Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke on the 15th anniversary of the International Conference of Population and Development, reminding us all, choice is not just one issue. (More quotes from her at http://feministing.com/)

Here is what I think– totally obvious– but maybe not: reproductive rights do not exist in isoaltion. They have everything to do with women’s economic and political power, women’s access to education and health care, women’s status in societies, and women’s abilities to take care of themselves and their children.

Years ago, Professor Jean Schroedel of Claremont College came out with a survey examining the relationship between state abortion laws and spending on children. Her research revealed that the states that most severely limit abortion are the same ones that spend the least on foster care, parents who adopt special needs children, and poor women with dependent children. States with strict abortion laws consistently accorded lower political, economic and social status to women. For example, Louisianna had some of the tougest abortion laws and spent $602 per child. Hawaii had some of the most liberal laws and spent $4,648 per child.

Schroedel’s finding suport the work of Nafis Sadik as Executive Director of the United Nations World poplaution Fund. Sadik was instrumental in turning the debate over how tolimit population growth into a campaign for womens’ rights. She is widely credited with bringing attention to the correclation between over population and the status of women (finally a more widely publicized correlation in the book: Half the Sky)  When women are educated, when they achieve ecomomic independence, when they have access to good health care, when they are valued in society for their intellect and their accomplishments, they have fewer babies.

Unfortunately, pro-life politicians still don’t get it. They don’t seem at all concerned with improving the status of women and benefiting the entire world. George Bush’s record as governor of Texas remains the classic model for Republican leadership on these issues. When Bush was Governor, Texas women had a higher than average chance of living in poverty, the state minimum wage, earned by he female dominated service workers and domestic workers industries was $3.35 per hour, totalling $6,700 annually for full time employment. The perecentage of women and children without health insurance was the second highest in the country. Bush made it more difficult for women to obtain abortions in times of crisis, but offered no preventative policy initiatives to reduce unintended pregnancy, no expansion of family planning or fundng services, no comprehensive sexuality education program and no insurance coverage for contraceptives.

Under his leaership, Texas had the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation.

Comapre that to France where mandatory sexuality education begins when students are 13. France’s teenage birthrate is approximately 6 times lower that the rate in the US; its teen abortion rate more than 2x lower, and overall AIDS rate, more than 3x lower.

Conservatives like to say,”The government that governs best, governs least.” What happened to this party? Now, they sound so much more like big government believers. Many Amercans wonder how they came to intrude so much into our private lives, legislating personal choices like whom who should sleep with or pray to.

The reason is because if politicians aren’t going to help to provide access to health care, contraception, STD prevention, access to child care and sex education, and economic autonomy there is nowhere to go but blame pregnancies on loose morals and loose women.  If Republicans acknowledge that women have reproductive rights, they’ll have to acknowledge that women have other rights as well: reasonable funding for family planning, a higher minum wage, insurance to cover contraceptives, real sex education and access to heath care.

Pro choice isn’t one issue and it isn’t one choice. Pro-choice means women have the choice to graduate from college, the choice to borrow money to start a business, the choice to get a good job with a fair wage, the choice not live in poverty and keep ther kids out of poverty. Choice means that women  get to be autonomous citizens, just like men do– with the power to determnine their own destinies.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was trying to tell the world– Don’t you get it? When women don’t have choice and healthcare and economic autonomy, the whole world suffers.

Rosalind Wiseman wrote the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, bringing a great deal of attention tothe previously more invisible problem of  female aggression in kids and cliques. Tina Fey helped to make the book into the movie, Mean Girls, starring Linsay Lohan. Now Rosalind has written a young adult novel which I am very excited to check out. I imagine– unlike Gossip Girl– it will have strong female role models and also be a great read. I will read it and rate it. Here’s the link

http://rosalindwiseman.com/publications/bgohm/

No! When willpeople stop assuming thin peeple are healthy and fat people are not healthy. Yes, there are many diseases associated with obesity but Regina Benjamin is not obese. Also, many thin people have unhealthy lifestyles: they can drink, smoke, not excercise, or be ill with less visible diseases. Please see my 2 posts on girls and food and this article on Salon.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/07/15/regina_benjamin/

I chickened out of applying for immersion programs when I was looking for a kindergarten for Lucy. The reason is because I am horrible at languages– I went to high school in France and still can’t speak French. In an immersion program, the parents have to be committed to learning the language, and I had to be honest with myself and admit, sadly, I was not. I wanted to be included in Lucy’s process of learning how to read.

