By Dana Goldstein
The New Republic

Candidate is trying to mount a feminist challenge to Hillary.
For Barack Obama, it has all come down to the mommies.

Hillary Clinton’s commanding lead among Democratic women – as high as 20 points in some nationwide polls – has long been cited as a strength Obama can’t overcome. A November Zogby poll found that nationwide, Clinton’s 11 percent advantage over Obama was due entirely to her 18 percent lead among women.

But in recent weeks, Obama brought female voters into his column as he pulled even with Clinton in the early primary states. The Des Moines Register’s December 1 Iowa poll showed Obama not only winning the overall race by a narrow margin, but for the first time beating Clinton among women, 31 to 26 percent. As the air of inevitability around Clinton vanishes, so does her lock on female voters. And the Obama campaign is trying to lock down his new supporters with a very special appeal to the peacenik earth mother it apparently believes is lurking within every woman (or at least every Democratic primary voter).

A few weeks before Oprah Tour ’07, the Obama campaign rolled out a 19-minute web documentary on “why women across the nation are supporting Barack Obama for president.” It features a bevy of babies gurgling happily to the strains of folk rock. And with babies, of course, come mommies. Mommies supervising in the park, cutting their children’s food up into tiny squares, and generally worrying about stuff. “Ever since I gave birth to my son, which was two and a half years ago, I have felt this, like, my heart ripped open to the world,” says a choked-up Gabrielle Grossman, a stay-at-home mom and Obama supporter from Exeter, New Hampshire. “I want to create a world that’s safe for my son and has harmony rather than sadness and poverty and grief and fear.”

Lord help us if the right wing decides to use this video – it’s almost a parody of Democrats as the Mommy Party. We meet Obama campaign COO Betsy Myers as she prepares dinner for her little girl. After all, there’s lots of time for those home-cooked meals on the trail! “Women have a guilt gene that men don’t have,” Myers says. “We’re the ones who handle the school, and the days off, and the doctor’s appointments.”

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Before you open the link and read the story, see if you can guess in which country migrant workers where chained, beaten, and forced into debt.

Clayton Seufert, Charleston

By Kendall Anderson
Minnesota Women’s Press

Founded in the late ’60s, the academic discipline of women’s studies has now expanded to include gender and sexuality studies as well as racism, environmental equity and peace studies. With all these changes … is women’s studies still relevant?

Boy have we come a long way baby (and girl do we have a long way to go).

That’s what many scholars and graduates think about women’s studies, the multidisciplinary field that sprang from the women’s movement of the 1960s. Founded and nurtured amid social activism and rampant gender discrimination in the late 1960s, women’s studies programs are now offered at more than 700 U.S. colleges and universities. The discipline’s success has also brought challenges, among them the everlasting question of relevance. There is a lack of knowledge among some students about the discipline, scholars say.

“Female students today have so many opportunities: Their mothers work, they’ve seen female senators and maybe, soon, a female president, so they think the women’s movement is done,” said Prof. Joanne Cavallaro, chair of women’s studies at the College of St. Catherine. She pointed out that though white middle-class American women have more opportunities, “If you look at the statistics around the world on women, that’s obviously not true.”

Nearly four decades after it was founded, women’s studies is undergoing a kind of redefinition, said Jacquelyn N. Zita, an associate professor in women’s studies and former department chair at the University of Minnesota. Along with proving the field’s relevance to students who sometimes lack historical perspective, Zita and others work to keep society at large educated about what a feminist lens can bring to our complex issues of the day. Both goals must be accomplished at the same time women’s studies leaders protect their programs and grow their historically low funding in an increasingly competitive academic world.

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By Cristina Page

The Spears family can’t be shocked by much these days, not with Britney in every tabloid. Still the recent news seemed to unsettle them. Their 16-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn is pregnant. And while no bad news is unprofitable for the Spears (it is rumored Jamie Lynn, a TV star in her own right, was paid one million dollars to break the news in OK! Magazine), this particular note of fame does appear to have taken the family aback. (“I was in shock. I mean, this is my 16-year-old baby,” her mother told OK!) It seems that no matter how well-to-do, (or bizarre) the family, it’s always a tragedy to have one’s child’s adolescence taken away by pregnancy. While Jamie Lynn Spears is not your average teen, her situation is becoming a more common experience for many girls of her generation: premature parenthood.

A Center for Disease Control (CDC) report released this month reveals that in 2006 there was a dramatic rise in teen births among 15 to 19 year olds in the United States bringing to a grinding halt a steady 14-year decline. In fact, Jamie Lynn’s situation exemplifies a reversal of many positive trends that began in the 1990s. Specifically there was a steep drop in abortion and unwanted pregnancy rates. During this period even sexual activity among high school students declined significantly. And those teens who were having sex — as would an average of half of them would before graduating high school – were more likely to use protection.

Now these gains are slowing or reversing. Sadly, these reversals seemed inevitable. After all, since 2000 we have turned away from using every strategy that the previous decade proved effective.

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