History > 2008 > USA > Women (I)

Women Are Now Equal

as Victims of Poor Economy

July 22, 2008
The New York Times
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.

They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate.

Indeed, for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.

“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage.

Ms. Samson knows she will have to get another job at some point. She and her husband still have a teenage daughter to put through college, and his income as a truck driver is not enough. So Ms. Samson, now receiving unemployment benefits, is going to college full time — leaving the work force for more than two years — hoping that a bachelor’s degree will enable her to earn at least her old wage of $20 an hour.

“A lot of women I know, all they did was work at the Maytag factory,” said Ms. Samson, who joined Maytag’s assembly line 11 years ago. “They can’t find another job like it and they deal with this loss by dropping out.”

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

“Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.”

The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending.

The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenage children and those with children under 6, and among white women and black.

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

“A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”

The biggest retreat has been in manufacturing, where more than one million women have disappeared from payrolls since 2001. Like men, many have not returned to jobs in other sectors.

Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuing new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said.

Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the key 25-to-54 age group. Just the opposite, the median pay — the point where half make more and half less — has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The similar wage for men today is two dollars more.)

Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long a stretch — and because this is a new experience for them, “women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts.

Joyce Call, 39, of Howell, Mich., near Detroit, certainly fits that description. She took an accounting job in January 2006 at Forming Technologies, which supplies plastic to auto companies.

The pay, $14 an hour — more than $25,000 a year — was acceptable, she said, but not the raises, which came to only 28 cents an hour over two years, or the Christmas bonus: $150 the first year and nothing the second.

“I was treated poorly,” she said, explaining her departure.

For the moment, Ms. Call is home-schooling one of her two sons, falling back on her husband’s $70,000 income as a plumber, and looking for another job, to return to a work force she has seldom left since finishing high school in 1988.

“People are just not hiring in Michigan,” she said. What’s more, she is reluctant because of the high cost of gasoline to commute more than an hour each way to the next job. “It would be a tough decision to accept a job that required me to go farther,” she said, adding that she and her husband were cutting back on discretionary spending until she is employed again.

What helped drive up the percentage of women in the work force were the thousands who came off welfare and took jobs in the 1990s, pushed to do so by the welfare-to-work legislation. A strong economy eased the way. So did tax credits and more subsidized child care. Now as the economy weakens and employers shrink their payrolls, many of these women struggle to find work.

Lisa Craig, 42, is among them. Raising three sons in her native Chicago, she had worked only occasionally since high school and started receiving welfare benefits in 1993. For the next seven years she took courses in office skills, was a volunteer in a day care center and served for a while as an unpaid intern for a college vice president.

And then in 2000 she went to work. For most of that year she earned $10 an hour as a salesclerk at a duty-free shop at O’Hare Airport, selling luxury items, but left the job to move to Milwaukee with her children to be near her sister.

“I was in a bad marriage,” she said, “and I was getting a divorce.”

Over the last eight years in Milwaukee she has worked only sporadically although, as she puts it, she has applied for hundreds of jobs, struggling to supplement a $628-a-month welfare check that goes almost entirely to rent, plus $500 a month in food vouchers. The longest tenure, 11 months, was as a salesclerk earning $7.75 an hour at a Goodwill Industries clothing store.

She lost that job last November, but is volunteering at the Milwaukee office of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, hoping to draw a modest salary soon as a community intern.

Ms. Samson, the former Maytag worker, says she can afford not to work because she qualified under the terms of the plant closing for two years of unemployment benefits as long as she is a full-time student. She lost health insurance but shifted to her husband’s policy.

His $40,000 income as a truck driver and her $360 a week in jobless benefits gets them by while she takes an accelerated program at a William Penn University campus near her home. Graduation is scheduled for January 2010.

“If I were a single parent or did not have benefits,” Ms. Samson said, “I would have had to find a job. I could not have gone back to school to get my degree and the promise it holds of a better job.”

That for Ms. Samson is a good reason to drop out. Just working, which she has done nearly all of her adult life, is unappealing, she says. Even interior design, for which she once earned an associate’s degree, does not excite her anymore, she says, mainly because people can no longer afford to fix up their homes.

“A business degree will put me in a position to work for any company,” Ms. Samson said, “and put me in a position to work up into a well-paid human resources job.”

Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy, NYT, 22.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/business/22jobs.html

Commanding a Role for Women

in the Military

June 30, 2008
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody has delighted in leaping through the doors of military planes and plunging into the night with a parachute on her back.

A master parachutist and a former battalion commander, General Dunwoody handled logistics for the 82nd Airborne Division in Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war. As a three-star general, she has flown to Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure the steady flow of ammunition, tanks and fuel to the troops.

But one of the biggest joys of her 33-year military career has been jumping out of airplanes and into roles previously unimaginable to generations of women in the Army. Last week, President Bush asked General Dunwoody to take over a new Army command as a four-star general. If confirmed by the Senate, she will become the first woman in the armed services to achieve that rank.

In her new role, General Dunwoody, 55, would lead the Materiel Command of the Army, which supplies soldiers with military hardware, repairs armored vehicles and sustains combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her quiet, determined climb into the Army’s upper echelon highlights both the widening role that women are playing in the armed forces and the difficulties they encounter in reaching the top.

