Are we “less happy” because of feminism? Not a bit of it.

["Women, if you're happy and you know it..." by Ellen Goodman]

Not long ago a group of writers decided to publish a book of essays we called “Feminism Made Me Happy.” It was an in-your-face title, a deliberate attempt to counter the narrative we all knew by heart. The one that kept describing how the women’s movement had left us stressed out, discontented, wrenched from home, hearth, and motherhood to struggle and fail at doing it all.

Life and writers being what they are, we never did the book, but we have had some terrific lunches. Now we are due for another one, because we are in the midst of another dust-up over research published under the (too) provocative headline: “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.”

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, partners in marriage and research, dove into the data and came up with numbers suggesting a decline in women’s happiness or, to be more precise, in their “self-reported subjective well-being.” In 1972, women were four points more likely than men to describe themselves as “very happy.” Today they are one point less likely than men to check that box.

This is hardly proof of a mass depression, but the story fueled the predictable debates on websites and talk shows. The controversy pitted those who blame declining happiness on too much change against those who blame it on too little change. And those, of course, who just blame the  messengers.

Stevenson and Wolfers should have known they were walking into this propeller when they linked the women’s movement and happiness together. The paradox, as this pair framed it, was that despite all the improvements in women’s lives during the last 35 years, despite barriers that went down and opportunities that went up, women weren’t “self-reporting” greater happiness.

Our lunch group could have warned the researchers against one sentence that truly raised hackles. “As women’s expectations move into alignment with their experiences,” they speculate, “this decline in happiness may reverse.” Oh, goodie, lower your expectations and get happy, gals?

In fairness, the researchers didn’t pin the decline in happiness–oops, “self-reported subjective well-being”–on any specific ideology or social change. It affected married and single, parents and nonparents, working and stay-at-home mothers alike.

Indeed, Stevenson, a new mom, says she was surprised by the paradox. “I look back and think, ‘Oh my God, I have to be happier than my mother. I have so many more choices,’” she said. She and her husband pulled many strings to unravel the happiness conundrum. Have we doubled the areas in which women are expected to perform brilliantly? Are women now given more permission to express rather than repress unhappiness?

Women aren’t nostalgic for the old days. If anyone is, just watch a few episodes of “Mad Men” as an antidote, with its suffocated Mad Wife Betty Draper and its slapped-down Working Woman Peggy Olsen. If you prefer nonfiction, leaf through the early chapters of Gail Collins’s history of “When Everything Changed” to those magical yesteryears when a flight attendant was weighed, measured, and hired to be a flying geisha.

Going forward to the past won’t bring a grin to our lips–excuse me, a self-reported sense of well-being to our database. Happiness is a pretty elusive state and an even more elusive research subject. We are, as they say, happy as our least happy child and insecure as our retirement fund. As for linking happiness and social history, today’s flight attendant isn’t going to wake up every morning and assess her own well-being in comparison to her 1970s predecessor any more than I wake up grateful not to walk 4 miles in the snow to school. It doesn’t work that way.

Feminism made me happy? Not, I assure you, in a permanent state of good cheer. It opened doors. It opened our eyes–to everything including what still needs to be done. The women’s movement never promised us a rose garden or a warm bath of contentment. It offered a new way to understand the world, a lens on injustice and a tool to use in the pursuit of happiness. It’s a work in progress.

That’s happiness? Close enough.

“Female Pastors: Making Progress…?” [by Elizabeth Felder]

From the magazine Gospel Today, 9.28.09.

Although female senior pastors continue to face a glass ceiling, a recent study reveals that women in the pulpit have made substantial gains over the last 10 years.

According to a new Barna Group survey, the number of female senior pastors doubled between 1999 and 2009. In 1999, 5% of senior pastors of Protestant churches were women. Today 10% are women.

The survey also revealed that over the last 10 years, the average age of female pastors increased from 50 years of age to 55; and women in the pulpit are disproportionately more educated than their male counterparts. In fact, 77% of female pastors have a seminary degree, while only 63% of male pastors have graduated from seminary.

Despite their educational advantage, female pastors continue to earn less money than male pastors. The current compensation package for women in the senior pastorate is $45,300 vs. $48,600 for men. The Barna study noted, however, that although men have seen a 21% salary increase since 1999, the wage gap between the sexes has diminished over the last 10 years–with female pastors earning 30% more than they did 10 years ago. In the past, male pastors were compensated (on average) $6,900 more than women. Today the gap has narrowed by almost half to $3,300.

