I couldn’t resist posting this article sent to me as part of an unsolicited email from the Maxim Institute – a social conservative think tank based in Auckland. I thought the research showed it was specifically men who physically benefitted from marriage cf. unmarried men. I guess the Maxim Institute don’t gender disaggregate their data. What a surprise… Still David Benson-Pope could do with a few of those physical benefits!

Read on…. Jacqui

Marriage-the healthy choice

While debate on the role and importance of marriage has been raging for years overseas, in New Zealand such debates are not so frequently heard. International research reveals various ways in which marriage is beneficial to society and individuals, including more than 100 years of research that shows married people have better physical health, on average, than unmarried. Married people get sick less often and tend to live longer than single or divorced people. Emerging research also suggests it is likely there are health differences between those who are married and those living in de facto relationships.

There are three main reasons offered for these health differences. One is that married couples’ long-term mutual investment in each other encourages healthy habits and discourages unhealthy ones. Unlike those in more casual relationships, married couples expect to rely on each other in the long term for childcare and financial support, so they are more likely to take an active interest in each other’s health. While people living together in de facto relationships may also benefit from this to some degree, statistics show that on average marriage lasts longer than de facto relationships. Therefore, accumulated health benefits are not as significant over time outside of marriage. Secondly, married couples generally accumulate more wealth and this is associated with better health, due to improved diets, and a greater ability to visit doctors and dentists and to take out medical insurance. There is also a link between relationship quality and physical health. Married couples tend to have higher quality relationships than those in less formal relationships, often because of the added security that comes from long-term mutual commitment.

Internationally, sceptics who question the benefits of marriage have argued that marriage does not cause better health for adults-or any other associated advantages observed for the married-but that healthier and wealthier people are more likely to marry, therefore ensuring that they will continue to have the best health over the long term. The weight of social science evidence, though, does not support this view. This is because long-term research shows health advantages for married couples accrue after they marry; they are not evident beforehand. Similarly, after divorce, physical health tends to deteriorate, which indicates there are a number of factors associated with marriage that lead to better health. The fact that there are many social and taxpayer costs related to ill health reminds us that marriage is not only personally beneficial, it is a social good as well, not just for individuals, but for the whole community.

Read a Maxim Institute research note on The physical health benefits of marriage

I keep finding articles in The Guardian that inspire me to ask questions – at the very end of this article on a recent YouTube broadcast and interactive (interesting in itself) candidates debate, you will see two rather incredible questions directed first at Obama and then at Clinton.  I am horrified that a female candidate for a Presidential nomination be questioned on the degree of her feminity – what do you think?  What do think the person who posed the question is getting at?  Do we ask this of women leaders in NZ?  Can women in positions of public leadership escape such questions?  How?  

Anita.

Clinton and Obama clash after YouTube debate

· Candidates grilled by public’s video clips
· Accusations of naivety over foreign policy

Ewen MacAskill in Charleston and Ed Pilkington
Wednesday July 25, 2007
The Guardian
Hillary Clinton speaks with Barack Obama after the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential candidates debate. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty images
 

Bickering broke out yesterday between the camps of the two main contestants for the 2008 Democratic nomination with Hillary Clinton’s team seeking to portray Barack Obama as naive in his approach to foreign policy in the wake of an experimental debate organised by CNN and YouTube.Mr Obama, responding to a question from a YouTube user in Monday night’s debate, said he would meet without preconditions the leaders of countries with which the US has strained relations – Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.

Article continues

Mrs Clinton, asked the same question, said she would not as she did not want to be used “for propaganda purposes”.Yesterday she said she thought Mr Obama’s response was “irresponsible and frankly naive”. Mr Obama’s camp highlighted a quote from Mrs Clinton in April in which she said: “I think it’s a terrible mistake for our president to say he won’t talk to bad people.”

The spat demonstrated how intense the rivalry between the two has become six months before the first primary contests begin. It also shows the impact of the new irreverent style of debate that was pioneered on Monday. The organisers of next year’s key US presidential debates are planning to dispense with much of the old formula and incorporate the freewheeling style of the YouTube website and other new media favourites.