“I grew up in a family that didn’t know what glass ceilings were,” General Dunwoody said in a statement. She declined to comment for this article, saying through an Army spokeswoman that she preferred to wait until after her Senate confirmation hearing. Senate Democrats said a hearing date had not been scheduled.

General Dunwoody’s brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather all graduated from West Point. Her father, Harold H. Dunwoody, and great-grandfather, Henry Harrison Chase Dunwoody, served as one-star generals, her relatives say. Her older sister, Susan Schoeck, was the third woman in the Army to be a helicopter pilot. And her niece, Jennifer Schoeck, is a fighter pilot who has flown missions in Afghanistan.

Today, women make up about 14 percent of the 1.4 million people on active duty in the military. More than 100 women have died in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the number of women at the very top, while growing, remains small. In the Army, where women make up 14 percent of active duty personnel, they account for about 5 percent of the generals, according to Lt. Col. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman. There are 15 one-star generals, three two-star generals and two three-star generals, including General Dunwoody.

Friends say that General Dunwoody, who specializes in logistics and is married to Craig Brotchie, a retired Air Force colonel, has chafed over the years at those who questioned her abilities or marveled at her accomplishments.

“Her issue is, when are people going to stop being surprised?” said Jeanette Edmunds, 55, a retired major general who has known General Dunwoody since the two attended officer training in the 1970s.

“You’re not out there thinking, ‘Am I good enough?’ ” General Edmunds said. “You don’t think, ‘I’m going to be the first this or that.’ You think, ‘This is cool. People think I’ve done good work.’ ”

Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the former American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan who retired this month, agreed. He described General Dunwoody as “remarkable” and praised her leadership skills and creative thinking, pointing to innovative strategies she developed to support soldiers in the rugged terrain in Afghanistan.

“She has been in and out of both theaters, and she knows what we’re up against,” said General McNeill, describing her work in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s really unfortunate that most of the focus will be on her gender.”

But for many military women, General Dunwoody’s nomination is something to be celebrated, precisely because she has pierced what many describe as the “brass ceiling.”

Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, who in 1997 became the first woman in the Army to reach the rank of three-star general and is now retired, said she felt giddy when she heard the news.

“I was twirling and throwing my hat in the air,” she said. “It shows people that the leaders in the Army think it’s important to pick the best qualified, not just the men.”

General Dunwoody, who lived in Germany and Belgium when she was growing up, joined the Army after graduating from the State University of New York at Cortland with a degree in physical education in 1975.

In recent years, she has preferred to speak publicly about the opportunities for women in the Army as opposed to the difficulties they face.

“This nomination,” she said in her statement, “only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career: that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform.”

But earlier in her career, General Dunwoody talked frankly about her struggles to make her mark in the male-dominated military. “It was like coming into the Dark Ages,” she said in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. She was describing her initial experiences as an officer with the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, N.C., in the late 1980s.

“Some senior officers perceived that their bosses would think less favorably of them if they allowed me to be assigned to the division in a critical position,” she said.

When she was a major at Fort Bragg, her superiors assigned her to account for the division’s equipment, including trucks, weapons and parachutes, a job normally given to low-ranking captains.

She said her assignments improved when her supervisors became familiar with her work. Her colleagues recall that General Dunwoody, who competed in gymnastics and tennis in college, also impressed her peers with her fierce athleticism. (Even today, she runs regularly, sails and plays tennis.)

“She impressed a lot of people in that environment, a high-density male environment, a high-testosterone environment,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former military commander in Afghanistan who worked with her at Fort Bragg and is now retired.

Her résumé soon listed a string of notable firsts. In 1992, she became the first woman to be battalion commander for the 82nd Airborne Division. In 2000, she became the first woman to be a general at Fort Bragg.

In 2004, she became the first woman to be commander at the Combined Arms Support Command of the Army at Fort Lee, Va.

Her brother, Harold H. Dunwoody Jr., said she loved handling logistics for soldiers in the field, perhaps because she grew up watching from afar as her father served in Vietnam. “I think supporting the troops is what she really enjoys doing most,” he said.

That job got more difficult after the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Defense logistics officers struggled to overcome shortages of armor, lithium batteries and tires in the early days of those conflicts, the Government Accountability Office reported.

Last year, General Dunwoody, who became the Army’s senior logistician in 2005, acknowledged in an interview with Inside the Army that the service was struggling to maintain and repair blast-proof trucks because they had so many different models. She became the deputy commanding general of the Materiel Command this month.

“Over time they’ve made improvements,” William M. Solis, who analyzes military issues for the Government Accountability Office, said of the Army’s logistics efforts. “But it’s a huge endeavor.”

If she harbors any doubts about assuming her new rank or her new duties, General Dunwoody does not let them show, her friends say. In her new role, they expect that she will do what she has always done — take a deep breath and take the plunge.

“You can live a humdrum, everyday life or live it for all it’s worth,” General Edmunds said. “She lives it to the fullest.”

    Commanding a Role for Women in the Military, NYT, 30.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washington/30general.html

Yahoo Launches

Site Focused on Women

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 31, 2008
Filed at 11:06 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. on Monday launched a site for women between ages 25 and 54, calling it a key demographic underserved by current Yahoo properties.

