Reason Magazine - Contributors > Catherine Seipp

The Big Score

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

Last week, Los Angeles Times reporter Mary MacNamara wrote a damply sympathetic, ain't-it-awful column entitled, "An Urban Pioneer's New Claim," about a guy who'd been priced out of Echo Park and forced to rent new digs in Lincoln Heights. For those not familiar with the dizzying altitude L.A. real estate has reached these days, even in locales where polite society often fears to tread, Echo Park is a funky bohemian barrio slightly northwest of downtown, while Lincoln Heights (slightly northeast) is still basically just a barrio—albeit one that realtors and "urban pioneers" hope will soon be funky and bohemian.

The Times piece wasn't a complete downer; both MacNamra and her subject managed a certain plucky, smiling-through-tears optimism, despite Lincoln Heights' rather gritty ambience: few trees, but plenty of window bars and pit bulls. The urban pioneer in question—a freelance printer's rep named Jim Priest—said his new neighbors were "really nice" and brought him "baked things"—unlike the snobby folks in Echo Park, who as prices rose became "hipper than thou." ( Priest admitted that his erstwhile neighbors may have been put off by his "anti-capitalist attitudes.")

Those attitudes, not incidentally, buzz around Priest's bonnet like a hive of bees. He never wanted to be what he calls a "careerist," but now he tells his two children to "learn how to earn" so they can afford to be homeowners when they grow up. "I hate it, man," Priest laments. What has the world come to that a dad needs to give his kids advice like that?

Prices had risen so steeply in Echo Park, MacNamara writes, that Priest couldn't "even muster criticism of his landlord for selling." The implication here is that of course a person really has no right to sell his own property if someone else wants to continue living in it, but we must realize that greed is an understandable human failing.

"It is difficult for a renter in Los Angeles to maintain true anti-capitalist attitudes these days," she observes, adding that "many of those who help establish an area as desirable inevitably get the boot somewhere between the opening of the Brazilian caf� and that of the high-end cheese shop."

Well, actually, as it turns out, not "inevitably." Buried in paragraph 17 comes the revelation that Priest could have bought "a run-down little place in Highland Park a few years ago"—newly hot Highland Park is not yet as incandescently groovy as Echo Park but much nicer than nearby Lincoln Heights—but didn't because "I thought I could do better."

Aha! So evil capitalism could have worked for Priest. If he'd bought that Highland Park house he'd probably be sitting on at least $100,000 of increased equity by now, by my extremely conservative reckoning. But he chose not to take the chance.

Now as it happens, funky East Side real estate with astonishingly increased value is something I know about. In 1988 I and my then-husband bought a rundown little Echo Park duplex for $165,000. Even at that price the only way we could afford it was because of the second unit's rental income, but I knew that with our finances we couldn't do better.

Here are some of the sniffy comments I heard at the time:

"I'd rather wait until I can afford a normal place, with a hall and two bathrooms." Well it was true that the two bedrooms in our tiny house connected right into the kitchen, and the one bathroom's toilet sat up on a weird foot-high ledge, like a throne. But since you could see the entire house while making dinner, I never needed a playpen for the baby.

"I don't like to visit because, face it, you live in East L.A.!" Actually, we lived several yards west of the L.A. river, thank you very much, but it was hard to keep the soundtrack of Cheech Marin's "Born in East L.A." out of my head when I went to the grocery store, where local abuelitas constantly asked me to reach things from high shelves for them because, as they pointed out, I'm so tall. (Well, I am almost 5'5.")

"Do white people send their kids to public school in your area?" one of my husband's friends asked. "I don't know," I said. "I don't think there are any white people in our area."

"I could never handle being a landlord." But that was the only way I could handle the mortgage.

There were some bad moments, like the time the roofers forgot to close the skylight to the tenant's place and I had to clean up all the debris myself. By the end of the job I was so coated with shingle dust I felt like I'd spent two hours licking the roof. I have good tenants, though, and I've never lost a month's rent in 15 years.

In 1991 I got divorced and the house was valued at just over $200,000, so I paid my ex-husband off for his share of the increased equity. In 1994 the L.A. real estate market sunk so low that I could afford to buy the much nicer house in Silver Lake where I live now, because like the first place it had a second unit I could use for rental income. Also everyone else who saw it apparently felt they could do better. "Smells like probate," the agent said when we walked in, although technically it wasn't.

Potential buyers were depressed by the Grandma-died-here ambience: wall-to-wall shag carpeting, ugly heavy drapes, a little ceramic rabbit with a broken ear on the kitchen counter. But I thought, well, we've all got to go sometime. And the Doing the Samba with Cugat! books in the closet were cheery; apparently Grandma had enjoyed a good life in that house. Anyway, I knew I couldn't do better, so I bought the house for $240,000 and made the sellers give me $4,000 back for repairs.

But I couldn't sell the Echo Park duplex without losing money after all the repairs and improvements I'd put in—"you might be able to get $180,000," a Realtor said doubtfully—so I kept it as a rental and bought the new house with something like 3 percent down—about the same amount other people I knew were spending as down payments on new cars.

I am sometimes appalled at the prices of L.A. real estate, even though I've benefited. I know you're not supposed to talk about these things, but what the hell: The Echo Park duplex, which I still own and rent out, is now worth around $400,000; my Silver Lake home is valued at over $600,000. Unlike the house's price, though, my income hasn't almost tripled. And here's what makes me think we may be in a bubble: Even if I did make three times as much money as I used to, I still couldn't hope to buy it now.

Many people missed out on taking advantage of the L.A. real estate recession through no fault of their own. But others, like Jim Priest in the Times's sad Tale of the Downwardly Mobile Renter, just failed to seize the day. I knew others like him. At around the same time I bought my new house, a friend and his wife went into escrow on a Koreatown duplex, but backed out after encountering "nightmare contractors." The nightmare in question turned out to be a contractor who showed up a little late to give an estimate for repairs.

They're still renters. Like Jim Priest, they thought they could do better. Obviously Mary MacNamara and her woeful subject think that when it comes to capitalism, we all can and should do better.

Well, maybe. It's just too bad they never let us know how.

Then and Now: Women's progress, 1960-present

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

73.1 life expectancy at birth for women in 1960

79.7 life expectancy at birth for women in 1999

66.6 life expectancy at birth for men in 1960

74.1 life expectancy at birth for men in 1999

35.3 percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in 1960

55.1 percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in 1996

31.6 percentage of Master's degrees awarded to women in 1960

55.9 percentage of Master's degrees awarded to women in 1996

2.5 percentage of law degrees awarded to women in 1960

43.5 percentage of law degrees awarded to women in 1996

400,000 number of businesses owned by women in 1972

8.47 million number of business owned by women in 1997

20 number of women in Congress in 1960

73 number of women in Congress in 2002

77 average of women's (ages 16-29) weekly earnings as a percentage of men's in 1974

92 average of women's (ages 16-29) weekly earnings as a percentage of men's in 1993

11 percentage of corporate boards with women in 1973

72 percentage of corporate boards with women in 1998

10 the number of times as fast women?s wages grew between 1960 and 1994 compared to men's

Source[s]: Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America (Independent Women's Forum, 1999); "2001 Statistical Abstract of the United States" (U.S. Census Bureau).