In the study, Barna Group noted that congregational sizes have contributed to the salary variation between female and male pastors. Men, disproportionately, lead larger churches with an average of 103 adults in attendance each week. Female pastors, however, have a median attendance of 81 adults each week.

You can read more articles here, if you like.

It’s a hammer of justice, it’s a bell of freedom.

Jen Nedeau of womensrights.change.org says:

“This just in–Mary Travers–of Peter, Paul & Mary has passed away tonight. We don’t talk that much on change.org about how women can bring truth to the female experience through their music, but Mary Travers was definitely one of those women who could translate the needs and wants of women through her voice and spirit.

“I grew up in San Francisco. I listened to the music of the ’60s in order to understand what came before me in the neighborhood I grew up in–the Haight-Ashbury. The death of Mary Travers reminds me again of how much time has passed since that revolutionary era and makes me yearn for the next cultural uprising to come–one that includes music, politics, and a desire for peaceful change.”

“OH NOOOOO!!!!”

That was literally my (audible! My dad, who’s across the house, asked me what’s wrong) reaction to this sad piece of news:

Mary Travers, a Member of Peter, Paul and Mary, Has Died at 72

Mary Travers, whose ringing, earnest vocals with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary made songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died on Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and lived in Redding, Conn.

The cause was cancer, said Heather Lylis, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager straight from the clubs and the coffee houses that nourished the folk-music revival.

“She was obviously the sex appeal of that group, and that group was the sex appeal of the movement,” said Elijah Wald, a folk-blues musician and a historian of popular music.

Ms. Travers’s voice blended seamlessly with those of her two colleagues, Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, to create a rich three-part harmony that propelled the group to the top of the pop charts. Their first album, “Peter, Paul and Mary,” which featured the hit singles “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer,” reached No. 1 shortly after its release in March 1962 and stayed there for seven weeks, eventually selling more than two million copies.

The group’s interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” translated his raw vocal style into a smooth, more commercially acceptable sound. They also scored big hits with pleasing songs like the whimsical “Puff the Magic Dragon” and John Denver’s plaintive “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Their sound may have been commercial and safe, but early on, their politics were somewhat risky for a group courting a mass audience. Like Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey, Ms. Travers was outspoken in her support for the civil rights and antiwar movements, in sharp contrast to clean-cut folk groups like the Kingston Trio, which avoided making political statements.

“There was a real possibility that we would lose the entire Southern market over the issue,” Ms. Travers told Robbie Woliver, the author of “Hoot!: A Twenty-Five Year History of the Greenwich village Music Scene,” an oral history. “But we felt that the issue was more important than the Southern market.”

Peter, Paul and Mary went on to perform at the 1963 March on Washington and joined the voting-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965.

Over the years they performed frequently at political rallies and demonstrations in the United States and abroad. After the group disbanded, in 1970, Ms. Travers continued to perform at political events around the world as she pursued a solo career.

“They made folk music not just palatable but accessible to a mass audience,” David Hajdu, the author of “Positively Fourth Street,” a book about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and their circle, said in an interview. Ms. Travers, he added, was critical to the group’s image, which had a lot to do with their appeal. “She had a kind of sexual confidence combined with intelligence, edginess and social consciousness–a potent combination,” he said. “If you look at clips of their performances, the camera fixates on her. The act was all about Mary.”

Mary Allin Travers was born Nov. 9, 1936 in Louisville, Ky. When she was 2 years old, her parents, both journalists, moved to New York. Almost unique among the folk musicians who emerged from the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s, Ms. Travers actually came from the neighborhood. She attended progressive private schools there, studied singing with the renowned music teacher Charity Bailey while still in kindergarten and became part of the folk-music revival as it took shape around her.

“I was raised on Josh White, the Weavers and Pete Seeger,” Ms. Travers told The New York Times in 1994. “The music was everywhere. You’d go to a party at somebody’s apartment and there would be 50 people there, singing well into the night.”

While at Elisabeth Irwin High School, she joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Mr. Seeger when the Folkways label reissued a collection of union songs under the title “Talking Union” in 1955. The Song Swappers made three more albums for Folkways that year, all featuring Mr. Seeger to some degree.