The site, Shine, is aimed largely at giving the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households. Yahoo said advertisers in consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals have requested more ways to reach those consumers.

Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles, said internal research also shows women are looking for a site to combine various content and communications tools.

''These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,'' she said. ''They didn't feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them -- as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.''

Yahoo is entering a market already served by Glam Media Inc. and iVillage, a unit of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal. It is Yahoo's first site aimed at a single demographic, although other Yahoo sites like Finance and Sports already draw specific audiences.

With Shine, Yahoo plans to expand its offerings in parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

Shine likely will replace the existing Food site over time, although Yahoo plans to keep its Health site operating to serve men and women of other age groups.

Yahoo is working with media companies like Hearst Communications Inc. and Rodale Inc. to develop Shine-exclusive content. Hearst publishes Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and other magazines aimed at women, while Rodale publishes a range of magazines on sports and recreation, including Women's Health.

Yahoo also has hired a team of editors to produce original material and to seek out items of interest from elsewhere in Yahoo.

Unlike most other Yahoo sites, Shine will be presented in a blog form, with newest items on top and commentary from an editor.

------

On the Net:

Yahoo Shine: http://shine.yahoo.com/

    Yahoo Launches Site Focused on Women, NYT, 31.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Yahoo-Women.html

Corner of Finance

Where Women Are Climbing

March 22, 2008
The New York Times
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

Any growth in the ranks of women at the highest reaches of corporate America tends to be measured in small increments, particularly in the so-called C-suite jobs like chief executive and chief operating officer.

There has, however, been a noteworthy jump in one corner of the business world: chief investment officers who handle billions of dollars for big university endowments and private foundations, which have been particularly aggressive in moving into nontraditional asset classes like hedge funds and real estate.

Women now manage 10 of the 50 largest endowments and foundations — or 20 percent — compared with 4 a decade ago, and oversee a combined $60.6 billion.

In the nonprofit world, the Ford Foundation, for example, has an endowment of $13.5 billion run by Linda Strumpf. D. Ellen Shuman oversees a $3 billion endowment for the Carnegie Corporation. Other women manage roughly $6.5 billion each for the MacArthur Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

To be sure, this universe is small, and comparisons are imperfect because of the sizes of various surveys. But Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that tracks the ranks of women in business, found that 15 percent of corporate officer and board positions were held by women in 2007.

Still, women control only 3 percent of the roughly $1.9 trillion invested in hedge funds, according to data compiled by Susan Solovay, whose Pomegranate Capital invests in funds run only by women.

Women are newer to the university endowment world — three of the five female investment officers were appointed within the last three years. Evaluating their performance is therefore difficult because they inherit investment strategies that require time to change.

But they all outperformed the median annual return of 17.5 percent for university endowments, as measured by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. However, they underperformed the 21.3 percent return for endowments over $1 billion for the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Foundation results are harder to compare because their fiscal years vary. However, at least two foundations run by women outperformed the 21.3 percent benchmark for universities in that same time period.

Why are they gravitating to the field?

A number of female chief investment officers said that they were drawn to the opportunity to be measured purely on performance, as well as a sense of mission and greater flexibility in their personal lives.

“Your reward is not just making rich people richer,” said Alice Handy, who ran the University of Virginia endowment for 29 years before starting an investment company to handle smaller endowments. She recalled that in 2000, her funds generated strong enough returns that the school could provide financial aid to first-year students without requiring them to take out loans. “It was a really happy event.”

Flexible schedules also appeal to many women who are raising children. Their role at endowments is to select investment managers, giving them a measure of control over their travel schedules.

“People who are selling services are at the beck and call of their clients,” said Rosalie Wolf, who ran the Rockefeller Foundation for six years and now heads Botanica, an investment advisory firm. “They have to be on the road convincing people to buy and tolerating frequent rejection. It is a more hectic life.”

Others say more women are in such jobs simply because there are a greater number of candidates. “More women are going to business school and more women are getting C.F.A.’s,” said Hank Higdon, who runs an executive search firm.

And there are more positions for money managers at nonprofit groups, family offices and funds that invest in hedge funds. “There is a bull market for chief investment officers because of the amounts of money around,” said Rebecca W. Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts. “People are creating new foundations and new charitable vehicles on an almost daily basis.”

Not everyone sees real progress, however. “The good news is that there are more women, we are managing large pools of capital, and we are more visible, but the bad news is that there are still not that many of us,” said Kathryn Crecelius, who became Johns Hopkins’ first chief investment officer in 2005.

Susan E. Manske, who heads the $6.5 billion MacArthur Foundation, had overseen Boeing’s $46 billion pension fund when a headhunter called her about MacArthur. “I love investing,” she said. “This married my interest with working in a culture of philanthropy.”

Ms. Manske said that foundations and endowments generally have stronger returns because they invest in a wider variety of asset classes. Indeed, many institutional investors consider foundations and endowments to be the most successful long-term investors, noted Deirdre Nectow, director for business development at Cambridge Associates, a consultant to nonprofit groups.

So far only a handful of women have used their track records in the nonprofit field to raise money and start ventures of their own, but those numbers may grow.

Five years ago, Ms. Handy began Investure, a firm that now invests $6.5 billion from small endowments. Last year, Stephanie Lynch of the Duke Endowment joined with two partners to start a similar business. And Anne Casscells, who had been chief investment officer at the Stanford Management Company, left in 2001 to become managing director of Aetos Capital, a money management firm.