You've Lost Your Way, Baby

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

What if they tried to revive feminism?s official media mouthpiece and nobody cared? That?s what?s been happening with Ms. magazine, which says something about the general state of organized feminism today. Last fall Ms. was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), which announced plans to hire a new editor and move the faded publication from New York to the group?s Los Angeles home base. But even as the 30th-anniversary spring issue, featuring founder Gloria Steinem on the cover, was hitting the stands in March, the group was still advertising for an editor-in-chief.

The position was finally filled in May by investigative reporter Tracy Wood, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register. Strangely, the first media mention of the new hire did not appear until a New York Post story in early July -- one sign among others of Ms. having dropped off the cultural radar screen.

The relaunched Ms. is finally hitting the stands now, with a Fall 2002 issue. (FMF reduced the original bimonthly schedule to quarterly but hopes to return to bimonthly publication in January.) Steinem confidently told the San Francisco Chronicle that "the need for Ms. has never been greater than it is right now."

At its peak, in 1976, Ms. had a circulation of 500,000; it now limps along at an unaudited figure of around 110,000. But the magazine?s decline can be measured by more than its diminished circulation. You might have expected that landmark 30th-anniversary issue with the Steinem cover to get some major play. But media coverage last spring was practically nil, aside from a few brief reports and a Nation feature that noted the aging crowd at the magazine?s birthday celebration in New York: "The contents of the giveaway goody bags were largely restricted to estrogen replacement." When The Nation starts making jokes about menopause, you?ve slipped a long way, baby.

If Ms. hadn?t been technically dead before the FMF took it over -- it ceased publication entirely for a while in 1998 before Steinem revived it as a nonprofit -- you could be forgiven for not realizing it was still around. One of the last bursts of publicity the magazine got came a few years ago, when it hired the disgraced columnist Patricia Smith, who had been forced to resign from The Boston Globe after she admitted making up sources and quotes.

Yet despite the media dry spell, when I called repeatedly asking to interview someone from the FMF about its efforts to resuscitate Ms., I got nowhere. The spokeswoman waffled for weeks and then finally declined, after explaining that she found some articles on the Reason Web site "anti-feminist."

Such Big Nurse control-freakism from the Ms. crew isn?t really surprising: Feminist leadership has developed a habit of lashing out at anyone who questions the party line. For example, the outspoken Tammy Bruce, former president of the National Organization for Women?s (NOW) Los Angeles chapter, is now considered persona non grata by traditional feminists. (More on that later.)

Or consider the feminist response to the recent effort by infertility doctors to educate women about the problems of waiting too long to have children, the subject of a Time magazine cover story last spring. As Time pointed out, a survey had revealed that very few women (13 percent) realize that fertility begins to decline at age 27; three times that many mistakenly believe it doesn?t drop until age 40. The truth is that by age 42, 90 percent of a woman?s eggs are abnormal, making it more difficult to conceive and carry a child to birth.

Yet feminists blasted an American Society for Reproductive Medicine advertising campaign that stated a simple fact which might help many women avoid heartbreak: "Advancing age decreases your ability to have children." NOW President Kim Gandy provided a flurry of disparaging quotes about the campaign to the media. "We don?t need to see a ticking clock every time we pass a bus," she told the Los Angeles Times. The message that you might end up regretting it if you put off childbirth for too long elicits howls from feminists because it questions one of their dogmas: that women should not for any reason think twice about the career track. This attitude seems about as useful as criticizing physicians for suggesting that maybe it?s not so great you?ve got your own cigarette now, baby.

The undying attachment to old shibboleths -- on matters from war to leftist politics to abortion -- has been a major cause of organized feminism?s growing irrelevance. Feminists have been complaining for years that rumors of the movement?s death have been greatly exaggerated, citing among other things the number of women?s studies departments on college campuses. But the disconnect between ordinary American women and their self-appointed spokeswomen is now painfully obvious. Only a quarter of women are willing to describe themselves as "feminists" to pollsters, and you can see why: Pretty much every step the feminist leadership takes these days seems to lead to a pratfall, from odd little blips like Ms.?s hiring of a disgraced journalist like Smith to the huge media circus surrounding NOW?s support for convicted child drowner Andrea Yates.

In a statement last year responding to criticism of the group?s involvement with the Yates case, NOW?s Gandy maintained that "NOW has not created a legal defense fund for Andrea Yates. NOW is not raising money for her."

Her organization, Gandy added, was merely trying to focus needed attention on the dangers of postpartum psychosis. "I have two little girls, and I was never once counseled by my midwife or obstetrician to watch for the well-established warning signs," she complained.

Maybe so, but from lying to infanticide, the feminist movement has long displayed an uncanny instinct for racing in the direction opposite from most people?s natural sympathies. That instinct was also on display during the Clinton impeachment spectacle, with its weird sideshow of feminists excusing the president?s personal mistreatment of women because of his support for abortion and affirmative action.

One revelation of 9/11 and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan is the stark contrast between the real world that women live in and feminist dogma. Pollsters have noted that this was the first war women approved of as much as men -- not a shock when you consider that bombing Afghanistan has probably done more to help a single group of violently oppressed women than any event since the British banned suttee in India. The feminist response? Hand wringing about the Taliban?s replacements and civilian casualties (which now appear to number in the hundreds rather than the thousands), obsessing about abortion, pushing for affirmative action and hate crimes legislation -- and suing to find out the true address of the house where ex-Beatle George Harrison died last year.

Wait -- what does that have to do with women?s issues? Exactly. Yet this is what Gloria Allred busied herself with last winter. Allred is the well-known feminist attorney who was last in the media limelight for successfully representing an actress who got fired from Melrose Place after becoming pregnant. (Producer Aaron Spelling had argued that the actress, cast as a homewrecking vixen, couldn?t pull the role off while in the family way.) "The integrity of public records is at stake," Allred said, explaining why Harrison?s family, wanting to avoid macabre fans, didn?t have the right to falsify the death address. Judging from Allred, Freud?s famous query "What do women want?" has a truly banal answer.

Feminists Go to War

When feminists haven?t been waylaid by irrelevant distractions, their attitude toward the post-9/11 world has ranged from tepid support for the war to silly posturing. Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Susan Sarandon, Eve Ensler, and about 80 other members of the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War circulated a petition last fall protesting the bombing of Afghanistan on the grounds that it "would only punish suffering people and increase the hatred on which terrorists feed."

The Feminist Majority Foundation has also been stuck in a bog of moral equivalency over the war on terrorism. In December its Web site, www.feminist.org, touted an online chat with its founder and president, Eleanor Smeal, "connecting U.S. and International Terrorism." The connection Smeal sees concerns not extremist American mullahs indoctrinating terrorists intent on murdering thousands but (and she?s not kidding) anti-abortion protesters. There was also a link to Scarves for Solidarity, a group urging all women to wear the hijab (the Islamic headcovering for women) in support of traditional Muslim women -- as if the most pressing social problem right now is the possibility that some Muslim women might be stared at.

Multiculturalist feminists have been complaining that "forced uncovering is also a tool of oppression," as two members of the Muslim Women?s League wrote in a January Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. "As an expression of their opposition to [the Shah of Iran?s] repressive regime," they continued, "women who supported the 1979 Islamic revolution marched in the street clothed in chadors. Many of them did not expect to have this ?dress code? institutionalized." Oops!

Turkey, the freest nation in the Islamic world, takes a different tack, forbidding women to cover their heads at public institutions, just as Germany bans Nazi regalia. These countries recognize their vulnerability to particular toxins and ban them to avoid a descent into fascism, not as an expression of it. Of course, head coverings don?t need to be illegal in America, and neither do swastikas. But feminists defending the former as just another "choice" should expect little more sympathy than those who defend the latter.