Presidential hopefuls, television companies and political websites yesterday judged the debate, organised by CNN as well as YouTube, as a success. The eight candidates for the Democratic nomination faced two hours of questions from a cross-section of Americans who submitted 30-second video clips.

The debate, in Charleston, South Carolina, included questions about Iraq from a mother whose son was to be deployed there and a father who had lost a son in the country. There were also questions about health from brothers spoon-feeding dinner to a father suffering from Alzheimer’s, about Darfur from an American in a refugee camp, and about gun laws from a man cradling a rifle which he described as his “baby”. Some questions were gimmicky and aimed at winning laughs.

One of the organisers said it would now be impossible to return to the old format. Although the candidates at times seemed uncomfortable with the uncertainty, listening with fixed grins, their campaign managers yesterday said it had been refreshing. Joe Trippi, who is part of John Edwards’ campaign, said: “I thought it was great. It was more freewheeling.”

David Axelrod, the campaign strategist for Mr Obama, said: “I think he relished this. He thinks the American people have been cut out of Washington politics.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of a history of presidential debates, called the move a milestone. The humour in some of the videos inspired interest in topics that might otherwise bore viewers, as did the images of “real” people talking about troubles in their lives, she said.

YouTube bloggers generally welcomed the format but objected to CNN choosing the questions: 39 were selected from almost 3,000 clips sent in.

Typical of the format’s directness was Jordan Williams, a Kansas student, who asked Mr Obama whether he was “authentically black enough”. Mr Obama said he had suffered the same difficulties as other African-Americans in hailing a taxi in New York: “You know, when I’m catching a cab in Manhattan in the past, I think I’ve given my credentials.” He also asked Mrs Clinton if she was “satisfactorily feminine enough”. She replied: “Well, I couldn’t run as anything other than a woman.”

Not in the name of the father

By Shelley Bridgeman

It’s 114 years since New Zealand women got the vote, Helen Clark is our second female Prime Minister, and women are starting to dismantle one of the few remaining bastions of male supremacy.

A small but growing number of women are passing their own surnames on to their children, rather than their husbands’ or partners’.

While this practice is well established in situations where the father is absent or unwilling to be involved with his children, it is increasingly being considered a viable option when the family unit is intact.

Suzanne Broadbent, 37, of Pakuranga in east Auckland, gave 8-year-old daughter Tessa her surname.

“It was purely a logical decision,” she says. “It wasn’t an emotional thing. It wasn’t a feminist thing.

“It was just: this is silly, that boys and girls get their father’s name.”

Suzanne’s son, Taylor, 9, has the surname of her partner, David Rooney, 35. “He may have preferred to have both his children with his name, but there’s always got to be a little bit of compromise,” she says. “Obviously, I’ve compromised by my son having his father’s last name.”

show_ad_tag(‘http://ads.apn.co.nz’,’NZH’,’SEC’,’NATIONAL’,’STY’,’300X250′,”,”);Both of 36-year-old Nelson woman Sharon Gibson’s daughters – Milla, 4, and Stella, 2 – have her surname. Before the gender of their first child was known, she and husband Wayne Pool, 46, decided girls would be given Sharon’s name and boys given his. “That seemed fair. It seemed odd to us to accept the fact that your children get the husband’s name,” she says. “This works really well. The only down side is that I figure people who don’t know us might think that Wayne’s not the father.”

Feilding mum Rachael McLaughlin, 24, passed her surname down to daughters Leah, 3, and Shania, 2. Pragmatism rather than ideology drove the decision.

Around the time of Leah’s birth, a convicted murderer from Masterton with the same surname as her partner Martyn Howse, 27, was back in the media, and Martyn was keen that his daughter not be associated with that high-profile case.

“He wanted to give our second daughter his last name, though,” says Rachael. But having grown up in a household as the child with the odd surname out, she promptly vetoed that suggestion.

“It was horrible. I’d never put that on a child.”

Maureen Molloy, women’s studies professor at the University of Auckland, says she’s observed a raft of unconventional naming options, including using the mother’s name.

“I guess the message is that people have more choice. It’s partly feminism, that kind of egalitarianism that women are no longer absorbed under their husbands’ identity.”