She had no plans to sing professionally. Folk singing, she later said, had been a hobby. At local clubs, friends like Fred Hellerman of the Weavers and Theodore Bikel would coax her onstage to sing, but her extreme shyness made performing difficult. In 1958, she appeared in the chorus and sang on solo number in Mort Sahl’s short-lived Broadway show “The Next President,” but as the ’60s dawned she found herself at loose ends.

“I was a bad waitress with a private school education, which meant that I was illiterate,” Ms. Travers told The times in 1994. “And I certainly couldn’t type though my mother suggested I learn. I think her quote was: ‘Mary, get a job. No one ever made a living singing folk songs.’”

By chance, Albert Grossman, who managed a struggling folk singer named Peter Yarrow and would later take on Mr. Dylan as a client, was intent on creating an updated version of the Weavers for the baby-boom generation. He envisioned two men and a woman with the crossover appeal of the Kingston Trio. Mr. Yarrow, talking to Grossman in the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, noticed Ms. Travers’s photograph on the wall and asked who she was. “That’s Mary Travers,” Grossman said. “She’d be good if you could get her to work.”

Mr. Yarrow went to Ms. Travers’s apartment on Macdougal Street, across from the Gaslight, one of the principal folk clubs. They harmonized on “Miner’s Lifeguard,” a union song, and decided that their voices blended. To fill out the trio, Ms. Travers suggested Noel Stookey, a friend doing folk music and stand-up comedy at the Gaslight.

After rehearsing for seven months, with the producer and arranger Milt Okun coaching them, Peter, Paul and Mary–Mr. Stookey adopted his middle name, Paul, because it sounded better–began performing in 1961 at Folk City and the Bitter End. The next year they released their first album.

Virtually overnight Peter, Paul and Mary became one of the most popular folk-music groups in the world. The albums “Moving” and “In the Wind,” both released in 1963, rose to the top of the charts and stayed there for months.

Ms. Travers, onstage, drew all eyes as she shook her hair, bobbed her head in time to the music and clenched a fist when the lyrics took a dramatic turn. On instructions from Grossman, who wanted her to retain an air of mystery, she never spoke. The live double album “In Concert” (1964) captures the fervor of their performance.

On television the group’s mildly bohemian look–Ms. Travers favored beatnik clothing and Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey had mustaches and goatees–gave mainstream audiences their first glimpse of a subculture that had previously been ridiculed on shows like “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.”

“You cannot overemphasize those beards,” Mr. Wald said. “They looked like Greenwich Village to the rest of America. They were the first to go mainstream with an artistic, intellectual, beat image.”

Although the arrival of the Beatles and other British invasion bands spelled the end of the folk revival, Peter, Paul and Mary remained popular throughout the 1960s. The albums “A Song Will Rise” (1965), “See What Tomorrow Brings” (1965), and “Album 1700″ (1967) sold well, as did the singles “For Lovin’ Me” and “Early Morning Rain,” both by Gordon Lightfoot, and Mr. Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In.” The gently satirical single “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” (1967) reached the Top 10, and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (1969), their last hit, reached No. 1 on the charts.

Mr. Yarrow, in a statement on Wednesday, described Ms. Travers’s singing style as an expression of her character: “honest and completely authentic.”

Mr. Stookey, in an accompanying statement, wrote that “her charisma was a barely contained nervous energy–occasionally (and then only privately) revealed as stage fright.”

In 1970, after releasing the greatest-hits album “Ten Years Together,” the group disbanded. Ms. Travers embarked on a solo career, with limited success, releasing five albums in the 1970s. The first, “Mary” (1971) was the most successful, followed by “Morning Glory” (1972), “All My Choices” (1973), “Circles” (1974) and “It’s In Everyone of Us” (1978).

Ms. Travers’s first three marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her fourth husband, Ethan Robbins; two daughters, Erika Marshall of Naples, Fla., and Alicia Travers of Greenwich, Conn.; a sister, Ann Gordon of Oakland, Calif.; and two grandchildren.

Peter, Paul and Mary reunited to perform at a benefit to oppose nuclear power in 1978 and thereafter kept to a limited schedule of tours around the world. Many of their concerts benefited political causes. “I was raised to believe that everybody has a responsibility to their community and I use the word very loosely,” Ms. Travers told The Times in 1999. “It’s a big community. If I get recognized in the middle of the Sinai Desert I have a big community.”