Another lesson to be learned from organized feminism?s reaction to 9/11 is that no tragedy is too great, no issue too important, not to be reduced to the most simple-minded identity politics. Those 343 firemen who sacrificed themselves at the Twin Towers? NOW is upset that there were no women among them. Its Legal Defense and Education Fund (NOW-LDEF) is demanding its share of federal disaster relief money. Never mind the widows and orphans; what the world needs now, goes the NOW-LDEF thinking, is more affirmative action.

"The critical thing is role models," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) told The Washington Post after viewing NOW-LDEF?s Women at Ground Zero video, part of the group?s lobbying campaign to steer funds toward recruiting more female firefighters, police, and construction workers.

NOW?s activities offer a good reading on the state of organized feminism. It is the movement?s largest organization, claiming 500,000 members. (A Boston Globe story puts the figure at 275,000.) The second largest is Ms.?s new publisher, the 60,000-member Feminist Majority Foundation. FMF deserves great credit for publicizing atrocities against women in Afghanistan years before anyone else cared. But it?s worth noting that Mavis Leno, who used her celebrity connections (she?s Jay Leno?s wife) to spotlight the situation, originally joined FMF?s board in 1996 because she wanted to help defeat California?s Proposition 209, which banned racial and gender preferences in state universities and other public institutions. That proposition won by a wide margin overall and garnered more than half the female vote. Yet the organizations that purport to speak for women were fiercely against it. Little wonder most women feel free to ignore organized feminism.

Girls Don?t Need Special Help

It?s not hard to figure out why so many women dislike affirmative action, even if official feminists don?t get it: Girls are generally better students than boys, and it?s insulting to suggest that they need special help getting into college. They certainly don?t need rigged policies that keep them out in the name of social justice. The passage of Proposition 209 meant, among other things, that black or Hispanic male applicants could no longer be admitted to California?s top public universities over better-qualified Asian or white females. This policy affects many more women than the small number who might hope to be firefighters.

Although feminism?s party line about affirmative action is out of touch with the needs of actual women, it continues to be part of the standard patter about "women?s issues." I went to hear Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti during his campaign last year, and he launched into the usual pandering spiel about "gender equity." Garcetti cited as an example of unfairness that only around 13 percent of city contracts go to women, even though at least half of all new businesses are started by women.

Actually, women are becoming self-employed at something like 12 times the male rate, as Daniel H. Pink pointed out in his 2001 book Free Agent Nation. Many, perhaps most, are work-at-home types like me. City contracts are the last thing on our minds. When we think of the government at all in relation to our business, it?s usually because we don?t want it interfering with how we earn our (quiet, nonpolluting) livings.

In fact, the last time I had reason to consider my work in connection with local government was a few years ago. L.A. was then threatening to enforce a $25 annual home office registration fee and collect city income tax on a percentage of home office earnings. You can imagine how that went over here in Hollywood, home of the bathrobe-clad screenwriter.

Some have argued that the feminist establishment?s major problem is that its leadership is heavy with aging baby boomers, stuck in the outdated concerns of their youth. But the Third Wave Foundation, an organization of feminists up to the age of 30, is equally dedicated to parroting the same out-of-date platform, except they?re bossier and remarkably clueless.

"Hey! Been to a movie? Walked down the street? Spy any sexism lately?" asks the foundation?s "I Spy Sexism" campaign, which suggests sending postcards informing the wrongdoers of their wrong deeds. Third Wave isn?t just against the usual age, gender, sexual orientation, and race inequities; it includes "economic status or level of education" in its list of unfair discrimination. Presumably you should send a postcard to your bank if you were denied a loan just because you have no income.

Left Out

Looking at dominant feminist concerns now, you might think that abortion is illegal, that Muslim women are being arrested in the U.S. for wearing head scarves, that girls are unfairly kept out of college, and that women?s fears about crime have more to do with right-wing nuts attacking lesbians than street rapists or garden-variety wife beaters. Woe to anyone who questions this received wisdom. Consider the case of Tammy Bruce, whose experiences with NOW highlight how feminism has been almost totally subsumed in the general morass of non-gender-related leftist concerns.

Conventional wisdom has it that feminists began losing credibility during the Clinton scandals. But I first noticed the slide into absurdity in 1995, during the O.J. Simpson trial. Bruce, then head of NOW?s Los Angeles chapter and a local talk radio host, had criticized Simpson on the air as a wife beater for months. After the not-guilty verdict, she organized a protest rally that attracted 5,000 people.

Surely using the Simpson case to focus on domestic abuse was exactly what an L.A. feminist should have been doing. But NOW?s national leadership, furious at Bruce for damaging feminist alliances with black leaders, called their L.A. renegade "racially insensitive" and "insidious" in multiple press releases.

"I was a thorn in the side of NOW from the beginning," says Bruce, who describes herself as a "gun-owning, openly gay, pro-choice, pro?death penalty, liberal feminist who voted for Ronald Reagan." Bruce?s recent book, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left?s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, details her disillusionment with the women?s movement, which she describes as "socialism masquerading as feminism, group rights as opposed to the individual."

One cliché about women is that they put everyone?s needs above their own. NOW?s behavior during the Simpson trial, which put racial sensitivity before the women?s issue of domestic abuse, was an object lesson in how this cliché can be true. So are organized feminism?s stance on affirmative action and its multiculturalist worry about offending the Muslim world by criticizing its reactionary traditions regarding women.

The women?s movement remains deeply rooted in the soil of the orthodox left. As Bruce notes, Betty Friedan belonged to the Communist Party, Gloria Steinem is honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and immediate past president of NOW Patricia Ireland wrote about her support of the Communist Party in her 1999 autobiography, What Women Want. It causes problems "when you attach a social activism agenda like feminism to one side of the political spectrum," Bruce told me. "As I argued to NOW, if we had not attached women?s rights to one party, we would not be having these [relevancy] problems."

Race and multiculturalism aren?t the only issues that feminists have put before women?s interests. They have done the same with the gay agenda, specifically its push for hate crime laws. A woman may need hate crime legislation like a fish needs a bicycle, but feminists never seem to worry that demanding stronger punishment for "hate" crimes risks a return to the bad old days of men getting light sentences for "love" crimes of the old "Ruby, Don?t Take Your Love to Town" variety by making one?s emotional motive dispositive in criminal sentencing. (Historically, enraged, cuckolded men who committed crimes of passion against their wives or girlfriends often were viewed fairly sympathetically by judges and juries.) The sad fact is that far more women are killed by angry husbands or boyfriends -- 1,218 in 1999, according to the U.S. Department of Justice -- than gays are killed because they are gay. The FBI reported 17 "hate-motivated" murders of any type in 1999, the latest year for which data are available.

Bruce makes a strong case that an obsession with uncommon tragedies like Matthew Shepard?s killing by strangers obscures the far more common situation of women being killed by men they know. She points out that in 1998, the same year that Shepard was left to die on that fence outside of Laramie, Wyoming, another grisly murder happened there. But you?ve probably never heard of 15-year-old Daphne Sulk, who was stabbed to death by her 38-year-old boyfriend after he got her pregnant. Daphne ended up just as dead as Matthew, even if her death never made the national news. And while Matthew?s killers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Daphne?s was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter. (See "The ?Hate State? Myth," May 1999.)