Even within the nonprofit world, there are more investment manager positions because more institutions, like Carnegie, are setting up in-house management teams.

Managing that money was once typically the job of investment committees. But as the sums and investment choices have grown, committees have begun handing off that responsibility.

For all its perceived advantages, the nonprofit world comes with an important trade-off: the pay is lower than for similar work on Wall Street. In 2006, according to foundation records, Ms. Shuman earned $711,582 and Ms. Strumpf earned $986,406.

“The endowments generally pay more than the foundations because more of the investment committee members are men, and there are a lot of alumni who understand the business world,” said Ms. Wolf of Botanica, the investment advisory firm. “But they don’t make as much as if they were running an investment portfolio at Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. The range is enormous. Wall Street could pay three to five times as much. There is no reason to expect that gap to close dramatically. They want to keep their costs down, and they are not used to business levels of compensation.”

Ms. Shuman, who was previously director of investments for the real estate portion of the Yale Endowment, is particularly drawn to the foundation world because she finds it very collegial — even compared with university endowments. “Schools are just fundamentally more competitive,” she said. “Let’s face it, the schools are competing for faculty and students. In the foundation world, we don’t have to bash each other to do that.”

Ms. Shuman likes the public service component of her work. “I have an aptitude for math, but I thought I might do something in the public sector,” she said. “I was interested in higher education, and my first job was doing the budget for Yale, so I ended up across the hall from the Yale Endowment offices. I could have gone to Wall Street, but it just wasn’t me.”

Kristin A. Gilbertson, who worked at the World Bank and the Stanford Endowment before joining the University of Pennsylvania, said she turned down jobs in the for-profit sector. “I get calls all the time for higher-paying jobs,” she said. “I love what I do.” She dismisses the idea that her workdays are shorter than those of her counterparts on Wall Street. “I work harder than most hedge fund managers who manage money for us,” she said.

Ms. Shuman’s job is to determine the asset allocation for the $3 billion endowment, and then get approval from the investment committee. “We are looking at things that are out of favor because that is how you make money.”

Longer horizons help, too. “A lot of times in our world the best thing is to do nothing and be patient,” Ms. Shuman said. “The guys who say when a crisis hits, you have to have a plan of action — why? A lot of times, people want to sell at the bottom.”

A similar question is being asked about commitments to women in the chief investment office.

“The interesting question,” said Ms. Crecelius of Johns Hopkins, “is whether in the next couple of years, in what looks to be difficult markets, will the institutions stick with the women and will we recruit more women?”

    Corner of Finance Where Women Are Climbing, NYT, 22.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/business/22women.html

Why Do the Wives Stand There,

Next to Their Men?

March 12, 2008
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

Perhaps as vivid as the lurid details of what the authorities have called Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s involvement in a high-end prostitution ring was the lingering image of the woman who was most personally affected by the revelation.

As Governor Spitzer apologized on Monday — then again on Wednesday morning in Midtown, when he announced his resignation — Silda Wall Spitzer, his wife of more than 20 years and the mother of their three daughters, stood before a bank of cameras. Her presence at the side of a faltering politician, caught up in a sex scandal, was merely the latest in a lengthening list of what might be called stand-by-my-man appearances.

They stretch back at least as far as 1987, when Lee Hart, the wife of the Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart, flew into New Hampshire during the campaign to profess her love amid reports of an extramarital relationship with Donna Rice. Last summer, Suzanne Craig held hands with her husband, Senator Larry Craig, under a brilliant Idaho sun as he denied reports of soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom.

On Tuesday, some political consultants and academics explained Ms. Wall Spitzer’s show of support as a way to prevent even more hounding by the news media and perhaps salvage his governorship. “Quite frankly, if she’s not standing there, the first question everyone will have is: ‘Why isn’t she standing there?’ ” said one seasoned New York political consultant who asked not to be identified. “It punts the question of a divorce to a different day.”

But workplaces and Web sites were nonetheless riveted by the plight of Ms. Wall Spitzer, as many people lamented what they saw as the growing practice of using a wounded spouse for political cover. Some took aim at Governor Spitzer, while others directed their ire at Ms. Wall Spitzer, who was his classmate at Harvard Law School.

“I think he did enough harm to his wife and children that he didn’t need to take her out there with him,” said Kathleen Carroll, a 39-year-old office manager in Manhattan, in a telephone interview. “If he was man enough to order a woman as if he were ordering a sandwich off a deli menu, he should have been man enough to go out there and take it on his own.”

Many had theories about why Ms. Wall Spitzer faced reporters with her husband. Was it a show of strength for the sake of their three teenage daughters, or a calculated political strategy? Was it her decision or his?

Anna Harvey, a professor of politics at New York University, said politicians often try to paint allegations of sexual misconduct as a family matter. “What you’re trying to do when you have your spouse accompany you in a public forum like that is you’re trying to frame the issue as a private one,” she said.

