This weekend is Labor Day, a day that signifies the end of summer and the start of the school year. Never mind that most of us have already started back to school, and that summer technically does not end for a few weeks. This weekend allows us a chance to relax and savor a few last minutes of summer before the cold weather begins to arrive. And so, as I prepare to join relatives for this long weekend, I sought out a bit of information about the history of Labor Day. Such information is all the more interesting to me, since my Ph.D. and my research allows me to call myself a labor economist.

The history of this day can be found at a web site created by the Department of Labor. Here we learn that the holiday is more than 100 years old, and that it sought to create a “workingmen’s holiday”. While I am sure that this phrase is historically correct, it made me pause for a moment. After all, with all due respect to the “workingmen” of this country, should we not also take time to also celebrate the work that is done by the women of this country, most specifically, by the mothers of this country? Remember, all of the household production done by women and other full-time homemakers is not counted in our country’s calculation of Gross Domestic Product.

In economic circles we sometimes joke about that if a lawyer marries his housekeeper, the GDP goes down. Her work, previously done for pay, is no longer considered to be part of the formal economy, since no money is now transferred to pay for it. I don’t think that any mother needs to be convinced that household work is of value to the family and to the economy. Just think of the time spent on child care each day, from waking children to getting them dressed to feeding them and getting them to school, and it is clear that the work done by mothers are also done by some in the formal economy, from housekeepers to chefs to bus drivers. The problem arises in that when it is mothers doing the work as part of their vocation as parents, it is not as easy to measure and therefore difficult to include in a total.

When my grandfather came to the U.S. almost a century ago, he did so because he was told that here, the “streets were paved in gold.” Believing that, the teenager took a boat across the Atlantic to land in New York, where he moved in with some relatives. His relatives immediately told him (most likely in Italian) that “this is America, and in America, you work.” He took that bit of advice to heart, and began to work, succeeding in building his own business from the ground up. He stopped working only weeks before he died, when the cancer that tortured his body forced him to sell the trucks that were central to his business.

Throughout his journey through the American dream, he was accompanied by my grandmother who managed a home and the office of his business, doing things that today are usually done by people with college degrees in Business or Accounting. When my grandfather’s success was added to the GDP of his adoptive country, the work of his wife was ignored, as was the work that she did raising her own children and helping relatives and friends who needed her assistance as they bravely navigated the Great Depression. While I am immensely proud of the labor that my grandfather brought to his new found country, I am sad that we, as a country, will not recognize the work that people like my grandmother did to help make this country so great.

And so, as we hold one last barbeque this summer, I propose a topic of discussion for our family gatherings. What kind of work do some members of your family do that is not counted in the official tallies that lead to the sum we call “Gross Domestic Product”, and what can we do, as a country, to start to give official recognition to household production, work that is often done by mothers?

Classes start tomorrow and my syllabi are finally done. They've been completed for a few days, but I never deliver them to the copy center on time; I prefer making endless micro changes in the vain hope of creating the perfect syllabus. Ideally, a syllabus conveys a tone, makes a clear and compelling argument for the importance of the subject matter, and lays steel traps for potential slackers.

I would fine-tune my syllabi endlessly, but I have a deep-seated horror of showing up on the first day of class without it. Although a few of my esteemed colleagues seem perfectly comfortable handing out their syllabus on the second week, I would feel I was living a recurring anxiety dream, like I’d shown up naked.

Part of my obsessiveness is the fantasy of perfection. I love the beginning of the semester: the clean slate, the chance to do everything right. (Like that Bill Murray in Groundhog Dog, as an inept weatherman who repeats the same day over and over, eventually getting it right.) After almost 20 years of teaching college I should be able to draft the perfect document. But I don’t.

What I'm forgetting, of course, when I painstakingly plan my course syllabus, is that there will be twenty-five other distinct people there too, whose interests and personalities and investment in the course will define it.

This semester our college started linking students' ID photos with the class rosters. For those of us who make an effort to learn our students' names, this is a great help. When I look at the eager, expectant (and varied) faces of my future students I realize that the course is not mine alone.