It was a faithful community. Musical fashions changed, but fans stayed loyal to the music and the political ideals of the group. Ms. Travers once told the music magazine Goldmine, “People say to us, ‘Oh, I grew up with your music,’ and we often say, sotto voce, ‘So did we.’”

Now go away and leave me alone with my record player. I’m mourning.

Thank you for existing, Mary Wollstonecraft. :]

“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”

Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its entirety for free. ;]

“She began to dream with her eyes open, lifting her face to the wind.”

I’d like to introduce you to Chloe Malone. Aside from the obvious attraction, of course the decadently beautiful cover with golden lettering, Chloe’s a real darling. She comes from a family of past wealth, current “almost poverty”–which means pawning heirloom furniture and jewels for the sake of purchasing Chloe expensive new clothes. For the sake of catching her a millionaire husband, who would of course solve all their problems. She doesn’t mind, really, because she’s determined that at any cost she won’t love her husband. She doesn’t believe in love, certainly not as a foundation of marriage. If you don’t care so much, you won’t be so disappointed. And besides, she likes jewels. And silk. And fur. And feathers. So she dutifully goes hubby-hunting according to the wishes of her destitute mother and her rather intimidating godmother, and she finds the perfect fellow for the job.

But Chloe meets a man who tells her that women have no right to live on a husband’s money unless they’re contributing something useful to the world. Good looks count for nothing. She’s “pretty but useless.” Decorative, ornamental. What’s more, he likes to work. He challenges everything, every single ideal, that Chloe was raised on. Chloe starts to think, to read, to question. Her maternal figures express a desire to get her “safely married” before she starts thinking too much, but she continues to study entomology out of library books. Her fiance “laughs indulgently” at her when she’s “being cute” by trying to initiate intelligent conversation, but she holds herself apart and continues to seek knowledge.

Both the feminist movement (“What is the feminist movement?” inquired Mrs. Malone, after a polite semblance of mirth. Chloe blew her mother a kiss. “I may be in it, someday, darlingest. Ask me, then.”) and socialism (“What is this,” he inquired lightly, “a socialist meeting?”) are mentioned by name, and both concepts are threaded throughout the story even when left unnamed. Chloe eventually makes her decision, rejecting the “nets,” the “chains” thrown around her by society and the people who love her: the trap of luxury, the exchange of herself for a comfortable life, the ridiculous gender roles too often reinforced even today. The futility and depression that inevitably accompanies a relationship based on hierarchy. The love of money. (That was the core of living. Not money, not position, not ease, not love-in-idleness, but the man and the woman working together, the utter, unspoken comradeship of the fight, fought shoulder to shoulder…) Basically, I’m just very, very excited to own this little gem. It’s like a subversive piece of important information, disguised as a romance novel for girls, whispering to them that they have choices in life and they shouldn’t let others decide their lives for them. I love to imagine girls reading this, and novels like this, under the nose of their unsuspecting fathers, preparing themselves for their own big jump. It was published in 1916, right in the middle of the suffrage movement. A not-so-subtle story of a woman’s empowerment by way of education and independence. Subversive, subversive! I love subverting culture. :) Look at that deceptively innocent cover! And what’s more, the way it looks inside the cover is this: Fannie Heaslip Lea was actually Fannie Heaslip Agee. The book is dedicated to James J. Lea, presumably her husband, but it’s copyrighted under her own name, Agee. Sounds to me like the publishing company felt they needed to change her name on the cover to her husband’s name so it would sell. Rather like the whole “Hey, you wrote this book but I’m a man and you’re a woman so let’s put my name on the cover in front of yours and say we cowrote it, otherwise it will never sell” concept, rather like the culture of women writers (George Eliot, anyone?) forced to work under cover as a man in order to be published, or even to remain completely anonymous. So the cover says Lea. But she was actually Agee. Hmmm, sounds like a Lucy Stoner to me! :)

Anyway, you can read the whole thing here, if you like!

EDIT: Merci, Michael, for the info. :) I’ve been meaning to look her up, haven’t gotten around to it yet. Haha, I like it even better this way, with her own personal name stamped right on the cover..

chloe malone

Smiles all ’round!

“Aunt Fran, do you think I’ll ever have what the magazines call a lure?”

“You’ve got the best of all qualities! You are completely yourself.”