She cited the classic example of such political theater — the 1992 “60 Minutes” interview with Bill Clinton, then seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trying to tamp down escalating rumors of an affair between Mr. Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, Mrs. Clinton, nestled on a sofa with her husband, said, “You know I’m not sitting here — some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”

“She was doing precisely that,” Professor Harvey said. “She said, ‘This is our marriage and our business,’ and he bounced back and he didn’t win New Hampshire but he won the nomination. In that case, there were no allegations of laws being broken. It was simple marital infidelity. I think that’s not what we’re dealing with here.”

Some political consultants and scholars said Ms. Wall Spitzer’s appearance hit such a nerve not only because of the tawdriness of the accusations but because of her obvious devastation. Unlike the blank demeanors of other aggrieved political spouses, Ms. Wall Spitzer, her eyes alternately downcast or glancing at her husband, had the drained, dazed look of someone in mourning.

In search of expert commentary, television news stations naturally zoomed in on one such spouse, Dina Matos McGreevey. Ms. Matos McGreevey, author of “Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage,” stood next to her husband, Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, at a news conference in 2004 in which he disclosed that he was gay and announced his resignation.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Ms. Matos McGreevey said that two hours before that news conference, Governor McGreevey asked her to consider joining him at the lectern. She told him she would think about it, she said, and then quickly consulted her therapist.

“It was an instinct to be there,” she said. “Despite the fact that he’s humiliated you and caused you excruciating pain, this was a man I married, a man I loved, and your feelings don’t evaporate overnight. And then I thought about my daughter, and I didn’t want her 10 or 15 years down the line to ask me, ‘Mommy, this was the most difficult point in Daddy’s life, and why weren’t you there to support him?’ ”

Ms. Matos McGreevey said she did not regret her decision to appear with her husband as he proclaimed himself “a gay American,” even though she was later faulted. “I have been criticized for going out there, and people have said: ‘Why did you do it? How could you stand there with a smile?’ ” she said. “But people who know me know that that was not a smile. That was my attempt to keep my composure.”

Some of the Internet chatter on Tuesday suggested that Ms. Wall Spitzer’s silent presence at her husband’s side represented a dark day for feminism, with one writer railing, “Someone needs to tell his wife that ‘stand by your man’ does not apply here!!! ... She needs to have some pride.”

But others turned the feminist argument on its head, detecting ample sexism in the notion that Ms. Wall Spitzer was dragged to the podium against her wishes.

“To me, a lot of this commentary seems patronizing to her,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a professor of law at Columbia University and director of its Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic. “She might have felt this was the best strategy in a terrible situation for protecting her children or her own reputation. We have no basis for assuming that she’s a mere pawn here.”

    Why Do the Wives Stand There, Next to Their Men?, NYT, 12.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/nyregion/12wife.html

Michelle Obama Takes to the Trail

February 14, 2008
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

CHICAGO — There is no confusing Michelle Obama for her husband on the campaign trail.

Asked at the Democratic debate in Los Angeles whether he would pick Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as a vice-presidential running mate, Senator Barack Obama said she “would be on anybody’s short list.”

But when a television interviewer asked Mrs. Obama last week whether she would support Mrs. Clinton, if she won the nomination, Mrs. Obama was less generous.

“I’d have to think about that,” Mrs. Obama said on “Good Morning America” on ABC. “I’d have to think about — policies, her approach, her tone.”

Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy and sometimes sarcastic, Michelle Obama is playing a pivotal role in her husband’s campaign as it builds on a series of successes, including a sweep on Tuesday of contests in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Her personal style — forthright, comfortable in the trenches, and often more blunt than Mr. Obama — plays well with a broad swath of the electorate and has given the campaign a steelier edge while allowing Mr. Obama to stay largely above it all.

“I am trying to be as authentically me as I can be,” Mrs. Obama said in an interview. “My statements are coming from my experiences and my observations and my frustrations.”

Mrs. Obama says she dislikes politics — she insists there will be no second run for the presidency if her husband falls short this time — but relishes a good fight, the competition of it all.

In the beginning, she had significant questions about an Obama candidacy. She pressed advisers for a blueprint of how the campaign would raise money and compete with Mrs. Clinton and other candidates. She gave her approval after seeing a concrete plan presented in strategy meetings in late 2006, all of which she attended.

Now she is involved in most major facets of campaign strategy, always a fierce protector of her husband’s image. While the Obamas seldom travel together — fanning out much as the Clintons do — Mrs. Obama is often in touch with key advisers and her message is shaped by the same strategists who advise her husband.

“The strategy is not to pigeonhole her to any one kind of audience,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close family friend who is a senior adviser to the Obama campaign.

Growing up in Chicago, her brother, Craig Robinson, recalls, Mrs. Obama did not like watching close basketball games, but would always watch blowouts to the end.

“She didn’t like the stress of watching,” said Mr. Robinson, the men’s basketball coach at Brown University. Thinking about the campaign for a moment, he added: “It’s much harder watching Barack in this race than watching my own team. It’s much harder to watch someone you love go through a close game.”

At almost six feet tall in heels, Mrs. Obama, 44, cuts an athletic and authoritative figure in her tailored pantsuits and skirts. A Harvard-educated lawyer who had been earning $212,000 a year as a hospital executive before she took leave on Jan. 1, she delivers rousing 40-minute speeches — surveying topics as far-ranging as the specific failings of the federal No Child Left Behind education act and problems with the military strategy in Iraq — without the aid of even a notecard.