It's not clear from their ID photos which students will make brilliant comments, who writes beautifully, or who will stare sullenly at me every week. The photos don’t reveal who’s depressed, afraid, in love, broken-hearted, bereaved, or hostile. It's easier to take them at their shiny Midwestern faces' value and assume the best.

There have been some interesting posts on this blog lately about gender, weight, and photoshop (see the posts by Aeron Haynie, two by Susan O’Doherty, and by Rosemarie Emanuel. They have resonated for a number of reasons. First, of course, I’m a woman in this culture and by no means immune to the pressures to look thin. Second, I’m a parent, and I want both my daughter and my son to be healthy and happy without starving themselves (and, believe me, both boys and girls are liable to do so, though I still think their pressures are different). Third, I’m currently teaching a first-year seminar on Cinderella, and “lookism” is never far from my mind as I discuss the tale.

After all, Cinderella is one of the original examples of a woman rewarded for her looks and (as discussed in Susan O’Doherty’s first post and in the Ms. Mentor column she cites) for being a “pleaser.” She’s “as good as she is beautiful,” we’re told, and her goodness looks an awful lot like being a doormat: dressing her sisters’ hair for the ball they deny to her, in one version; completing absurd tasks without complaint in another. While neither Perrault nor the Grimms comment on Cinderella’s weight, many revisions make at least one of the wicked stepsisters fat, and the Disney version—the version most familiar to all of my students and, I suspect, most of us as well—turns the heroine herself into a Barbie-doll with similarly unrealistic proportions. (For a clever examination of the looks of the Disney princesses, check out this blog post from last fall .) Whether she’s thin or not, though, all versions of Cinderella seem to agree that she simply has to show up looking beautiful to snag the prince, and thus to achieve the epitome of feminine success.

We can’t, of course, blame Cinderella for a culture preoccupied with looks, and I’m not claiming that without the tale we’d all be better off. Rather, I want to suggest that the discussion my co-bloggers are having here is worthwhile, and is one with deep-seated roots. While most of us don’t really believe that just showing up in a ballgrown and glass slippers is enough to earn us success (however we might define it), still the tale is tenacious. If it’s about virtue rewarded, can we try redefining virtue to emphasize intelligence, or thoughtfulness, or generosity, without associating that with self-abnegation? While we’re at it, can we de-emphasize the looks of our female leaders, stopping the commentary on the pantsuits and hairstyles that inevitably accompanies a female leader though not her male counterparts and competitors? Can we stop calling assertive women “difficult” or “shrewish” when men with similar qualities are “confident” or “assertive”? Those of us with opinions and a little backbone are no longer doomed to the fate of the “ugly stepsister” (actually, they’re beautiful in Perrault’s version); it would be nice if our language and our commentary reflected that new reality.

“Clarissa” commented on last week’s post,

This is an enormously helpful post. But, I'd point out how quick you are (very quick -- as if being fat were a form of leprosy) to say that your son is big (hence necessitating shopping online) but not FAT. If he were fat, he'd have an entirely different orientation to the world. My brother grew up as the fat kid and only recently (at 45) lost a lot of weight -- a friend's son has anorexia (since treated successfully, so far). It might be different for men, but not all that much. Perhaps men who live their entire lives within the norm of masculine shape, behavior, looks don't obsess about these things or about pleasing others, but men who are outside those norms do. Please don't leap to the conclusion that women are "perhaps uniquely" concerned about looks and pleasing others, because it's just not true.

This is an important point, and one that I don’t think I addressed sensitively enough, so thanks to Clarissa for pointing it out. As I read this comment, I remembered the “fat kids” at my elementary school, both boys and girls, and how mercilessly they were sometimes teased. Having been the victim of teasing and shunning for other reasons, I know how pervasive and tenacious the effects of these experiences can be, and I’m sorry if I seemed to slight this.

I think, though, that there is still a difference between the experiences of males and females around weight and body issues. I truly did not equate “fat” with “leprosy.” My father was obese, and my brother has struggled with weight issues for most of his adult life. Both managed to have successful careers and social lives. My brother is enjoying a spectacular marriage to a brilliant woman who is also a knockout.