Chairperson of the Auckland branch of the Celebrants Association of New Zealand Kerry-Ann Stanton believes it’s a trend that is likely to gain momentum. While she hasn’t personally performed a naming ceremony for a child receiving its mother’s surname, she knows of instances where that has occurred.

“As more women keep their maiden names, I imagine, it will trickle through into giving children their surnames, especially as more women start to realise it’s only a social convention that a child is given the father’s surname,” she says.

So entrenched is the patriarchal naming tradition, it’s often believed that parents are legally obliged to give a child her or his father’s surname. In fact, the Department of Internal Affairs advises that a child may be given any surname, provided it doesn’t cause offence or bump the length of the full name over 100 characters.

What happened to the traditional way of hyphening your surnames?

JoanneC 213

In these two pieces from the UK-based Guardian newspaper, Polly Toynbee and Kira Cochrane tell of the newspaper’s long-running women’s page, its history and they offer arguments as to why such feminist spaces are still needed. The posts following these articles are as interesting as the pieces themselves.
What do you think? Are feminist ‘spaces’ needed? Are there feminist spaces in your lives?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2128820,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/50years/story/0,,2128681,00.html

Why does the Guardian still need a women’s page? Because the feminist revolution is only half made

Polly Toynbee
Wednesday July 18, 2007

Guardian

How did the Guardian women’s page become so influential? It helped that as the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s got under way, Private Eye regularly sneered at the page, with male newspaper columnists writing biliously about hairy, dungaree-wearing, lentil-eating, man-hating Guardian wimmin. There were reams of articles in the tabloids and rightwing broadsheets back then about why men should now slam doors in women’s faces to prove that women couldn’t have it both ways – not chivalry AND equality. And that vitriolic backlash proved the making of the women’s pages.
The section raised all the difficult issues – battered wives, the menopause, women prisoners giving birth while chained down. It asked why girls were put in pink, what’s hard-wired and what’s not, why sex was often rubbish for women, why men were often rubbish but women had no means of escape. Why should women always do the housework and why shouldn’t they do anything a man could do? Back before the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the unions insisted on lower rates of pay for women doing the same job as men in the same factory. Back before the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, all kinds of jobs were forbidden to women.

It’s hard to recapture the shock and fury that feminism caused but, never forget, these were, and still are, revolutionary ideas. The very notion that women, that mothers, can be equal in everything reaches down into the heart of family life and questions everything. And there is no denying that feminism caused a soaring divorce rate and an explosion of single motherhood. Women walked away from bad men. Bad said: “If you want equality, then I can abandon my family responsibilities and pay no maintenance.” So it is still an unfinished revolution, where women’s attitudes changed fast, but men’s only slightly, and society has done too little to accommodate this great eruption. The economic system still demands a male wage to bring up a child – jobs aren’t flexible enough and women’s pay is too low for mothers alone to be breadwinners.

The Guardian women’s page had a huge influence in spreading revolutionary ideas. The secret was that it alerted one of the most powerful, but usually all too politically dormant forces in the land – the women’s magazines – to what was being written. The Guardian was the conduit for ideas from the US, from Rosie Boycott’s Spare Rib, Virago, the wages for housework campaign and some dottier ones too. Suddenly the editors of Woman’s Own and Woman took up these themes and popularised them for a mass audience. I doubt any revolutionary ideas were ever spread as far, as fast and as effectively as by those magazines, read by women under men’s noses. Glossy magazines became the underground press for women. The trouble was, men didn’t get it, didn’t read it and didn’t understand what was in the air. They were startled to find women growing discontented and demanding. Where were they getting these ideas from?

Sometimes we were startled too. There was the woman who wrote a card to Jill Tweedie, the greatest women’s page writer, sent from a remote caravan park: “I’ve done it! I’ve left my violent husband and taken the children and we’re living in a caravan. What should I do now?” Jill was appalled. What did she know? No one wanting advice would have taken Jill’s own life story as any kind of template. But her insights into her own life became the anvil on which she pounded out what she knew of how life was for women in general – and it turned out she knew a lot and was funny and wry about it too.

