Category Archives: Womens Herstory

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Farewell, Male Breadwinners

By Hanna Rosin

The male breadwinner is a dying breed. A Pew study out this week confirms his slow march toward extinction: Four out of ten American households with children have a mother who is the sole or primary breadwinner for the family, the highest share on record. And all trends for the future—men out of work and earning steadily less, women earning more college degrees, fewer couples with children getting married—point to us moving farther down this road.

From the broadest historical perspective, this is a radical reversal of a power dynamic that we believe has been around since the caveman days. But in its details, it doesn’t look so glorious. Old systems die hard, and it’s clear from the Pew numbers that Americans are still deeply uncomfortable about the changes and haven’t settled in anything like a happy new egalitarian paradise.

Americans are very conflicted, for example, between their materialism and their traditional family values. In the Pew study, two thirds say that the increasing numbers of working women has made it easier for families to live “comfortably,” but comfortable doesn’t translate into moral. Three quarters say that women working makes it harder for couples to raise children, and half say that children are better off if women are at home. That said, women are starting to like working full time. In the recent survey 32 percent of women say they want to work full time, up from 20 percent in only 2007.

There are some more signs that people are getting used to the changes: Just 28 percent of Americans agreed that it is “generally better for a marriage if the husband earns more than his wife.” But then other studies, summarized in this New York Times story, have shown that couples in which the wife earns more have higher rates of divorce, and that breadwinner wives overcompensate by being extra wifely at home, doing more housework or cooking more elaborate meals.

The worst part of the new trend, though, is the class divide. The female breadwinner looks very different depending on which social class she’s in. About 37 percent are women who make more than their husbands. They are more likely to be white, older and more educated, and their median income is $80,000. Single mothers on the other hand are younger, black or Hispanic and have a median income of $23,000.

The rise of the female breadwinner is obviously not a straightforward feminist triumph, but it shouldn’t be an occasion for nostalgia either. The old days aren’t coming back so we might as well stop pretending and evaluate the new characters as they are—the displaced men, the overworked single mothers, the guilty high earning mothers—and try and make it easier on them.

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This Story Could Save a Woman’s Life

For a split second, Helen Yee thought the guy who opened the passenger door of her car and slid in next to her was a neighbor.
Then she saw his gun.
The story of what happened next should be shared with every girl and woman you know. It might just save their lives.

Yee is co-founder of the American Institute of Alternative Medicine in Columbus, Ohio. She is 52 and, at 4 feet 11 inches, petite, but she’s strong from decades as a martial arts expert. Her training made all the difference when the armed man slid into the car seat next to her.

“It’s not all about kicking and punching,” Yee told me in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s about using your head.”

On Monday, Yee pulled into her driveway about 9:45 p.m., after rehearsing with the all-female band Wednesday Wine. She turned off her car, pulled the key from the ignition and clicked on the remote, opening all the doors so that she could retrieve her bass guitar from the back seat.

That’s when the young man slid in next to her. He wore a hoodie pulled over his head and a bandana tied across his face.

    “All I could see were his eyes and his gun,” she said. “I had that sunken feeling.”
    “I need you to drive,” he said.
    “What?” she said.
    “I just need you to drive,” he repeated.
    Yee looked at the gun and said, “OK,” but she continued to hold the key in her hand and refused to panic.
    “I knew I was not going anywhere with this guy,” she said. “I knew from my martial arts training you never do that.”
    Yee also knew she had to distract him. She turned to him and said, “Hey! I know you!”
    He recoiled. “You don’t know me.”
    “Yeah, I do,” she said. “You’re Darren’s friend.”

She made this up. She didn’t recognize him, nor did she know anyone named Darren. But she caught the guy off guard, which gave her precious seconds to figure out what to do next. Yee pretended to struggle to put the key in the ignition as her left hand reached for the door. She pushed it open and darted out, running and screaming, “Help! Help!” She never looked back. “I didn’t give myself a chance to see if he was following me,” she said. “I figured, if he was going to shoot me, he was going to shoot me. I was going to run and make as much noise as I could.”

A neighbor of Yee’s, firefighter Jim Amick, was already on the phone to police when she bolted out of her car. He was suspicious after looking out the window and watching a car park too far from the curb and its driver jogging toward Yee’s driveway. Police confirmed that Amick placed his call at 9:52 p.m.

“At first, I think they didn’t know whether to take me seriously,” Amick said. “I’m describing this suspicious character, and then all of a sudden, I’m saying, ‘Now there’s a woman running down the street, screaming for help.’ That they took seriously.”

Yee banged on one neighbor’s door. No answer. She continued to run and scream, banging on doors until she slid under an SUV parked in a neighbor’s driveway. She waited 20 seconds without moving. When she didn’t see her attacker’s feet, she pulled out her cellphone and started speed dialing. She reached her business partner and asked her to call 911.