My father’s weight contributed to a serious cardiac condition; my brother has Type 2 diabetes and some joint problems. Both would diet periodically to address their health issues—but neither, as far as I know, suffered from job discrimination, social isolation, or feelings of low self-esteem because of their size.

One difference between them and Clarissa’s brother is, I think, the age at onset of the problem. My father and brother were both athletes in their youth — my father was a track star and my brother was a football player. It was only after they settled down and became more sedentary that the weight started to creep on. So they didn’t have to suffer the stigma of being “different” as kids.

For women who were thin as children, though, and gained weight for whatever reason in adulthood (smoking cessation, stress, hormonal issues, pregnancies, or simply the natural accumulation of pounds that sometimes comes with aging and a slower metabolism) there is still tremendous pressure to look like a sixteen-year-old model.

Again, this is not to slight men’s experiences of being social outcasts for any reason. It’s no fun for anyone. But I think the problem is compounded for women because even now, we’re brought up to feel that a large part of our self-worth depends on pleasing others, no matter how smart and accomplished we may be in other areas of our lives. It’s okay for men to be computer geeks or mad scientists — they might also wish they were slender and handsome, but it’s not a requirement for “success.” It’s simply a different story for women.

It is sometimes said that it would be good to find a “two handed economist”, as we are known for seeing both sides of issues, and summarizing our thoughts with “on the one hand, but on the other hand.” It was that ambiguity that I felt when I saw some ads in a local newspaper that reminded me of a discussion that has been going on in this space recently.

I read with interest the latest discussion on this site about girl’s body image, and, as a mother of a little girl, I was concerned. However, the whole issue hit me head-on when I was flipping through the newspaper recently and noticed some advertisements for a large, national department store. Indeed, in my grandmother’s day, this store was almost synonymous with the idea of a “department store.” Which is why it disturbs me so much.

The ad that ran in our Cleveland paper had many different pictures of clothing that were on sale, each in a separate block with a sales price listed below it. Then I noticed the pictures of clothing as modeled in the advertisement. It was quite clear that the torsos of the models had been extended, leading to unnaturally long torsos and very thin waistlines. At first I thought that this was a way to accentuate the clothing rather than the models, but then I realized that the same thing had been done to a model in an ad for lingerie. The result in that ad was to stretch out the model’s torso but at the same time to actually underemphasize the underwear being sold. It was as if she was standing in front of a fun house mirror. My husband suggested that this might be a natural result of the printing process, but it really disturbed me.

Ever an economist, I can see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, ridiculously thin models were not needed to create the advertisement. On the other hand, it further encourages unrealistic body images for ordinary people.

I have recently heard comments like “I am so fat” from children my daughter’s age, who are definitely not fat and also certainly still several years from puberty. One little girl stood with her back arched (as little girls tend to do) and looked down at a beautiful little belly to mumble “My belly is so big”. I am appalled that we have created a world in which even these little girls are growing to be uncomfortable with their lovely bodies at such a young age.

This is particularly disturbing to me, as I grew up in an Italian family, where food was central to our celebrations of life. There were frequent family feasts where the food overflowed and the dishes were taken off the table to be washed, but returned with heaping helpings before they could even be put away. No, not all that food was healthy, but I never heard any of my relatives fretting over a few extra pounds. And I certainly never heard young children worrying about their figures before they knew how to do division.

And so I ask you, have you noticed any similar photoshopping of ads in your local newspapers? And if you have, might this not an issue that should be raised with the store involved? And just how should we let the store know that we are not happy with this new approach to advertising?

Geez! Tuesday was the first day of school for my teenagers and my alarm did not go off! Either that or I had turned it off and rolled back to sleep.

I was in Florida at the beginning of this week, both to get my teenagers off for their first day of school and also to vote. I have assessed that it is statistically more important for me to vote in the state of Florida than it is in Illinois where my university job resides (but Blagojevich has me questioning that decision...)

My son Nick woke me up frantically in my bedroom, “Mom! It’s after 7!”

For some unnatural reason, my children’s high school starts at 7:30AM, and we all try to wake up by 5:30. That means it’s 4:30 AM for me, since I spend most of my working hours in Chicago central time. I was so looking forward to having a relaxed, organized time with my kids this last weekend and arriving triumphant for their first day of high school with well-dressed, showered, and prepared children who had finished their summer reading.