By the time I started writing a column for the women’s pages in 1977, the battle lines had been drawn years before, starting with Mary Stott. But the perennial question was asked then as now – why do you need a women’s page? Isn’t it a harem that confines and diminishes women, as if the rest of the paper was not really women’s domain? For journalists, it was a problem. I was a reporter on the Observer, covering strikes and industrial relations when, out of the blue, I was offered the column. I suspect nervous male editors and features editors kept trying to find women to edit and work on the pages who were not known for feminist writing.

Although it was a great honour, I’m ashamed to admit that, like many others, I hesitated before joining. Although I was always a feminist and never a feminism-denier, I worried I’d be branded a single-issue women’s columnist, a bit frivolous, no longer fit for the men’s newsroom. Would I ever get back to the “mainstream”? Lurking somewhere beneath was that old fear of being branded as a bra-burning harridan.

Well, I stayed for 11 years, some of the best years of my working life, and it changed my view of the world. All through those Tory years there were fierce battles to be fought.

I might be on the women’s page still if I hadn’t unexpectedly been offered a job as social affairs editor at the BBC. Would I ever have made the jump from Guardian women’s page to Guardian comment page without leaving first? The fact that I even ask this question shows that the word “women” still signifies what it always did – “other”, “second class”, “not serious”, “not one of the boys”. That – paradoxically – is exactly why we still need a women’s page. The revolution is only half made, and sometimes it seems to go backwards. Who else will keep banging the drum?

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Still so much to do
Kira Cochrane, 2006 – present

Kira Cochrane
Wednesday July 18, 2007

Guardian

It happened to Mary Stott fifty years ago, and it still happens to me now. That moment (usually, annoyingly, at parties) when someone asks – “what’s the point of a women’s page anyway?”
Even before the inquisitor lays out their case, even if I’m on my third martini, I can still guess what’s to come. The suggestion that a women’s page is intrinsically sexist (why no men’s page?); that a women’s page is patronising, ghettoising; that we are living in a post-feminist age of such blinding, cast-iron equality that a section dedicated to women is an anachronism.

Reading through fifty years of the pages, as I have over the past few months, women’s changing status has hit me harder than ever. In the late 1950s, well into the ‘swinging’ sixties, and on into the feminist heyday of the seventies, the constrictions of women’s lives seem, with hindsight, incredible.

Women unable to get a mortgage in their own name; banished from the table at the end of dinner parties; having no access to safe, legal abortion; being told that their career options were nursing, secretarial work or, at a push, teaching; being sacked, quite legally, if they became pregnant; being paid – again, quite legally – less than a man in the same job. Treated like children. Or worse.

Back when the pages started in 1957 there was still a clear split between the public sphere and the home, with women often confined to the latter. In those days the women’s pages had a clear purpose, being the only section that discussed women’s specific concerns. Now, of course, women have entered the public sphere in droves, and, at the same time, coverage of ‘women’s issues’ has found its way onto the news pages, the general features pages, even – just occasionally – the sports pages too.

Is there still a place, a need, for the women’s pages then? Yes (and I’m not saying that simply because I love my job and quite fancy keeping it).

However much women’s situation may have improved, the fact remains that we are still some distance from equality. There is still a 12.6% pay gap between men and women – rising to 40.2% when it comes to part-time work; only 30% of women get a full state pension, compared to 85% of men; rape conviction rates are at an all-time low of 5.6%, down from 33% in the late 1970s.

Equally, while ‘women’s stories’ do make the news pages, men still dominate – and they account for 80% of MPs, 89% of high court judges, and 97% of the Chief Executives of FTSE 100 companies. If the women’s pages – which now run on two days a week – were the only place to showcase ‘women’s’ stories the ghetto argument would be more than fair. In fact though what they now provide is simply a guaranteed space, a space that persists and provides at least some balance on those days when every single major news story pivots around a bloke.

Uniquely among women’s sections, our pages don’t centre around fashion, food or general family stories – we have other extremely good sections that deal with all of those. What they provide is a dedicated space for stories that solely affect women – some of them frivolous (frivolity being essential to anyone’s sense of liberation, I would guess) but many of them political, serious and campaigning.