It?s rare to find a feminist group that ever mentions Daphne Sulk. Yet they regularly beat their drums about hate crimes legislation, even -- especially -- when it has little to do with women.

>The Red Herring of Abortion

One reason feminist groups didn?t turn Daphne Sulk into their new poster girl may be because she?d refused to have an abortion. As Bruce notes, this is "not exactly the kind of person the left wants to immortalize."

Three decades ago, feminist activist Flo Kennedy said that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. In the days of ineffective or unavailable birth control and back alley abortions, that statement packed a lot of punch. Not any more. Abortion has become a sacrament. I am not now, nor have I ever been, against abortion rights. It?s hard not to notice, though, how feminists continue to place abortion above issues with a bigger effect on women?s lives. Surely one reason the feminist movement has lost credibility is precisely because women are beginning to notice.

George W. Bush is not exactly a right-to-life crusader. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out during the 2000 presidential campaign, the 100-plus judges Bush appointed while governor of Texas actually extended abortion rights in that state. The Texas Right-to-Life Committee called the Texas Supreme Court?s 1999 ruling in favor of a 17-year-old?s right to an abortion without informing her parents "shocking." Laura Bush has stated that she thinks abortion should be legal; Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that he considers Roe v. Wade "settled law." But feminists still paint Bush as a pro-life zealot and ally themselves relentlessly and totally with the Democratic Party.

Anti-anti-abortion paranoia helped defeat former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan?s gubernatorial hopes last spring. Although the liberal Republican believes abortion should remain legal, his opponent, Gov. Gray Davis, brought up some old personal statements against abortion that Riordan, a Roman Catholic, made in the early ?90s. I remember feminists using similar scare tactics during Riordan?s mayoral campaign 10 years ago -- as if the mayor of Los Angeles, who can?t even control the city council, actually has the power to ban abortion.

All this was especially bizarre because abortion has been a nonissue in California dating back to six years before Roe. Ronald Reagan, of all people, signed into law the most liberal abortion rights act in the country in 1967, when he was California?s governor. The law made abortion completely legal for any reason in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy -- well into the second trimester. (Roe calls for some restrictions after the first 13 weeks.) Since the beginning of this year, women don?t even need a prescription to get emergency postcoital contraception from California pharmacies. Yet the feminist movement seems determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

When President Bush expanded a government health care program to include pregnant women in February, he classified the fetus as an "unborn child" eligible for health care. The feminist Web site Women?s Enews made this its "Outrage of the Week." But if the result is that poor pregnant women get prenatal care, is that such a terrible thing? More women would like free medical care from the government than would like an abortion, but you?d never know it from listening to feminist organizations.

Instead they provide dramatic but misleading statistics, such as the fact that some 80 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion providers. This says as much about the state of rural health care as it does about abortion: Most of the 3,143 counties in the U.S. are thinly populated "nonmetropolitan" counties, as the Census puts it, and almost half have no obstetricians or gynecologists at all. If classifying the fetus as an unborn child makes it easier for poor women to get health care, it seems strange for feminists, of all people, to be outraged.

Granted, you can?t expect abortion rights activists to want a fetus described as anything but a fetus. But this seems to be more a matter of semantics than an omen of abortion restrictions to come. Feminist groups were similarly up in arms last year because of the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which increased penalties against criminals who attacked pregnant women. But the law specifically exempted legal abortion, and one criminal law professor told The New Republic that he saw nothing in it "that would undermine Roe v. Wade." The protests against such semantic transgressions seem hysterical in the most basic sense of the word.

Foot-In-Mouth Disease

Another major problem with the women?s movement, aside from its mindless fealty to leftism and obsession with abortion, is that its spokeswomen just haven?t sounded very smart lately. The moribund situation of the movement?s flagship magazine Ms. is just the most obvious example. For another, turn to Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers. Last winter she railed against the notion of liberal bias in the media, arguing in The Boston Globe that leaders of the tiny (600-member) Independent Women?s Forum (IWF), a conservative women?s group, appear on talk shows and the op-ed pages of major newspapers regularly, while NOW and FMF leaders don?t.

Rivers brought up a good point, even if it wasn?t exactly the one she was trying to make. Mainstream media are generally sympathetic to the NOW and FMF platforms. They are also unsympathetic to IWF. So if feminist leaders aren?t appearing on the op-ed pages, the most likely reason is that they?ve failed to provide a fresh or convincing argument.

That feminism seems to have lost its voice can be seen in the recent implosions of Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, who reigned during the ?90s as the movement?s major intellectual media darlings. But if they came in with a bang in 1991 -- Wolf with The Beauty Myth and Faludi with Backlash -- they?ve gone out with a whimper. The decline of Faludi began in 1998, when the British novel Bridget Jones?s Diary, which was very popular with women, if not with feminists, arrived in the U.S. (It was first published in the U.K. in 1996.) The novel?s running joke was that Bridget was always meaning to read Backlash, but just kept getting bored. A media icon?s days are numbered once she?s perceived as simultaneously worthy and dreary.

Still, the severe media backlash against Faludi and her last book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), was remarkable. If Backlash revived American feminism, Stiffed began hammering the nails into the coffin. The premise of Stiffed was that men were "in crisis," "in agony," and that something must be done.

Like what? Like "learning to wage a battle against no enemy," Faludi suggested vaguely (and with one hand clapping, no doubt). That was pretty much it, except that the argument was extended for some 600 pages. Even those generally on Faludi?s side got impatient. "She should have said she was talking about class," Judith Shulevitz wrote grumpily in The New York Times. "She said she was talking about gender." Despite the sort of massive publicity send-off authors dream about, including a 5,000-word excerpt in Newsweek, the book sank without a trace.

Even deadlier was the reaction last fall to Naomi Wolf?s Misconceptions, a mesmerizingly nutty polemic about what she calls "the hidden truths behind giving birth in America today." (That?s compared to the sheer delight of giving birth in the rest of the world, of course.) The bland trade journal Publishers Weekly, which hardly has an anti-feminist ax to grind, irritatedly dismissed the book as "a weirdly out-of-touch bid for personal attention."

Now that the standard polite flip-through of the neighbors? hospital baby pictures means viewing a bloody color close-up of baby?s emerging head and mom?s genitalia, you may wonder just what truths about giving birth are still hidden. But perhaps you had no idea that pregnant women "in our culture" (to use Wolf?s favorite phrase) often have Cesareans, even when they?d hoped not to; that they are typically exhausted and sometimes feel like they?re losing their minds; that new moms still get up more than new dads to deal with howling infants in the middle of the night; or that maternity clothes tend to be unstylish, with a cruel lack of selection in Western wear.

Yes, she?s serious about that one. "You could not be a cowgirl and a mother," Wolf observes glumly, describing another day "mourning the loss of the young woman I had been" while rifling the racks at the mall. "You could not be a heartbreaker and a mother....You could not, in our culture, easily pair motherhood with many other alluring archetypes."

As opposed to what other culture? Are there really maternity shops selling Annie Get Your Gun outfits in Iraq or India? But Wolf remains starry-eyed about the obstetrical wonders of the non-American world. In Europe and Belize, she instructs one annoyed obstetrician, episiotomies are less necessary because midwives massage the perineal area with warm oil. There?s hardly anywhere on the planet, in fact (except the bad old U.S.A.), that Wolf doesn?t imagine as a garden of perineum-massaging delights.