Alas, the reality of my commuting lifestyle set in around the time that my smoothie spilled as I screeched out of the driveway, landing smack inside my purse. (Only a woman, perhaps, can feel the tragedy of a smoothie spilling inside one’s purse…) After cursing, speeding and driving erratically, it also became clear that neither of my children had actually finished their summer reading yet.

But at least my son seemed to want to finish his assigned book...

Nick’s summer reading has renewed my belief that our public school system occasionally makes some good decisions, or at least hires teachers who still do. Nick is finishing James Loewen’s, “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong” (1995), a nonfiction assessment of twelve leading high school history textbooks that the author reviewed while at the Smithsonian Institute. Loewen identifies and then overturns textbook exaggerations and historical untruths ranging from Christopher Columbus to “Gone with the Wind.” Howard Zinn has said that “every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book." (You can read the introduction and table of contents online).

I glanced through one chapter that outlines the history -- both in artwork and writing -- of abolitionist John Brown, and the textbook interpretations of his armed insurrections at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry. Many textbooks describe Brown as a “terrorist” and show pictures of him as a wild-eyed man with a long beard, particularly in southern textbooks. Loewen’s analysis of these images is clear and challenging, and he develops a debate about terrorism and justifiable treason, rather than pronouncing the “truth” of the event. The book is clearly appropriate for my son’s AP course in American History and he is excited about reading it — or at least I thought he was....

After a disappointing ride to school, I went home to clean out my purse and then to vote in the Florida primary. By 3:00 PM, the kids had forgotten about their hectic morning and were more upset about their class assignments and the absence of friends in classes. My daughter, Katie, had learned that her literature teacher was quizzing her the next day on their summer reading book, Kashmira Sheth’s “Keeping Corner”--another cool reading choice. This book is about Leela, a young girl from India, married at age nine, widowed by twelve, and witness to Ghandi’s teachings about freedom and equality for women in 1918.

Like her Mom, Katie needs to do some fast-paced work in order to be ready for the first week of school. I got the children a snack, dropped them off at band practice, and left to catch a plane back to Chicago, wishing that I had had more time and patience to delve into their summer reading books with them.

On the way to the airport I heard on the radio that Kendrick Meek was leading billionaire Jeff Greene in Florida’s Democratic primary for the Senate. If Meek wins the election in November, he will become Florida’s first black senator.

It sure feels like the first day of school…

What with winter over, we’re now ready to jump back into school again. Let me explain that: my family and I are just back home from 10 weeks of travel first to western Washington state (where June and July were pretty consistently in the low 60s) and then on to Australia, where July and August were (despite being mostly a little warmer than the Seattle area!) winter.

We had a fabulous month “down under”. With some pressure from my parents, whom we were visiting for much of our travel, my husband and I did something we haven’t done for years and years: both of us travelled without our laptops. Imagine. A whole month. We were nervous. It was a big decision not to just slip one of them into our carry-on bag. But we did it. And no regrets whatsoever. For a whole week at the Barrier Reef, in fact, we spent no time online at all. The rest of our trip we very minimally checked email. It was a welcome break from routine and I feel like we took full advantage of exploring Australia.

The trip started, however, with a heavy dose of screen time for all of us. On the back of every seat of our Quantas A380 airbus waited our own individual portal to the land of entertainment, talk, news and information: the little video screen, remote control, and earphones. The last time I traveled overseas was before my children were born more than 10 years ago. An in-flight technological revelation has occurred in those years! Each of us holed up in our seat, and even my youngest - age 7 - stayed up most of the night watching movies and nature videos (cheers, David Attenborough) and playing games (and not even the arcade kind – they were thoroughly entertained with hangman, drawing programs and Sudoku!) Although I usually severely limit how much time my kids spend on computer and tv, I let it go for our cross-pacific voyages and enjoyed how (1) “plugging in” greatly eased the pain of the 13 hour flights and (2) by sucking us in for so long, effectively scrambled our body clocks so that we suffered very little jet lag on either end of our trip.

