Happy Valentine's Day

For the next few hours, this Suze Orman book is available as a free pdf.

Women & Money

Suze's a feisty broad, and she has a lot of words of wisdom regarding money, power, and relationships.

Thanks to Mystique Free for the link.

One fortnight until due date.....

Which means that I could be in labor in fifteen minutes or as long as four weeks from now. Even four weeks doesn't sound like enough time. I'm starting to feel the doubt of whether I'm really going to be able to do this, although there are many people with less common sense than I have who have raised reasonably healthy, happy, and well-functioning kids.

Work has been strange lately. I have been superwoman the past several months, determined to prove that pregnant women aren't useless professionally. Now, I'm starting to have to copy colleagues on all of my correspondence just in case they have to take over something I'm working on at a moment's notice. I can't be relied upon to do anything for the next two weeks, and I feel very uncomfortable in that situation. I know men have to deal with this uncertainty too when their partners are about to give birth, but for some reason I feel like it reflects more poorly on me. I might be projecting a bit, although there has to be SOME reason for the pay gap between men and women (not that I think there is a pay gap at my job - but it has been shown routinely in the economy in general). I'm pretty sure that women having to walk around pregnant in front of everybody explains quite a bit of that variance.

My husband proposed a few years ago that there won't be true gender equality until we figure out external gestation. I tend to agree. No matter how strong and useful I want to be, some evolutionary whisper is telling me not to lift the spare tire out of the trunk and not to stand on top of a ladder to change the HVAC filters. And it's hard to think of myself as equal to anyone if I have to rely on them for help, even temporarily.

What's an iron, anyway?

I've been unable to find the original source of this essay. I've seen it forwarded in email and referred to in various posts.

Goodbye To All That (#2) by Robin Morgan

I don't know if it is genuine - it is too new to appear on Snopes. Let's just assume it was actually written by this person and that all statements in it are factual.

The gist of it is that female candidates face tougher rhetoric than black male candidates. One statement that made me think for a few days (and it works as a hypothetical situation too, even if the story is untrue) is that a person at a Hillary Clinton event yelled "Iron my shirt!" and it was generally considered amusing. The essay proposes that if someone yelled "Shine my shoes!" at a Barack Obama event, there would be nothing but outrage.

I thought about why this was true. I can't be objective about this because I am a white chick, and I am constantly deprecating myself and my gender for ironic comedic effect. Such as by calling myself a "chick". I think having a sense of humor about being thought of as weak adds to my strength. So if I were on stage running for president and someone told me to iron their shirt, my response would probably be to laugh, especially since I can count on one hand the number of times I have used an iron in my life.

As a white person, I *would* be more outraged to hear someone yell "Shine my shoes" to a black person. I can't speak from the perspective of how it would feel to hear "Shine my shoes!" if I were a black person. Perhaps having the perspective of one but not the other is affecting my point of view on this discussion.

In the US at least, I think it is fair to say that women have had it easier than blacks historically. White women, though thought of as property by many men, have never been bought and sold to work in the fields and make plantation owners rich. White women have been able to share water fountains and lunch counters with men. White women have never had to be escorted by the national guard just to get to school.

I know women in the past have had it harder than we have it today. But being trapped doing the cooking, cleaning, and child raising in my opinion pales in comparison to what black people have had to go through. So that's why I tend to be more outraged with racial slurs than anti-female rhetoric.

Credit card protest

Today I began filling out a web application for a credit card through CitiCards with a good cash-back rewards program. 5% cash back on select purchases such as supermarkets, gas stations, and drug stores, 2% cash back on these same purchases thereafter, and 1% cash back on all other purchases.

This sounded like a good deal to me until I put my last name in the Last Name field (including the hyphen). Red letters bitched at me that "special characters such as & and ()" are not allowed.

This offends me on two levels. First as a feminist, because it's another example of just how few people comprehend the idea of a hyphenated name. People assume that I want to use only the last part of it, people have no idea how to alphabetize it (you use the first character of the first last name), and people from the bank to the voting booth have to cleverly comment on its length.

Second it offends me as someone who occasionally does some programming. I have to assume that the person who wrote the code for accepting input from this field was either too clueless to think that any non-letter character in a last name could be valid input, or too lazy to figure out how to store the hyphenated name in the database. Either way, I'm not impressed.

I did not complete this credit card application. It may be up to $300 lost in cash back rewards per year, but I have to protest somehow. I'll find some other company with cash back rewards to reap the benefits of my credit card transaction fees.