"In Greece, Guatemala, Burma, China, Japan, Malaysia and Lebanon," she tells us, "women who have given birth are expected to do little more than lie in bed" for a long, leisurely postpartum. And in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen -- to cite another statement that sounds good but makes little sense. "Cross-culturally," Wolf continues, "women?s pregnancy is marked by ceremony: a festive meal in China, a visit to a Shinto shrine in Japan, a blessing in Malaysia." Or maybe by a stoning in Nigeria if they?re pregnant and unmarried, or a forced march to the abortion clinic in China if they?re pregnant with another daughter instead of a son. But Wolf doesn?t get into any of that. To quote Publishers Weekly again, "What stands out with embarrassing clarity is [Wolf?s] emphasis on the sufferings of a privileged minority."

Precisely. One of the minor casualties of 9/11 was patience for listening to privileged Americans complain, in distinctly anti-American terms, about their privileged American lives. If feminism doesn?t want to completely wear out women?s patience -- and men?s, too -- it had better find a new agenda. Perhaps one that is, to start with, less blatantly foolish, and more engaged with the issues that women regularly tell pollsters they care most about: crime, the economy, child care, balancing work and motherhood, their children?s schools. It might help if organized feminism recognized that, among other things, legal equality already exists. If feminism wants to become vital again, it must first acknowledge the successes that it helped to achieve.

Asthma Attack

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 EST

Just before the beginning of this school year, the Bristol Township School Board in Pennsylvania decided that students with asthma must keep their emergency inhalers in the school office, rather than on hand.

On September 7, the board received a letter from Nancy Sander, executive director of the Allergy and Asthma Network/Mothers of Asthmatics (AANMA), a national asthma support and education group based in Fairfax, Virginia. Sander's letter neatly encapsulated the all-too-common frustration of parents when their doctor's advice about how to care for an asthmatic child encounters a school with an entrenched hall-monitor mentality. The letter read, in part:

"The decision to accommodate and facilitate a child's needs with asthma is far easier than pretending their needs do not exist or that restricting student access to medications is for the safety of all students. To do so places your students with asthma at greater risk of death or missed school days, their classmates at risk of witnessing their death, and your school board at risk of lawsuits....

"If a student placed a plastic bag over a teacher's head for a brief moment, the student would be charged with assault. But a school board voting to restrict a child's access to his life-saving asthma medication is no less guilty of a crime. Is Bristol Township School Board really ready to accept responsibility for violating a child's right to breathe? Are you prepared to breach the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act?"

Three days later, the school board held a hearing and reversed its original decision. Students in Bristol Township are now allowed to retain control of their asthma inhalers.

There are a couple of remarkable things about Nancy Sander's letter. The first is that it was necessary at all. Although school officials have often taken zero-tolerance laws against drugs in schools to mean that even asthma medicine must be kept locked in the office -- which obviously defeats the purpose of rescue inhalers like quick-acting bronchodilators -- in the past few years many states passed bills specifically exempting inhalers from such rigidly interpreted rules. Pennsylvania become one of them, to a fair amount of publicity, almost a full year before the Bristol Township School Board decided to deny asthmatic students easy access to their own medicine. On September 27, 2000, the state's House Education Committee voted unanimously to require its public school districts to let students carry asthma inhalers. This was partly in response to "The Flagpole Mom" (as the media dubbed her), a Pennsylvania mother who chained her lawn chair to her son's elementary school flagpole for 19 days to protest the school's asthma inhaler policy.

Similar laws are in place in Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. But ignorance and obstinacy among school officials often trump even their own local laws. In August, the Chicago Asthma Consortium succeeded in getting Illinois to pass a bill allowing students to keep asthma inhalers on hand; the group had previously persuaded Chicago's public schools to pass a local version of the law in 1997. And yet a survey of Chicago school nurses, sponsored by a local chapter of the American Lung Association in May of 2000, revealed that only 30 percent of asthmatic students carried their inhalers at school. "We have better control," one nurse told the Chicago Sun-Times.

The second remarkable thing about Nancy Sander's letter was its gloves-off tone. Heads of 10,000-member nonprofit groups who present their case to Capitol Hill every year are generally more circumspect in official communications. But Sander began her organization in 1985 as a simple support group called Mothers of Asthmatics (three of her four children have asthma), and I know from experience that when a mother of an asthmatic encounters school stupidity that threatens the health of her child, the result can be murderous rage.

My daughter, who is now in the seventh grade, attended one of the better Los Angeles public schools, Ivanhoe Elementary, through the middle of fifth grade. She has mild-to-moderate asthma and rarely needs to use her emergency inhaler. But when she did, the elementary school's involvement ranged from OK to inept. (Her current private school is better about the inhalers, but far from glitch-free.) In first grade, one of the after-school counselors helped my daughter, who'd been wheezing, take her inhalers. At the time, her doctor had prescribed two to three puffs of Proventil, a fast-acting bronchodilator, followed by three puffs of a slower-acting one called Atrovent, which takes about 20 minutes to work. It turned out the counselor had only given her the Atrovent; apparently he'd failed to read the written instructions and had just grabbed the first inhaler handy. Luckily, her breathing improved anyway. Or at least it had by the time I picked her up, about 20 minutes later.

This is just the sort of situation that University of Iowa nursing professor Anne Marie McCarthy found two years ago, in a survey she conducted of 649 school nurses: Almost half reported medication errors in their school the previous year, and three-quarters said that medication was dispensed not by nurses but by other school employees, such as office clerks or playground aides. That's not surprising, considering that the national ratio of school nurse to student is 1 to 1,500 at best and 1 to 2,500 at worst, depending on who's estimating the figures.

Ellie Goldberg of Newton, Massachusetts, advises parents of children with various medical problems how to deal with schools. She gets calls about asthma inhalers every day. One of the most memorable: "A person from Louisiana called and told me about a teacher who pulled a drawer out, spilled all the medicine out of the cups, refilled them randomly and said, 'Gee, I hope this doesn't hurt anybody.'" When Goldberg's own asthmatic daughter was in the second grade, the school secretary mistakenly gave her Ritalin instead of her inhaler.

My daughter always keeps emergency inhalers with instructions in her backpack, a fact kept on file in the school's office. Despite that, no one in charge had been quite aware of this when she had that asthma attack in the first grade; apparently, she'd been wheezing too badly to speak. "Jasmine knew where the medicine was," a teacher later explained, referring to another first grader who was often in trouble for digging around in other student's backpacks. Considering how the adults at the school had handled the situation, I probably would have been just as well off leaving them out of the loop and going over the instructions with the enterprising Jasmine.

I was relieved when my daughter learned to read and proved she knew how to take her medicine by herself. Plus, unlike most adults, she was careful not to leave it locked in a hot car or sitting in the sun. One day when in the fifth grade, however, she was in tears when I picked her up from school. The teacher had yelled at her when she'd used the inhaler in class, claiming that she didn't really need it.

I spoke to Ivanhoe's then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I'd been "breaking the law" for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would "confiscate" it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. "So now what we need to do," he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, "is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law." My arguments about doctor's orders went nowhere. "When your daughter is at school," Principal Baker said, "I am the ultimate authority concerning her health."

That Robert De Niro soundbite from The Untouchables that Howard Stern likes to play -- "I want him dead! I want his family dead!" -- kept echoing in my head as I left the school office. But I'd heard enough misinformed pronouncements over the years from that school -- a jellyfish is a mollusk, "Indian" should be spelled with a small i -- to consider the possibility that the principal didn't know what he was talking about. So I went home and called the Los Angeles Unified School District's director of nursing. Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker's desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly.