While other sources are adamant that feminism is over, the women’s pages have recently covered all manner of activism – from the revival of the Reclaim the Night protests, to the rise of anti-pornography campaigns, to the creation of six new British feminist magazines in the last eighteen months.

While others talk about living in a post-feminist age, the women’s pages are still looking forward to a truly feminist age – one in which men and women are treated equally, no more, no less.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Did Jackie Blue say the LOBBY word? Could this mean that if National wins next year’s election, the MWA would stop peddling government policy and begin to work for women instead??? Check out this link too: NZ Herald

Tania

Women face sexist backlash
By PATRICK CREWDSON – The Dominion Post | Thursday, 19 July 2007

Women may have claimed some top jobs but worsening domestic violence and a sexist backlash show they still face discrimination, a New Zealand delegation will tell the United Nations.
A report to be presented to an international committee warns of a “marked change for the worse in the social and political climate”, eroding some of the gains made in gender equality.
New Zealanders were increasingly dismissing anti-discrimination work as unnecessary political correctness – often citing the success of prominent women such as Prime Minister Helen Clark and Chief Justice Sian Elias as evidence women had achieved full equality with men.
Though New Zealand women no longer faced prejudice enshrined in law, the “far-reaching effects of social and cultural discrimination” could still be seen.
The report was compiled by the National Council of Women of New Zealand based on submissions from 93 non-governmental organisations.
Council representatives Beryl Anderson and Anne Todd-Lambie will present it to the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women monitoring committee in New York at the end of the month.
Ms Anderson said the overall tone of the report was optimistic and there had been areas of clear progress – such as paid parental leave and student loan reform – since the previous report in 2002.
But domestic violence rates had increased, many workplace issues such as pay parity remained unresolved, and women were no better represented in the top echelons of companies.
“Sexist attitudes and the `Old Boy network’ still prevail in many areas of public and professional life where men are in positions of power,” the report says.
Lesbian and bisexual women faced particular discrimination in the workplace.
Ms Anderson said that having had women as prime minister, chief justice, governor-general, speaker of Parliament, and chief executive of Telecom had created a misleading impression that gender parity had been achieved.
“There has been a bit of a backlash because so much emphasis was given on having women in those top positions. People thought everything was resolved when in actual fact the pay equity gap is greater now than it was 20 years ago.”
The report expresses concern that sexist jokes are becoming more common as part of a reaction against “political correctness” that included developments such as the National Party appointing a `PC eradicator’, a position that has since been disestablished.
Other concerns included women’s treatment in the male-dominated prison system, where their needs as mothers were not met, and migrant women being subjected to oppressive customs transplanted from their countries of origin.
Women’s sport still received meagre media coverage and advertisers used stereotypes to sell products.
“We’re seeing more and more young women sexualised in television programmes and advertising and it’s happening at an earlier and earlier age,” Ms Anderson said.
The report criticises National’s intention to abolish the Women’s Affairs Ministry if it had won the 2005 election, but newly appointed women’s affairs spokeswoman Jackie Blue said the party had abandoned that policy.
She said Women’s Affairs was a small ministry and she would like to see its funding increased so it could move on from “tick-a-box” policy work to more active work.
“I would like to see it have more teeth and to actually lobby for women’s issues and causes.”
A Government delegation will present its official report three days after the National Council of Women presents its findings.
That report also identifies domestic violence and gender pay parity as areas that need addressing.

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2124290,00.html

Panel stops short of calling for rigorous measures to tackle eating disorders.

Hadley Freeman, deputy fashion editor
Thursday July 12, 2007
The Guardian

Models under 16 should be banned from the runways, designers should be trained to help models with eating disorders and shows should be “demonstrably” drug-free, an investigation into the fashion industry has concluded.
The measures are set out by the Model Health Inquiry, which was set up in response to concerns about the use of ultra-thin models during last year’s London fashion week.

But the panel, headed by Labour peer Lady Kingsmill and made up of health specialists and fashion industry insiders, including designers Giles Deacon and Betty Jackson, has stopped short of trying to enforce rigorous measures to weigh models or test their body mass index (BMI) before they are allowed on the catwalk.