A doting mother of two, Mrs. Obama has kept crowds waiting with telephone calls to her “little people” — daughters Sasha, 6, and Malia, 9.

But Mrs. Obama’s confident, commanding presence has its drawbacks. At an address last month for an African-American awards gala in Atlanta, some in attendance were left feeling that she had been condescending, preaching to a group of achievers about the need to achieve.

“Her speech was very long and inappropriate for that occasion,” said Vivian Creighton Bishop, a public official in Columbus, Ga., who supports Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Obama has also had to learn to tamp down her sometimes biting humor because it too often leaves Mr. Obama as the punch line. (It has been a long time since she has talked publicly about her husband of 15 years being smelly in the morning, as she told Glamour magazine, or forgetting to put away the butter.)

“What I’ve learned is that my humor doesn’t translate to print all the time,” she said in the interview. “But usually when I’m speaking to a group, people understand what I’m trying to say, they get the humor, they understand the sarcasm, they get the joke.”

Her audiences do laugh. Talking about how long it took her and Mr. Obama, 46, to pay off their student loans (they did so only in the last couple of years), she told a church audience in Cheraw, S.C., “I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund.” They cackled. She continued: “Then I heard Dick Cheney was supposed to be a relative! Thought we might be in for something here.”

On some occasions, Mrs. Obama’s straight talk has also made it necessary for the campaign to explain her remarks. In the case of “Good Morning America,” campaign officials pointed out that in an unbroadcast portion of the interview, Mrs. Obama later acknowledged that as a good Democrat, she would need to support Mrs. Clinton if she were the nominee.

Mrs. Obama’s nickname inside the campaign is “the closer” because she is skilled at persuading undecided voters to sign pledge cards. But as a smooth orator, she is also known as a connector, volunteering her own life lessons from working-class roots and discussing her confrontation with a culture of low expectations.

She has been transparent about more mundane things, too, like leaning on her mother for child care while she is on the road.

Mrs. Obama does not have a nanny, only her mother. “Thank God for Grandma!” Mrs. Obama says more than once on the campaign trail, adding that she “couldn’t breathe” if she thought her girls, who attend private school here in Chicago, were being neglected for the campaign.

“I spend more time worrying about how do I keep their lives on track in the midst of this?” she said in the interview. “Barack and I both do. How do we keep our traditions whole? Those are the day-to-day concerns.”

In a presidential campaign that has included discussions of race and gender, Mrs. Obama has a singular vantage point at the intersection of the two. As the advantage in some states has seesawed between Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and Mrs. Clinton, of New York, based in part on the votes of blacks and women, Mrs. Obama typically makes a plea for unity, even when race- or gender-based appeals might be expedient and easy.

That was the case when they packed the pews to hear her one Friday night last month in a modest Methodist church in Orangeburg, S.C.

“Oh, amen!” the participants cried out over the rise and fall of her voice, springing to their feet, howling their approval with hands lifted as if in praise.

It was the eve of the Democratic primary in South Carolina, and Mrs. Obama was urging the audience to the polls. But they were urging her on, too: “Come on now, tell it, sister!”

And so she did, focusing on the economic hardships facing many Americans: “What we have to understand in this race is that this is true regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of your gender,” she said to the mostly black audience. “This is the truth of living in America.”

Interviews with people who know Mrs. Obama say she chose, even as a young adult, to strive for the opportunities that were closed to previous generations.

Mrs. Obama grew up knowing, for instance, that her maternal grandfather, a carpenter, was squeezed out of the best jobs in Chicago because as a black man he was not allowed to join a union. But she said she had also been taught not to see race as a barrier, to look at the world in terms of what is possible, not the other way around.

“My parents told us time and time again, ‘Don’t tell us what you can’t do,’ ” she said. “ ‘And don’t worry about what can go wrong.’ ”

She talks on the campaign trail about high school advisers who tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because they thought her scores were not good enough. (She graduated with honors in sociology in 1985.)

She talks about college counselors who said similar things about her desire to go to Harvard Law, from which she graduated and went on to one of the top corporate firms in Chicago.

“I realized that gnawing sense of self doubt that lies within all of us is within our own heads,” she said in Atlanta. “The truth is we are more ready and more prepared than we even know. My own life is proof of that.”

Mrs. Obama’s father, Fraser Robinson, provided for the family of four on a city worker’s salary. Her mother, Marian Robinson, now 70, stayed home and allowed their two children only one hour of television a night.

Mrs. Obama and her brother were expected to fill their time with books, chess, sports — and, critically important they both said, dinnertime conversations with their parents.

The defending of ideas, the back-and-forth, the debates, they were an early in-home version of what Mrs. Obama has come to do, almost full-time now, for her husband.

At Harvard Law School, one professor recalled that Mrs. Obama was not one to mince words.

“Michelle was a student in my legal profession class in which I ask students how they would react to difficult ethical and professional challenges,” said the professor, David B. Wilkins. “Not surprisingly, many students shy away from putting themselves on the line in this way, preferring to hedge their bets or deploy technical arguments that seem to absolve them from the responsibilities of decision-making. Michelle had no need for such fig leaves. She always stated her position clearly and decisively.”

Mrs. Obama said her mother has been her No. 1 advocate and role model, even though their lives could not be more dissimilar.