So it was with a sense of déjà vu that I read Nancy Sander's letter to the Bristol Township School Board. Just as my local school principal in Los Angeles should have known about his own district policies, so should those Pennsylvania school officials have known that state law allowed students access to their asthma inhalers. Why don't they know? Perhaps just because of how the school system tends to work.

"The nature of bureaucracy is you get these mailings with 57 pages that go out every two weeks and they go straight to the circular file," says Jura Scharf, executive director of the Chicago Asthma Consortium. "Anything that can carry risk, the short answer is going to be no. The paperwork gets to be cumbersome and so they fall behind."

"I think a large part of what happens," Scharf adds, "and this permeates all school situations, is the teacher and the school are petrified of being sued. They're almost afraid to admit they have children with asthma in the classroom, because then they have to do something about it."

It's when they don't do something about it, though, that schools end up on the losing side of lawsuits. In her letter to the Bristol Township School Board, Nancy Sander referred to the 1991 death of a New Orleans high school student, Catrina Lewis, who was delayed by security guards before being allowed to get her inhaler from the office. When it didn't help, she asked school staff to call an ambulance; instead they spent a half-hour trying to call her mother first. Catrina's sister, another student, finally called 911 herself, but emergency help arrived too late. In 1996, a New Orleans judge ordered Lawless High School's acting principal, a school counselor, and the school board to pay $1 million in damages to Catrina's family.

For school officials to be so obtuse about asthma now requires a certain amount of effort. The American Lung Association estimates that 7 to 10 percent of children have the condition, but for unclear reasons the incidence has increased dramatically in recent years -- almost doubling between 1982 and 1995, according to one study -- and some urban school districts now report initial asthma screening rates as high as 30 percent.

Rescue inhalers work by opening the bronchial passages, ideally to 100 percent of what they should normally be. It can't dilate them any further, so a non-asthmatic student who grabs another student's inhaler would feel no change in his breathing. The only likely side-effect might be a mild jitteriness. Inhalers aren't dangerous; asthma, which kills around 5,000 people a year, is. What's really frightening is how it can surprise you. I know children with severe asthma who have never been hospitalized; my daughter, who rarely wheezes badly, caught a simple, non-feverish cold when she was five that put her in the hospital for four days. Parents who've experienced such situations, who've been forced to acquire a certain level of expertise, can be impatient when school officials -- many of whom don't even know that asthma can be fatal -- dismiss their concerns as paranoia.

This doesn't mean that schools are unaware of the problem. "Everything about asthma, in the last two or three years, has come up more in every context," says Bruce Hunter, director of government relations for the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) in Arlington, Virginia. "We spend a fair amount of time on it." They'll probably spend even more time on it now that the Centers for Disease Control has just issued a special grant addressing school management of asthma in adolescents.

The AASA is no fan of zero-tolerance policies. Hunter notes that "the inhalers are an issue where, if you don't have some flexibility, you end up causing problems. Our view is people need to have common sense. But that being said, I don't think it'll be too long before someone finds some illicit use for inhalers. I've watched kids trade Ritalin. Kids just amaze me." Indeed, school nurses have reported students trying to use the devices to increase athletic performance or open the airways before sniffing glue. But the medical viewpoint that schools should let asthmatic students keep their inhalers is quite clear, and made even clearer whenever specialists talk to schools. Doctors don't worry about misuse; they worry about lack of access.

"The asthmatic should always have the inhaler on hand," says Dr. Robert Nathan, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a spokesman for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. "The issue with schools, obviously, is that it's a drug. But it's kind of hard to overdose on an inhaler. Periodically, we will meet with school administrators, teachers, P.E. teachers. There are some who say, 'You can't use this inhaler and you have to run around the track with everyone else.' It's ludicrous."

Common sense would suggest that children are naturally reluctant to call attention to themselves by asking for permission to go to the office and use their inhaler, and clinical observation backs this up. Elizabeth McQuaid, a Rhode Island Hospital pediatric psychologist and Brown professor who studies human behavior and asthma, has surveyed focus groups about just that issue. "Particularly with early teenagers, it's embarrassing for them to take medication with people looking at them," she says. "They're hesitant to disrupt sports or other activities to go take the medicine in the office."

Not all school administrators have opportunities to meet with asthma experts. But a simple Internet search quickly reveals that medical opinion is clearly in favor of asthmatic students having access to their inhalers. Even school nurses, who straddle the two worlds of school employees and medicine, generally agree, with some caveats. The Ohio Association of School Nurses (OASN) lobbied hard for amendments to the state's 1999 asthma inhaler law. "We saw gaping inadequacies," says Sandra Gadsden, a Worthington, Ohio, school nurse. "Originally the law was just going to allow inhalers." Still, the OASN supported the law after legislators added requirements such as a doctor's certificate that the child is capable of self-medication, as well as a written procedure attached to the permission if the inhaler doesn't help.

The National Association of School Nurses (NASN) has a position statement on its Web site stating that they "support the self-management of asthma, including the use of prescribed, inhaled medications on a case-by-case basis." Nancy Sander reports that "I rarely run into a school nurse anymore who feels she needs to be in charge of the inhaler at all times." At my request, the NASN, to which around 11,000 of the nation's 40,000 school nurses belong, sent out an e-mail survey to board members asking what they thought about students carrying their own asthma inhalers. Of the 25 responses, only three were negative. Most members were aware of new state laws exempting inhalers from zero-tolerance rules and reported few or no problems, although some asked students to keep a spare inhaler in the office and demonstrate proper inhaler technique.

Go further up the ladder of experts -- to physicians specializing in asthma rather than school nurses -- and medical opinion is much firmer. "Information for School Personnel Regarding Treatment of Asthma" is a peer-reviewed paper on the Children's Virtual Hospital Web site. It was written by Dr. Miles Weinberger, a University of Iowa pediatrics professor and the director of the Children's Hospital of Iowa's pediatric allergy and pulmonary divisions. Dr. Weinberger states flatly that "it is essential that all students with sufficient maturity have their bronchodilator inhaler in their possession at all times," adding, "The inhalers pose no abuse potential or other danger to classmates. It therefore constitutes unreasonable interference with the student's medical care for school personnel to unilaterally restrict possession."

In an interview, Weinberger notes that "virtually all kids eight years and up, of normal intelligence, and in some cases six years and up, are capable of handling the inhaler." He deals with school administrators by handing out a preprinted form authorizing the child to keep the inhaler on hand. "Most go along with it," he says. "Others have Tight Rectal Sphincter Syndrome. But there are very few principals who are really going to argue with a note from the doctor."

"Around Iowa, at least, I gather they're pretty reasonable," Weinberger adds. "I rarely have to call up and say, look, you jackass, the kid's an asthmatic and needs his inhaler. But then, Iowa is a state of small towns, and we're also largely a middle-class state. People go in and talk to the principal. They probably already know the principal personally. I can see the problem with bigger school districts, in bigger cities."

In Los Angeles, most public school students are the children of poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants, and I suspect that some of the problem with my daughter's elementary school principal -- tactless as this may be to point out -- came from his inability to switch out of patronizing Bwana mode upon encountering someone more, rather than less, educated than himself. (He soon became exasperated by the demanding parents in our middle-class neighborhood, and quit his principal's post for a district job deep in the bureaucracy.) But what about parents without the resources, or the will, to argue with school officials? Part of the reason I contacted Principal Baker's supervisor, cluster administrator Rowena Lagrosa, was to make him think twice about bullying other parents of asthmatic children. I also wanted the policy allowing students to carry asthma inhalers explained to other principals. "I can assure you the situation will be clarified," wrote back Lagrosa, who added that her own daughter has asthma.