Police cars were already on their way because of Amick’s call. They blocked off the street and surrounded the gunman’s car. When he returned to it, sans hoodie and gun, they arrested him. He is a suspect in several other robberies, as well. Within hours, news of Yee’s escape, covered by local TV stations, started popping up on Facebook.

I asked Yee what advice she’d give other women in a similar situation who don’t have self-defense training. She rattled off the list:

  • Stay calm. Your attacker wants you to panic.
  • Never agree to go with him to a remote location.
  • Don’t hesitate to lie. Telling the robber he looked familiar bought Yee crucial seconds.
  • Always keep your cellphone on your body, not in your purse.
  • Make as much noise as possible. If your car remote has a panic button, use it. Yee said she wishes she had remembered to do this.
  • Be aware of your surroundings, always.

Finally, here’s advice for all of us, all the time: Know your neighbors, and be willing to call 911 if you see something suspicious.

“I am so grateful that Jim picked up that phone,” Yee said. “If I had been out there all alone, I don’t know what I would have done.” We all can be grateful she never had to find out.

    Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

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Meet the Federal Agency that Shoots Wild Animals with Your Tax Dollars

Cross-posted from One Earth

A small prop plane takes off into a sun-dappled sky and circles over Western pastureland, being filmed from a distance, as a woman’s offscreen voice intones “three more shots … two more shots,” counting off the distant sound of rifle fire. “What are they doing, shooting the pups?” she asks.

That’s a scene from the new NRDC documentary “Wild Things,” which was screened late last month for policy makers on Capitol Hill and is providing new momentum for reforming Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture responsible for killing 100,000 coyotes, bobcats, foxes, wolves, bears, and mountain lions every year. Methods of death include spring-loaded poison cartridges—a.k.a. traps that shoot sodium cyanide into an animal’s mouth when it tugs on bait—and gunning down predators from low-flying aircraft.

“It’s blatant killing,” former Wildlife Services employee Gary Strader says in the film, explaining the mindset of the agency where he used to work. “It’s just flying around—there’s a coyote, let’s kill it. There’s a coyote, let’s kill it. Let’s kill it, let’s kill it. You know, it’s just every coyote they see, they’re gonna kill it.”

And that’s just what the agency does on purpose. A Sacramento Bee investigation last year found that Wildlife Services has also accidentally killed more than 50,000 animals since 2000, including bald eagles, endangered wolverines, family dogs, and several species considered threatened or imperiled by wildlife biologists. And 10 plane crew members have died in crashes since 1989 during aerial gunning operations, including two in 2007, the Bee reports.

What’s the point of all this death and destruction? The Department of Agriculture says it’s spending about $30 million a year to protect commercial livestock from coyotes, wolves, and other predators. (It’s harder to argue with some of Wildlife Services’ other roles, like controlling rabies and removing geese from airport runways—although some people object to lethal measures there, as well.) The economic case for killing predators to protect livestock is pretty shaky, though. A 2001 Governmental Accountability Office report could find no independent studies of the costs and benefits associated with Wildlife Services, and it urged the agency to develop more nonlethal means of protecting livestock, including wildlife contraceptives and scare devices triggered by motion sensors.

The scientific argument for lethal control is even worse. As the Bee reports, a growing body of scientific research has found that by killing predators in such large numbers, Wildlife Services is “altering ecosystems in ways that diminish biodiversity, degrade habitat, and invite disease.”

“It’s a killing business,” a former agency employee tells the Bee, “and it ain’t pretty.”

Indeed it ain’t, as the new documentary—which will premiere this weekend at D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival—makes clear. (Full disclosure: “Wild Things” was produced by the films division of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which also publishes OnEarth.) The film includes a scene of a coyote whose paw is caught in a Wildlife Services trap and nearly severed after two weeks of the animal struggling for release. And although there are no close-up shots of the aerial gunning, there are descriptions of the practice by former Wildlife Services employees who took part. It’s a disturbingly common practice: since 2001, more than 340,000 coyotes have been gunned down from planes and helicopters across 16 Western states—an average of 600 a week.

Efforts to reform the agency go all the way back to 1963, when the indiscriminate killing of wolves, bears, and mountain lions across the West led a panel of scientists to condemn the program in a report to the Department of Interior. Hearings and more critical reports followed, and President Nixon could see that predator control had gone too far. In 1972, he signed an executive order banning the use of poison, but it was later amended (for the worse) by Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan dumped the poison ban entirely, allowing the slaughter to continue.

“Wild Things” includes an appearance by Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, who along with California Congressman John Campbell has introduced legislation to ban the poisoning of predators (just like Nixon!), but whose efforts went nowhere in the last Congress. DeFazio and Campbell plan to try again this year, but a change in the law isn’t really needed. The agency itself could decide to do things differently, if there’s enough political and popular pressure for reform. Because death from the skies is really no way to manage our nation’s wildlife.