In spite of my language phobia, Lucy has managed to learn Korean. She is in the General Education program of a school that also has a Korean Immersion Program. In the after school program which she attends twice a week, all the kids are put together. She absolutely loves hanging out with the immersion program kids and learning Korean. She sings in Korean, counts in Korean, and now is having a playdate with two girls who are visiting the school for a month from Korea. Though Lucy tells me she speaks Korean– and what do I know–  the teacher who runs the afterschool program told me Lucy and these two girls have “a wonderful non-verbal relationship.”

One amazing thing about books– obviously– is that they allow kids to travel to and learn about other countries. One of our favorites is called The Seven Chinese Sisters, about siblings who fight off a terrible dragon. It gets ***GGG*** rating.

For Christmas, I was given some money to do some home improvements. For a long time, my husband and I have wanted to make a window seat in one of the bay windows in our house. We were told the windows come down so low, so a traditional window seat would be too high and not be safe, but we  could build sort of a couch without furniture, like a Turkish style pillow arrangement that goes all along the windows in a semi-circle. To see what it would look like, we put  a lot of pillows and blankets there and called it a reading nook. The kids love it. Lucy has been reading to Alice all day. Maybe its just a new thing right now, and they’ll get over it, but it reminded me how kids love little spaces with special purposes. I think (I hope) having a designated reading nook in the house will help the kids with their reading.

My three all time favorite girl heroines in children’s books come from the classics. I named my first daughter Lucy after the brave, honest queen of Narnia from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; my second daughter is named after Alice from Alice in Wonderland fame. (I don’t like the name Dorothy much so I stuck with the classic trend and named my third daughter Rose. Anyone know a story about a Rose? If not, I may have to write one.) My girls don’t appreciate their names YET. The two older kids always have aliases they liked to be called or at least insist on being called in any stories I make up about them– right now Arania and Magnolia. I am super excited for the new Alice in Wonderland film. I hope it’s great. With Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, you can’t really go wrong, though I hope JD lets Alice remain the star and that the movie isn’t too scary for kids. I LOVED Burton’s Coraline but had to walk out b/c the kids were so freaked out.

So back to the girl triumverate: I remember as a sophomore in highschool learning about the phallic symbol in literature. My teacher was Miss Minton, and we were reading Rip van Winkle– he has a gun that didn’t go off (or something) and she explained the term, the class giggled, and after that, pointing out the symbology was was an easy A all through high school. Back then, I asked Miss Minton if there was a female equivalent in literature and she said no, there was no a literary term. Lucy’s wardrobe, Alice’s rabbit hole, and Dorothy’s funnel cloud all lead to magical worlds. I wonder if students today– highschool, college, and beyond–  learn anything different about female symbols and literature. Is there a term yet?

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz all get ***GGG***

A few days back, I posted what I tell my kids about Santa, asking if it’s Ok to lie to your kids– the gist of the post being “Now I believe that all these myths serve a brilliant purpose: a gentle way for kids to learn well-intended parents are not always reliable sources of truth.”

I didn’t write anything about Heaven, just put it in the title of my post, but got a lot of comments on the blog, email etc.

My six year old starting freaking out about death when she was three. She was crying in the night, “I don’t want to die!” Maybe because I had my second daughter around this time. I asked my doctor what to do and she asked me what I believed in and that just confused me further. My daughter was only three, I figured the most important thing was for her to feel safe and loved and that everything was okay. So I told her about Heaven, I told her about reincarnation, I named all the people who loved her, put their names into a song, stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

I guess what I feel about Heaven is essentially the same message I was trying to get across about Santa; kids are going to have to figure out stuff on their own eventually. No one knows for certain what happens after you die. Mortality is something all humans will grapple with as they get older but kids are not small adults; three years old is too young to grapple.