Unfortunately, other mothers I tracked down who'd had similar run-ins with their children's schools had less satisfying results. Some threw in the towel and ended up homeschooling, like Connie Cruz of Phoenix. "We learned our lesson about working to change things, as that only got our children mistreated when they were in school," she comments. "[Our daughter's] teacher would not allow her to go to the nurse to use her inhaler unless she could hear her wheezing. At one point I recommended that the school nurse attend an informational lecture on the latest treatments for asthmatic children. She had so little knowledge that she was a hazard."

At least Cruz made the transition to homeschooling without difficulty. The Home School Legal Defense Association reported in its July/August 2000 newsletter that an Olive Branch, Mississippi, mother named Patricia Vanderford decided to home school her daughter after a teacher refused to let her carry her asthma inhaler to class. Soon she got a call from a truant officer, who argued that the girl was only being kept home to avoid trouble about unexcused sick days -- missed school that might not have been necessary had Vanderford's daughter been allowed access to her asthma inhaler in the first place.

Other families have addressed the problem by simply avoiding physical education classes -- a shame, since along with its other benefits, regular exercise can help asthma. In Portland, Oregon, Kris Hasson-Jones' middle-school son had asthma attacks at least twice a week after P.E. "He missed an awful lot of school that term," she says. "Finally, his doc wrote him an excuse from P.E. and we didn't have the problem again."

In Salem, Oregon, Carolyn Berry's repeated argument that her daughter Kim needed her inhaler on-hand went nowhere. The school's response was essentially, "If they made an exceptions for asthma meds, where would it end?" Even a near-disaster when the P.E. teacher insisted she run around the track at the height of pollen season didn't change the situation.

"At the end of the half-mile, Kim was wheezing terribly," Berry recalls. "The track was a block from the middle school, so she had to walk (with assistance) back to the school office, at which point they had to track down the person with the key for the med drawer and wait for her inhaler to be found. I tried talking to the school administration again, and was told the same story I was always told. It seems to be the party line."

Much has been made of how school zero-tolerance policies can lead to absurdity. One of the most notorious cases was the 1998 incident in which Christine Rhodes, a quick-thinking sixth grader at Mount Airy Middle School in Maryland, lent her inhaler to another girl who was having an asthma attack on the bus ride home. For her trouble, the school labeled Christine a drug trafficker. At the time, the incident was bandied about Internet message boards as an example of anti-drug hysteria, but I suspect that some school officials' ingrained We Know Best attitude probably has as much to do with the situation. The Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act of 1994 put more pressure on schools by linking federal funds to their drug-free policies. But even in 1989, the Journal of Allergy and Immunology was complaining about longstanding school rules that restrict all medicine to school offices. I remember my daughter's second grade teacher, who had asthma herself and was near retirement age, telling me that in her day, "we used to keep the inhalers in our coat pockets, on the q.t."

The asthma inhaler legislation many states have passed recently has evolved in an independent, patchwork way: in Illinois, because of lobbying from the Chicago Asthma Consortium; in Ohio, because a Bowling Green doctor named Wayne Bell complained to Rep. Randall Gardner (R-Bowling Green). There is no similar federal law, although an argument can be made that access to asthma inhalers in school is a civil rights matter. "The thing I've been looking to see, that I haven't seen, is a 504 claim," says the AASA's Bruce Hunter. "But the federal data tends to lag." Under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1974, any school receiving federal funds must accommodate children with medical problems -- even problems not severe enough to merit special education services.

Schools will start to see 504 claims if Ellie Goldberg has her way. She worries that state laws simply allowing students access to their inhalers can let schools off the hook. "A child's self-management of asthma does not relieve the school of responsibility for the safety of the child," she says. "Education is considered a property interest under the Constitution. What 504 does is require the system to respond." Goldberg recommends that parents frustrated with their school's asthma policy begin any 504 claim by documenting the situation, beginning with a "Gebser letter" to the school. In a 1998 Supreme Court decision, Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District, the court for the first time clarified just what parents need to put in writing when complaining to school officials about discrimination. (A good explanation, with examples, can be found at the reedmartin.com Web site.)

"You have to accommodate kids under 504," agrees Dr. Howard Taras, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on school health and professor of community relations at the University of California�San Diego medical school. But Taras, who spends about half his time as a school doctor, adds that not all parental requests are reasonable.

"We had one mother who wanted the child to receive free transportation to the school, which was four blocks away, because she said it was too cold for him to walk to school with his asthma," he recalls. "This is in San Diego. But only one-half of one-percent of all children with asthma have that kind of severity. She had a note from her child's doctor, but when I spoke to the doctor, he said, 'Yeah, she's quite a mom. Well, she wanted me to write that note.'"

Taras says that although he personally encounters school resistance to students carrying their own asthma inhalers only occasionally, he often hears other doctors complain that their own patients' schools don't allow it. "And I have to explain to them that the schools are misinformed. But as much as I would like every school to comply, I am hesitant to respond with legislation. Sometimes the treatment of the disease changes, and to get legislation off the books is a problem. It has a way of helping in the short run and harming in the long run." He would rather see the problem addressed in Department of Education guidelines. "That way it's not like a huge system interfering in a minute thing."

Nancy Sander, however, considers "right-to-carry laws," as the AANMA has labeled asthma inhaler legislation, an essential part of family rights. The "right-to-carry" phrase, with its echo of handgun rights, is perhaps an unfortunate term to use when dealing with schools. But Sander doesn't worry much these days about delicate sensibilities. "The older I get, the less tolerant I am of things that are easy to fix, where it concerns a child's life, and where suffering is unnecessary," she says. The Chicago Asthma Consortium's Jura Scharf notes that parents tell her such laws have made a world of difference in working with teachers and principals. "It allows them to begin some other conversations," she says. "About potentially irritating substances in the classroom, for instance, so maybe in that particular homeroom you don't have the gerbils. We're not asking the school to vacuum the ventilating system, but maybe you put a cheap filter over the vent."

Scharf, who has been a lobbyist for 25 years, adds that the best way to talk to schools about asthma inhalers may be in terms of how missed school days mean lost dollars for the school. About half the states in the country calculate funding by average daily attendance, rather than by average daily membership, so when students are out sick, that costs those schools money.

This argument tends to get officials' attention, even when the health of their charges does not. "You can talk about doing the right thing," says Scharf, "but in Illinois, if the child is not in school, the school loses funds for every day of his absence. If that absence could have been prevented by easy access to the inhaler, it's a powerful argument."

Gilligan's Island vs. the Taliban

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 00:00:00 EDT

Why do they hate us?

Here are some of the usual answers: Israel. McDonald's. The Gulf War. Infidel American women who run around in short skirts with heads uncovered. Hollywood. U.S. arrogance and naivete about other cultures.

To all that, I suggest another reason: "Gilligan's Island."

Shakespeare scholar and literary critic Paul Cantor wrote "Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture In the Age of Globalization" before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. (The book will be published in November.) But his argument that "Gilligan's Island" was really, at its core, not just a silly '60s sitcom but a paean to American democracy is particularly noteworthy right now, in the wake of the disaster.

