The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you'd use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.
For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.
For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects.
Breast-feeding does not belong in the realm of facts and hard numbers; it is much too intimate and elemental.
Every congresswoman surely endures the same strains that drive some of her male colleagues to have affairs: lots of travel, families far away, heady work that makes a domestic routine seem distant and boring. But the stakes are much higher for women, because they are still judged by a different standard.
Fixing things around the house was the last bastion of manliness. But now, even that is getting taken away. As women become more economically independent, they are starting to fix things around the house for themselves.
Because women have been marginalised, they're more likely to behave like immigrants and continue to push themselves forward in order to avoid falling through the cracks, but I don't think a happy ending comes from matriarchy.
We're so marriage-obsessed, we think that only married people are families.
There are always signs that a reign is ending, and they are usually spotted not in the king himself but in his court. In the inner circle, latent jealousies between advisers spill into open conflict, as they angrily debate who is to blame for the calamity, chewing over each other's past errors and pointing the finger at old and nascent enemies.
There is no 'natural' order, only the way things are.
If men can quilt and take over the kitchen, then women can pick up a wrench and fix a leaky pipe.
Transsexualism is far less common than homosexuality, and the research is in its infancy. Scattered studies have looked at brain activity, finger size, familial recurrence, and birth order.
The classic war movies of the post-Vietnam era have generally taken on grand, philosophical themes: the meaninglessness of war, the grinding down of man by the machine - the machine being war itself, represented by someone like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in 'Full Metal Jacket,' the sadistic marine who turns his boys into instruments of death.
I grew up with a pretty tough mom. She was a self-appointed neighborhood watchdog, and if she saw that any of the local boys were up to no good, she would scold them on the spot. Although she is only 5 feet 2, she was famous in our neighborhood for intimidating men three times her size and getting them to do the right thing.
Studies show that recipients of Section 8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods.