“I remember Michelle telling me about a teacher complaining about her temper in elementary school,” said Verna L. Williams, a law professor in Cincinnati who has been a friend of Mrs. Obama since their days at Harvard. “She said her mom told the teacher: ‘Yeah, she’s got a temper. But we decided to keep her anyway!’ ”

Mrs. Obama is an organized and self-described “task master,” who has always been focused — so much so, that when she met Mr. Obama in 1989, when they were working at the same law firm in Chicago, she refused to go out on what Mr. Obama called “a proper date.”

“Eventually I wore her down,” he wrote in his memoir. During the summer when she met Mr. Obama, Mrs. Obama said she was influenced by his sense of purpose, and began to change her own career to add more service to others.

Martha L. Minow, a professor at Harvard Law School, did work with Mrs. Obama for a nonprofit educational group in Chicago. Dr. Minow’s father, Newton N. Minow, is senior counsel at Sidley Austin, the law firm where the Obamas met. Dr. Minow said she remembered hearing about the day Mr. Obama announced to her father that he would be leaving the firm to pursue public service.

“My dad was very supportive,” she said. “Then he said, ‘One more thing, I’m going to take Michelle with me.’ ”

And Mr. Obama did. Mrs. Obama left the firm, where she specialized in marketing and intellectual property, after two years and eventually founded the Chicago office of Public Allies, a national nonprofit leadership-training network for young adults.

After that, she gravitated toward the University of Chicago, whose campus is in her own South Side neighborhood. As a whole, the university has an often-tense relationship with the poorer surrounding area, and Mrs. Obama’s job, as vice president for community and external affairs at the university’s medical center, is to form partnerships between the two.

A recent project has focused on opening more neighborhood clinics to provide preventive care and take stress off the emergency room. Mrs. Obama earned a reputation as being equally tough on the hospital and the community in regard to their obligations to each other.

Now, she often describes her life to audiences in terms of beating the culture of low expectations that confronted “a little black girl” from the South Side.

“I wasn’t supposed to have my own successful career,” Mrs. Obama said in Atlanta. “They said my achievement must have been the result of racial preferences. And I am certainly not supposed to be standing here, maybe to become the next first lady of the United States.”

Asked about the role of first lady, Mrs. Obama said she saw it as a full-time job. But, she hastened to add, she reserved the right to change her mind if she gets there.

    Michelle Obama Takes to the Trail, NYT, 14.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/us/politics/14michelle.html

Quarter of U.S. women

suffer domestic violence:

CDC

Thu Feb 7, 2008
3:08pm EST
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About a quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday, with ongoing health problems that one activist likened to the effects of living in a war zone.

Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.

The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.

The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.

Many of these women have other long-term health risks and problems, the CDC said.

"It confirms ... that living in a dangerous and stressful environment has long-term health impacts. It's like living in a war zone," said Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an advocacy group.

More than 70,000 people in 16 U.S. states and two territories -- Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands -- responded to the CDC survey in 2005.

Black women were more likely to report domestic violence than whites or Hispanics, but it was most frequent among multiracial, American Indian and Alaska native women.

Women of all income and education levels suffer such abuse, although it was more frequent among the poorest and those who attended but did not graduate from college.

"Perhaps one of the factors at play here is the high prevalence of sexual violence on college campuses, and dating violence," Michele Black, a CDC epidemiologist who helped write the agency's report, said in a telephone interview.

Black said she could not say whether domestic violence rates were rising. The results were comparable with those of a 1995 government survey that found that 24.8 percent of women and 7.6 percent of men reported suffering domestic violence.

The CDC said women who suffer domestic violence are three times as likely to engage in risky sex and 70 percent more likely to drink heavily than other women.

They are also twice as likely to report that their activities are limited by physical, mental or emotional problems and 50 percent more likely to use a cane, wheelchair or other disability equipment, the CDC survey found.

These women also were 80 percent more likely to have a stroke, 70 percent more likely to have heart disease or arthritis and 60 percent more likely to have asthma.

Kiersten Stewart, director of public policy for the Family Violence Prevention Fund advocacy group, said the CDC figures broadly fit other assessments that about a quarter to a third of U.S. women experience domestic violence.

Stewart endorsed the CDC's call for doctors to ask women about possible domestic violence if they are showing signs of stress or other symptoms indicating possible violence.
 

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Alan Elsner)

Quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence: CDC, R, 7.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0737896320080207

Women’s Support for Clinton

Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism

January 10, 2008
The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR

If the race wasn’t about gender already, it certainly is now.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been running for president for nearly a year. But in the past week, women in Iowa mostly rejected her, a few days before women in New Hampshire embraced her. All over the country, viewers scrutinized coverage for signs of chauvinism in the race, and many said they found dismaying examples.

Even Democratic women with no intention of voting for Mrs. Clinton found themselves drawn into the debate and shaken by what briefly seemed like a humiliating end to the most promising female candidacy in American history.

The process seems to have changed a few minds, at least for now.

“I was really pained by the thought that her campaign really was over,” said Amy Rees, a stay-at-home mother in San Francisco who will vote in the California Democratic primary on Feb. 5. “I kept thinking that the truth is, a woman — even a woman of her unquestioned intelligence and preparedness — can’t get even a single primary win. It really stung.”