Despite thoroughly enjoying the luxury of being offline for a month, I know screens are part of our lives, and will only become more so. On a domestic flight this summer (which didn’t have entertainment systems on every seat!) I watched a group of university students traveling together as they passed their iPads around to one another, and I wondered how this screen revolution is going to evolve in the next 10 years – by the time my daughter goes to college. Although computers have been integral in academic centers for a long time now, it seems to me that the shift to learning through screens is in its early stages. The power of screens is apparent and it seems pretty clear that higher education will incorporate this way of learning more and more into lectures and labs and discussion sections. What will a course lecture be like in 10 years? And how best to facilitate the balance of time spent on screens for my own kids now? I’m not sure. I’m generally pretty positive that screen learning will improve our lives and spread quality education further around the globe, though for me, I like to remember to flip the off switch now and again.

A week ago on Monday afternoon — the time when I usually write this blog post — I was in a car headed back to Richmond after a long weekend visiting family in Connecticut and upstate New York. Today, I’m in my office, having met my advisees last week and my first group of new students today. I’ll meet my second class tomorrow and then the school year will be well and truly underway.

Or sort of. It begins again later this week when we take our daughter to the airport for her flight back to college. While we drove her up last year for orientation, this year she’s on her own. We got most of her stuff up to New England last weekend on our trip; her grandfather will get it the rest of the way to her when she moves back into her dorm. So really the school year begins on Thursday.

Or again, it begins the day after Labor Day, when my son returns for his last year of middle school. I’ll have finished two weeks of classes before my son gets back to school.

This time of year is tough for academic families, and it makes me wonder why we continue to follow the quasi-agrarian calendar when it’s so clearly irrelevant to most kids in school. And even if it were relevant, the timing is off: there’s all kinds of farmwork still to be done, as the farmers who run my CSA can attest. Most of my friends who are also parents are either scrambling, or have already scrambled, to find quality care for their kids whose camps have ended but whose schools haven’t begun yet, even though our schedules are now fully booked.

I’m grateful that we don’t have school all summer long, don’t get me wrong. I need the summer break — or some break — to regroup, recharge, get some research done, plan for the fall. But I’m willing to entertain the notion that I could work differently, and I’m quite sure that children in K-12 could. I’m not alone, of course — there are year-round schools all over the country, and proponents of the change have a good deal of research on their side about learning loss over the long breaks, among other things, to suggest that a schedule of, say, 10 weeks on, 3 weeks off, might actually work better for most people. (Many other calendar models have been proposed, some retaining at least a month of summer vacation, and most not lengthening the school year significantly or even at all.)

It’s hard for me to imagine giving up “summer vacation” entirely. The whole concept of summer jobs relies on a long break when students are available to work in a variety of fields where three weeks might really not be all that productive (I’m thinking of pools and lakes that hire lifeguards, for example, or amusement parks hiring temporary workers). And, as I mentioned above, the college summer break can be restorative — though it didn’t really feel that way for me this year, when I only left town twice. Still, as we get started this fall — again, and again, and again — I can’t help but wonder whether there are workable alternatives to the wild schedule dance we do every year. No doubt my middle school son will be out of school before anything changes here, but it’s still worth thinking about.

Aeron Haynie’s excellent post on girls and weight/eating issues made me rethink Ms. Mentor’s most recent column, “Being Nice or Getting the Job Done.” When I first read the Ms. Mentor column, it seemed like straightforward advice on a situation that is fairly common with younger employees.

Haynie quotes Susan Bordo as follows: “This emphasis on fitness with its false sense of empowerment, siphons off potential subversive energy that could be used to challenge norms of beauty or, change the world.” That is what made me go back to the Ms. Mentor column and confirm my recollection that all of the protagonists in the letter writer’s story are women.

Because both preoccupation with weight/body size and the work/social conflict tend to be primarily, if not uniquely, feminine concerns.

Haynie refers to a recent New York Times article on the difficulty of finding plus-sized clothes. Women who are larger than average need to shop in specialty stores or go online to find clothes that fit them.