I heard there is a book by Maria Shriver for kids about death and also I know there are a couple about pets who die, one Bernestain bears about a dead fish. I’ll read them and rate them.

What do you tell your kids about heaven?

This comment on the earlier post from Kim:

What confuses me more is what to do about heaven. For some reason I feel stranger about perpetuating that story than Santa’s– I wonder if it’s because I’m less 100% sure heaven is a fairytale. Or because the context of confronting mortality (“But I don’t want to die!” my daughter said– yikes, I was totally unprepared to deal with that from a four year old, though I should have been) is so much more serious. But after telling my kid in a kind of wobbly way “Well, many people believe that when you die you go to a place called Heaven, where you get to be with everyone you love,” I felt much more conflicted and unsure about how to handle the conversation or whether I was doing teh right thing than I ever have felt about leaving milk, cookies, and raisins for Santa. Go figure…

I highly recommend two books ***GGG rating***  empowering for girls: Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic and Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic– the illustrations are beautiful, the text for each goddess is concise and fascinatng. There are many goddesses featured that I had never heard of: young and old, short hair, long hair, all ethnicities, good and bad. They are all described in cool and original ways, even ones I was familar with I learned new things about. Both my daughters sat turning the pages, interested enough to give me an hour time to make dinner without disturbance (I’m talking TV/Sponge Bob absorption level.) Here’s the Amazon link if you want to learn more (I need to learn how to do these links)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=goddesses+a+world+of+myth+and+magic&sprefix=Goddesses+a+world

Second recommedation, newly published: Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Yes, she is a princess but this book is a great example of successfully appropriating classic female imagery and narrative, making it wonderful and powerful.

Princesss Hyacinth has a flowery name but not a flowery look. As a brown haired, brown eyed girl myself, I always appreciate when the star of a kids book has my (and my middle daughter) not so typically princessy coloring. This story is also great to explain narrative style to kids because it begins: “Princess Hyacinth had a problem.” (I tell my kids every story has a problem because creating that problem helps them focus when they tell their own stories, which otherwise tend to go on and on and on.) Hyacinth has a magical power– her problem is she floats, so her parents keep her inside and weigh her down with a heavy crown (which shows kids being a princess isn’t so great after all.) She has a crush on a boy who flies a kite, but she’s not sure if he likes her or not. One day, she’s outside and sees a bunch of baloons. She takes off her clothes, except for her royal underwear, and the baloon guy lets her float up, holding on to her with a string. He loses his grip, and she is off– somersaulting and flying about, having a great time. But her parenst are very worried, no one can find her or get her down. Suddenly, she is tangled up in the boy’s kite, and he reels her in. After that, every day she goes out and floats and every evening, the boy she loves reels her in; then they go to the palace together and have tea and popcorn. I look at this as a perfect fantasy/ metaphor for love and marriage (and one that men have written about in various ways in grown up books and actually created in the real world for ages); Hyacinth gets to go out on her own, flying and having adventures, but knows the boy she loves truly understands and appreciates her unique magical power; will always be able to find her and bring her safely home.  Here’s the link to more info on Amazon.

When my six year old brought this book home today, I got chills. I have a vivid memory of reading it, actually learning to love to read with this book. I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma then. I was in first grade, just as my daughter is now. My teacher’s name was Miss Foote. She had very short hair which was radical for Oklahoma in the seventies. She was reading The Boxcar Children to the class but at a chapter a day, moving way to slow for me, so my mom bought me my own copy.

I only read the first two chapters with my daughters tonight, but I remember the illustrations so well: they are all in silouette. I can’t remember the story yet, but the pacing is perfect; my kids were riveted. I have no idea what my rating will be, but I hope high. Do you remember this book?