Anne, Betty, and Cathy are housewives who'd like to start home businesses. Each one takes $1,000 from the family bank account to start a home crafting business (apple preserves, bead jewelry , and cauliflower-shaped cushions, respectively). Each one spends $50 on purchasing crafts from the other two. Now Anne has $1,000 still invested in all the supplies for her apple preserve business (minus a few units of product), plus she has some bead jewelry and a few cauliflower-shaped cushions.

After reading a bit on the Internet about sales techniques, she then manages to sell about $200 worth of her preserves to a few of her non-crafting friends, but they either don't seem interested in buying any more or they're not returning her calls. So she starts a website, gets advertising materials, and goes to a craft show, spending a total of $200 or so on all this. She meets new crafting friends D-Z and sells $2,000 worth of apple preserves to them, but of course buys products (about $2,000 worth) from all of them to maintain these new business connections and because the macramé kite and the popsicle teddy bear were so cute! Anne's business's fiscal year looks like this:

Expenditures:

1000 start-up costs

300 replenishing supplies after sales of product

200 Internet and other advertising

100 to Betty and Cathy for their crafts

2000 to D-Z for their crafts

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3600

Income:

100 from Betty and Cathy

200 from friends who now have plenty of apple preserves, thank you)

2000 from D-Z for her apple preserves

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2300, plus a lot of the aforementioned beads and cushions, as well as many doilies, lampshades, toilet-seat covers, a hand-painted xylophone etc.

Net loss to her family, $1,300. How she'll describe it, "I made $2,300 from my crafting business!"

I say this with all the bitterness and sorrow of someone who's watched her best friend put a lot of money and many hours of painstaking and eyesight-destroying work into one of these home businesses. There's only so many handcrafted gewgaws her friends can buy, and I honestly don't see how she'll ever sell them to anyone who doesn't care about her. Most of the crafts I've seen have fallen into this category.

Oh nonsense, there are plenty of issues affecting solely or mostly women without feminism having to horn in on issues that affect men and women equally. Actually, there are probably twice as many gay men as lesbians, and their movement has been a hell of a lot more successful than feminism in the past few decades, probably because of their focus on their own goals and because there isn't much infighting except as to extremeness of methods.

Feminists have lost/never had the support of most women on actual feminist issues, and seem to find fighting other groups' battles to be a convenient way of putting off admitting that and doing something to solve it.

This bullshit about feminism focusing too much on upper-middle-class and rich women is just another way of shooting the movement in the foot. Men from those classes have the most power and money, why shouldn't a movement focus on getting similarly situated women to provide support and funding? Then their assistance can be used to help poor women (from demanding equal treatment in the workplace to providing money to battered women's shelters).

Hey, here's a women's issue that disparately affects poor women: abortion. Anyone remember that? Nope? Guess that's why we're losing that war and about to fight the birth control one all over again. Do poor women enjoy getting paid less than men do for the same work? What about the miniscule percentage of rapes that actually get reported, let alone end in convictions; is it just rich women getting raped?

Very depressing. Maybe you’re right, let’s go see if the blacks and gays have found anything more interesting to do. If nothing else, their parades are always more fun.

There's an aqua-blue toilet seat cover on the front page of the Paper Crane site. It's the second product down on the left side.

The tampon dolls can be found by clicking on "shop", then "plush", then "the bathroom". Here's a link: http://www.mypapercrane.com/shop/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_17

The Paper Crane products are cute. However, it's hard to think of a use for most of them, other than the occasional gift to friends or kids. There's certainly a market for plush toys and decorations, but it's pretty crowded as it is. Also, most crafters don't have the talent and skill, at crafting and promotion, of Ms. Kenney.

Jacobson is the one at fault, for calling while her wife was in labor. I hope that their health insurance wasn't cut off at the moment of the dismissal, or else that was one expensive phone call.