This is a problem my son shares: at sixteen, he is well over six feet tall, and, though he’s not fat, he’s large — broad-shouldered, with big feet and hands, and a broad neck. But for Ben, this isn’t a problem, it’s just a fact of life. There’s inconvenience, but no shame involved in having to comb the internet for apparel that fits. Friends and neighbors comment admiringly, not disparagingly, on his ever-increasing size. (Yes, I know that some small, slight boys are made to feel inferior, and of course this is wrong — but as far as I know, people don’t turn away from them in disgust or write hostile comments on blogs.)

Both columns describe, essentially, the contortions women tend to go through to please; to be liked; to fit in—and the punishment on tap when we don’t. “Franny,” the intern in the Ms. Mentor column, sacrifices her job to cater to an unworthy boyfriend. “Delpha,” her ultimate supervisor, worries that she will be seen as uncooperative and unlikable for firing Franny, who screwed up big-time. And Haynie expresses realistic concern that her daughter might become overly preoccupied with her appearance and body size.

We’re exhorted not to care about body size, or about being seen as likable, but the penalties are greater for large, difficult women than for men. As usual, I don’t have an answer for this, but I think it’s important to keep examining the questions.

Last week, I watched my daughter giggle as she made her way down the water slide at our public pool. She was floating on a mat that was pushed along by a stream of water until she was dropped, amidst laughter and delight, into the deep end of the pool. Ever the geek, I could not help but think of the concepts of “stocks” and “flows” in economics. Stocks are compared to the amount of water in the pool at any one time, while flows are the rate of change of that water, how much water is pumped into the pool minus the amount of water leaving the pool. In economics, these concepts are most often used to describe levels and changes in levels in the money supply, which of course did not matter to my daughter as she went down the slide over and over.

My daughter discovered the water slide in the middle of August. I was surprised it took her so long to start sliding, since she is quite the “sensory seeker”. I sometimes think that children like her were the reason they invented the pay one price admissions policies at some amusement parks and carnivals, as she will ride a ride only to get off and stand back in line to ride it again. I think it was the idea of going into the deep end of the pool scared her for a while, but that fear was definitely overcome this summer when she decided to start using the water slide. Since the water slide is in the deep end of the pool, that meant that I spent most of my time in the deep end, too. I trust that the time I spent treading water there will help offset the effect of the many ice cream cones that I also ate this summer.

Once she found the water slide, it was only a small step to decide to use the diving board. The first few attempts at the (rather substantial) low diving board were met with her turning around and climbing back down. However, in less than a week, she overcame her fear and was jumping off the board, often in an attempt to land in the water at the same time as other jumpers who jumped from a higher board. Once, I watched as she, too, attempted to jump off the high board, only to, once again, turn around and climb back down. The lump in my throat was small compared to those that I know will be there when she someday decides to drive and date, both milestones that I know will come and which will bring even more situations where I know my ability to protect her will again be limited.

As the summer ends, I realize that this was a very special collection of weeks as I watched her grow at least a few inches and gain confidence and self-control. This was the summer that she joined the bike parade in our neighborhood with a decorated bike that was driven down the middle of the street with escorts from a police car and a fire truck. This was a summer of transition as she moved from one school to another, only to join friends from her pre-school days who will be in her new homeroom. This was the summer that friends who had moved away moved back, as they spent late evenings running around catching lightning bugs, delighting in each other’s re-found company. And the growing bellies of several friends and relatives convinced me this summer that I soon need to give her a more detailed explanation of where babies really come from.

This was a summer that I had entered with great plans. I wanted to read the “Little House” series with her, chapter by chapter. Instead, she found some books that friends had given us. While certainly not classics, at least they encourage her to read and to work on comprehension from one chapter to another. I had wanted to teach her to multiply better, but instead was content with watching my very shy daughter learn to stand in line at the snack bar and choose how to spend her Tooth Fairy money without my assistance.

When I look back on this summer, I will remember a season in which my daughter grew by leaps and bounds, both physically and socially. I will remember magical days at the pool, a heat wave that would not end and barbecues almost every weekend. I hope that everyone had similarly satisfying times this summer, and that we all look forward to a new and productive semester. In the end, I hope that everyone got a taste these past few months of not just enjoying the deep waters of a pool, but also the deep waters of life.