Ms. Rees had favored Senator Barack Obama of Illinois; now she is thinking of voting for Mrs. Clinton.

Until a few weeks ago, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, hardly seemed like someone in need of defending — from sexism or anything else. She was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was a Clinton. And as a former first lady, she was a complicated test case for female achievement.

By losing the first presidential contest, Mrs. Clinton may have succeeded in getting more women to see her as she presents herself: not a dominant figure of power, but a woman trying to break what she has called “the highest and hardest glass ceiling" in America.

“I do want Hillary Rodham Clinton to take the White House, but until she lost Iowa, I didn’t realize how much, or how much it had to do with her being a woman,” said Allison Smith-Estelle, 37, director of a program against domestic violence in Red Lodge, Mont.

What bothered them as much as the Iowa results, said several dozen women in states with coming primaries, was the gleeful reaction to her defeat and what seemed like unfair jabs in the final moments before the New Hampshire voting.

Michelle Six, 36, a lawyer and John Edwards supporter in Los Angeles, said she was horrified to hear Mr. Obama tell Mrs. Clinton she was “likable enough” in a Democratic debate on Saturday. Ms. Six said she found the line condescending, and an echo of other unkind remarks by other men about women over the years.

The likability question, initially raised by a moderator, “wouldn’t be coming up if she wasn’t a woman,” she said.

At work, Ms. Six said, she listened to male colleagues make fun of Mrs. Clinton for choking up at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. “She’s over,” one chortled, Ms. Six said.

With that, Mrs. Clinton “may just have earned my vote,” Ms. Six said, adding, “I don’t know if I was super-conscious” of the gender factor in the race before then.

In New Hampshire, two hecklers yelled at Mrs. Clinton to iron their shirts — stray comments that angered untold numbers of women after the incident was widely reported. And Mrs. Clinton is the only candidate whose critics complain about the pitch of her voice.

For many women, these moments are deeply personal. Though Sarah Kreps, 31, who is moving to New York, said she would vote for Mr. Obama, seeing Mrs. Clinton debate was a reminder of her time in the Air Force, and the discomfort of being the sole woman in a group of men. The criticisms of Mrs. Clinton’s voice took Ms. Rees back to the time her boss pushed the mute button on a conference call to tell her that her voice was too shrill.

Now that Mrs. Clinton has gone from a solid lead to a tie with Mr. Obama in the latest national Gallup poll, some voters are thinking back to incidents that they say now seem suspect to them: the debate in which Mr. Edwards critiqued the bright jacket Mrs. Clinton was wearing, or the one at which Mrs. Clinton was asked, by a woman, if she preferred diamonds or pearls.

Other women mentioned how they were shocked to see how the only female candidate was perceived by some voters. For Jodi Cohen, 31, a recruiter in Orange County, Calif., it was the relative who recently told her that he admired Bill Clinton but would not vote for his wife because she had stayed with her husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Priya Chaudhry, 31, a lawyer in New York and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton said she heard that criticism all the time. “They punish the woman who stood by him,” Ms. Chaudhry said, “but forgive the adulterer himself?” Some women said Mrs. Clinton’s teary moment, which many women said they found moving, seemed to bewilder skeptical husbands, sons and male colleagues.

“There’s probably not a working woman over 40 who hasn’t found herself in a similar situation, where her work performance is being questioned or challenged and she feels so strongly about her actions or vision that she wells up,” said Lisa Goff, 48, a freelance writer in Charlottesville, Va. “Hillary handled that moment the way we all hope to, by remaining articulate and not breaking into tears.”

Younger women, however, may look at Mrs. Clinton differently. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Democratic women split by age, with the older ones voting overwhelmingly for Mrs. Clinton, the younger ones for Mr. Obama.

In interviews, some Democratic women over 40, who said they had experienced stinging sexism at school and in the workplace, seemed to long for the election of a female president — they said Mrs. Clinton would fill the role just fine — as a grand moment of validation. But younger women, who have grown up in a world of greater parity, seemed less likely to allow gender to influence their vote.

In some cases, this split is playing out within families. Myra Dinnerstein, 73, a former professor of women’s studies at the University of Arizona, said Mrs. Clinton’s setbacks had saddened and angered her. “I used to tell my students that I would never live to see a woman president,” Ms. Dinnerstein said, “and now that there has been a golden opportunity, we are letting it slip away.”

A few hours later, after hearing about Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, Ms. Dinnerstein wrote a celebratory e-mail message: “Hurrah! I think women got as mad as I was, seeing Hillary trashed. I think they realized that ‘the gender thing’ exists.”

But Ms. Dinnerstein’s daughter, Julie Dinnerstein, 39, who works for a nonprofit feminist organization in New York, said she would vote for Mr. Obama in the Feb. 5 primary.

“Senator Clinton’s struggles are not my own, and they are not those of my generation of women,” the younger Ms. Dinnerstein said. “The idea of a woman being president just does not seem to be as powerful or as revolutionary to me as it does to feminists of my mother’s generation.”

But if Mrs. Clinton loses the nomination, would the younger Ms. Dinnerstein be sorry?

Yes, she conceded. “It will upset my mother.”

Women’s Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism, NYT, 11.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/us/politics/10women.html