The independent study was keen to focus attention on issues other than weight, such as long working hours and, in particular, the use of models under 16. Inevitably, though, the question of models’ weight was the focus of the press conference yesterday at which the report was presented. Dr Adrienne Key, clinical director at the Priory hospital’s eating disorder unit, said at the conference that as many as 40% of models may have eating disorders and almost all the models the panel spoke to confessed to having an “unhealthy relationship with food”.
The report rejected the suggestion that there should be an agreed BMI all models should fulfil.

The model Erin O’Connor, who sat on the panel, told the Guardian it would “compromise the dignity of the models”. Instead, the panel recommended that those who work in the industry should be trained to recognise problems.

One suggestion being considered is that models should submit to random drug testing, with the risk of bans and fines. But panel member Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm model agency and the woman who discovered Kate Moss, disagreed with this idea. She said: “I wouldn’t fine them, I would try to help them. If it continues to be a problem for that one model then, yes, you have to take action and once I did have to fire a model, which was an extremely painful event.”

Lady Kingsmill, former deputy chair of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, was riled when one journalist described the report as “idealistic” but admitted that “this report won’t bring about a revolution. It is moving the peanut forward. I can think of no other industry which has such a highlighted health issue but no one does anything about it.”

Critics felt the report did not go far enough, however. Dee Doocey, Liberal Democrat culture spokeswoman on the London assembly, said: “This report has been a huge disappointment. We were led to believe that this inquiry would produce recommendations that would actually protect young models in London fashion week from exploitation and illness. Unless some real action is taken the health of our young models will continue to suffer.”

The difficulty for the panel is that the most powerful designers are not British but Italian, French and American, and they often prefer to use very thin models. To many in the business, the skinnier the model, the more fashionable the label must be. Lady Kingsmill said she was surprised by what she had seen at the Paris couture shows last week: “All was not well there.”

The report admits that if British models are discouraged from losing an excessive amount of weight, it could harm their careers elsewhere.

“Models told the panel that they are required to shed extra weight to be successful in Paris, Milan and New York. Would action in London be undermined by the demand of other international fashion centres?” the report asks rhetorically.

Other fashion weeks, including Madrid and Milan, have said they are taking steps to ban obviously unhealthy models from their runways. However, the report says that some contributors described Madrid’s move as “window dressing without substance” and, of Milan, the report says that there has been “no evidence that this has been enforced or that intervention has been effective”.

Ms Doukas told the Guardian that the situation was much worse in New York, Milan and Paris.

Lady Kingsmill agreed: “I hope one day we will have international cooperation, but right now we focused on London and I would like to set up London fashion week as the gold standard in terms of the treatment of models,” she said.

Yet even this may be difficult. Lady Kingsmill said that “it is unclear who should enforce these recommendations. We think the British Fashion Council should do it, but they lack the funding.”

Even before the press conference took place, Hilary Riva, the head of the BFC, released a statement saying: “Supporting models does not fall within the BFC’s remit. If the BFC is to take a broader role in this important area, new funding will be required.”

Ms Doukas also told the Guardian that the schedules of fashion weeks in other countries were not conducive to healthy working.

“If there are five or six shows in the daytime, you’re going to fit the models for the clothes for the shows the next day in the middle of the night. And then they have to get up the next day to do those shows. It’s very difficult and I don’t know what you can do.”

Betty Jackson said at the launch of the report: “No designer wants to have an ill person walking in their show.”

Others, though, have a different starting point. Karl Lagerfeld, the designer behind Chanel, Fendi and his own line, recently said: “We don’t see anorexic [girls]. The girls are skinny. They have skinny bones.”

Recommendations

· Initiate model health education in the industry, including workshops about eating disorders

· Provide a healthy backstage area for models at the shows, with good-quality food

· Model agencies to provide regular health checks and recruit experienced models as mentors to younger ones

· Create a representative body or union for models

· Backstage environments should be demonstrably drug and cigarette free

· Models under 16 should not be used in London fashion week

· A formal licensing system for model agencies to be established