she thinks only women who fit safe stereotypes are loved and cared for? With such a benighted view of humanited, no wonder she's depressed.
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Another one of those
[Read the article: The hothouse effect]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I, too, was one of those kids designated as "gifted"--as was my mother as were my neices and nephews and so will, no doubt, be my daughter. And, yes, much of school did not interest me. Nonetheless, there's a kind of dissatisfied, petulant tone to many of these letters. It's clear that the writers consider the public school system failed them because it did not sufficiently adapt to them.
My own view of giftedness differs. Many of the kids defined as "gifted" are head-of-the-class bright. Teach them well, give them some extra-credit projects and encourage them to read. They'll do fine--provided that they're allowed to be second-best some of the time (we all are.)
With the extremely/profoundedly gifted, I think there are some different issues. A child who thinks that outside of the box will have a hard time fitting in and it really is hard to adapt the standard curriculum to her or him. However, having known some unhappy ex-prodigies, I don't think these kids should be pushed to the edge of their abilities. If anything, they need less pressure than a kid closer to the median--a very bright child is one who's extremely absorptive. In many ways, one of the best things that happened to me is that my abilities were somewhat ignored--I was left to read and think in peace. By the time anyone outside my family found out what I read and how I thought, I was well into my teens and beyond the hot-house child stage. As a result, I enjoy my mind--but many of my former hot-house friends don't.