Feminism, Careers, and the Family

FEMINISM, CAREERS, AND THE FAMILY
FORUM AT COLGATE

HAMILTON - Colgate University will host The Second Annual Joseph C. Woodford Forum on Critical Social and Political Issues on Wednesday December 1. The topic of this year's panel discussion will be "Feminism, Careers, and the Family: Who has gained? Who has lost?" This event will take place in 209 Lathrop Hall from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. with a reception at Merrill House to follow.

The panelists will examine the effects of the movement of women into the world of work, in particular how feminism's simultaneous promise of personal choice and denigration of stay-at-home wives and mothers has affected American children and families, and women who have or otherwise might have chosen to remain outside of the paid-labor force. Have women who have committed themselves to a professional career been freed from patriarchal dependence, thereby gaining a life of personal fulfillment and professional accomplishment, or have they given up one kind of dependence for another, one without love or larger social or spiritual meaning? And have they made this choice freely? These are issues which our panelists will explore and about which, we anticipate, they will pointedly disagree.

The three panelists are internationally recognized authorities on issues relating to the family, feminism, and the effects of the large-scale movement of American middle-class women into the paid-labor market. They are Allan C. Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society, general secretary of the World Congress of Families II, author of four books and hundreds of articles on the family and labor policies, and a father of four; F. Carolyn Graglia, attorney, author of Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism and related articles in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, and a mother of three; and Katha Pollitt, associate editor and much-reprinted columnist for The Nation, author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism and numerous articles in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and many other publications, and a leading feminist who has spoken out boldly in opposition to school prayer and in defense of abortion rights.

More explicitly, with stay-at-home wives and mothers in mind, the panelists will examine whether an important segment of the world of working and middle-class women has been forgotten and ignored in the rapid transformation of normative family and labor practices wrought by feminism and modern industrial and commercial interests in post-WWII America. Our panelists will examine whether, as some have argued, large numbers of women in the past three or four decades have been robbed of a sense of their own self-worth and even a language with which to understand and value what they did or continue to do for themselves, their husbands and children, and society at large. Or is it, as others have contended, that it was only with the changes wrought by modern feminism that women became free to develop into fully autonomous beings. We anticipate, then, that our panelist will help us all better understand these epochal changes in American society, work, gender relations, and family, who are its beneficiaries and who are its victims, and what are the likely long-term effects of these momentous changes on American society, patterns of child rearing, and family structure.

For further information on this panel, its participants, and the problems its participants will address, contact Rebecca Costello, Department of Communications, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346; 315-228-7415 or at [email protected].

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