"Gilligan's Island" premiered in 1964 on CBS, to almost uniformly terrible reviews. But since then it has never, not even once, been off the air. For 12 years, "Gilligan's Island: The Musical" (co-written by the TV show's creator Sherwood Schwartz) has been touring theaters across the United States. On Oct. 14, CBS presents the latest in Gilliganiana: a new TV movie called "Surviving Gilligan's Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Running Three-Hour Tour In History."

Gilligan's typically clueless comment when a visiting banana-republic dictator proposes making him the puppet leader of the island ("I was the president of the eighth-grade camera club"), Thurston Howell III's lament about the possibility of an island election ("The whole thing sounds so darn democratic") ... all this and every other bit of the "Gilligan's Island" political philosophy has been dubbed into 30 languages.

Somewhere in the world, someone right now is watching the show's central idea that, as Cantor puts it, "a representative group of Americans could be dropped anywhere on the planet - even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean - and they would still feel at home - indeed they would rule." Unfriendly countries probably find this infuriating. But friendly ones don't seem to mind.

At the "Surviving Gilligan's Island" press conference, a British journalist plopped himself down next to me and began happily singing his version of the theme song: "Just sit roight back and 'ear a tile, a tile of a fightful trip..."

If the "Gilligan" theme song is so embedded in viewers' minds, so, perhaps, is its subliminal message to an entire generation around the world. As Dawn Wells (who played Mary Ann) remarked as she surveyed a room packed with reporters: "We raised you!"

Perhaps especially annoying to anti-Americans across the globe, the castaways have little regard for whatever indigenous culture they find on the island. When they put on a show, it's a festival of Dead White Males: a musical version of "Hamlet," to the tune of "Carmen."

Academics are famous for reading all sorts of strange ideas into texts. But in the case of "Gilligan's Island," Cantor is not simply projecting images onto an inkblot. Creator Sherwood Schwartz notes in his own book about the series, "Inside Gilligan Island," that "I know about the social content of my show, and the seven characters were carefully chosen after a great deal of thought."

Schwartz named the Castaways' ship, the S.S. Minnow, as a jab at then FCC chairman Newton Minow, who'd famously characterized television as "a vast wasteland." He recalls CBS chief William Paley's horror - "I thought it was supposed to be a comedy!" - at Schwartz's description of "Gilligan's Island" as a social microcosm.

Schwartz's response is a classic of let's-save-the-pitch quick-thinking: "It's a funny microcosm!"

Viewed through the prism of America's enemies, it's easy to see how the "Gilligan's Island" gang represents everything Muslim fanatics and their sympathizers hate. As Cantor describes it, "The Skipper embodies American military might, the Professor represents American science and technological know-how, and the Millionaire reflects the power of American business...the presence of The Movie Star among the castaways even hints at the source of America's cultural domination of the world - Hollywood."

Extending this trope, I would add that the Millionaire displays an unseemly Western uxoriousness towards his one wife -- insulting to societies where women are fourth class citizens, after the children and the camels. Mary Ann, besides her fondness for short-shorts, is offensively spunky to anyone who thinks women belong in robes and head scarves. She's the type of virgin who offends the fantasies of suicide bombers bombers everywhere, as she obviously wouldn't even give them the time of day in paradise.

And then there's Gilligan, the essence of the naïve, childish American - as Americans are so often described, ad nauseum, abroad. But bumbling, unsophisticated Gilligan has a way of ruining the plans of every Soviet cosmonaut or Third World dictator who drops by. "Representing the average citizen at his most ordinary," Cantor writes, "Gilligan presides over a kind of democratic utopia on the island and is repeatedly called upon to act as its savior."

What's more, he always prevails.

Why do they hate us? It just may be because of "Gilligan's Island."

Yes, this is sort of a silly answer. But it's still smarter than the question.

Working Mothers of the World Unite!

MissSeipp@aol.com (Catherine Seipp) — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 00:00:00 EDT

I get annoyed every year when Take Your Daughters To Work Day rolls around (this year, it's happening on Thursday, April 26). But only after reading Ann Crittenden's much-discussed new book, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued, could I pinpoint exactly why. Crittenden, like most feminists, sees working mothers basically in terms of corporate cubicles and government largess: Her vision of Utopia is in part a job at a big company with great big child care benefits. She takes a grim and briskly dismissive view of the rise in home-based businesses started by self-employed mothers-even though (as I can attest) this combination of income-producing work and child-rearing not only frees children from institutional day-care, it liberates mothers from exhausting commutes to often drone-filled offices featuring bad lighting and worse coffee.

Obviously, I'm not alone here. As Crittenden points out, the number of small businesses owned by women has been increasing at twice the rate of those owned by men, and almost half these female-headed businesses are home-based. My Los Angeles neighborhood includes self-employed moms working as architects, bookkeepers, graphic designers, personal trainers, character actresses, and corporate-newsletter editors. Some are probably just getting by, some make a lot more money than I do. I doubt, however, that many see life as a female Dilbert clone - but with improved child care! - as the brass ring of working motherhood.

So why is this a problem? Well, because by defining "the consultant or editor who works out of a home-based office" as a working mother, Crittenden writes, the government "contributes to the false impression that most mothers are not available to their children during the day. On the contrary, a substantial majority of working mothers appear to be reducing their work hours during the child-rearing years." What the government should do, she thinks, is follow the example of France, where all mothers get free health care and cash allowances for each child: "Everyone who has ever studied family policy comes away from France with the same blissful expression that one would wear after a great meal."

That expression might change to a grimace of indigestion once they chew on the reality of France's estate tax - which kicks in on measly inheritances of $9,000 and ratchets up to a top rate f 60 percent, but never mind. It is true that working mothers typically reduce their hours. I don't usually enter my home office before 10:30 a.m., and most afternoons I pick up my 6th-grade daughter from school by 3 p.m. I often return phone calls while making dinner, put in a few hours writing on the weekends while she's visiting her father, and that's basically it. But my daughter sees that work and home life with children can be integrated. I saw the same thing 30 years ago, when my own single mother set up her real estate business in the dining room. That, and hearing her casually recall that she used to apply for (and often get) the better-paying "men wanted" ads in the sexist bad old days, was a far more inspiring career example than visiting her at some dreary, fluorescent-lit office.

There are people who accept rules and people who fight them. But there's something to be said for my mother's way, which was to just ignore them. She made good money setting her own hours in real estate, while raising children. And I make good money setting my own hours writing while raising my daughter - as much as the typical full-time staff writer at a big-city newspaper, not that I want anyone to stop springing for lunch. Skeptical 9-to-6ers dismiss home-based work as rife with interruptions, but here's a weird little truth of the e-mail age: There are days around here when the phone just doesn't ring. Certainly I'm never interrupted by a supervisor telling me what to write about, or when to take my vacation, or how often I'm allowed to stay home with a sick child.

Plus I'm diversified. If I were to lose any one of my regular freelance gigs, I'd be unhappy. But unlike the laid-off staffer, my income wouldn't suddenly plummet to zero. In a world of constant corporate downsizing, anyone who doesn't realize this is sadly out of date. A few years ago, a veteran editor doing some consulting for a local mid-sized newspaper offered me a staff job. Knowing the paper's legendary cheapness, I explained that I doubted they'd be able to come up with as much money I made freelancing - and it would have to be a lot more for me to even bother thinking about it. "Why would it have to be more?" he asked, sounding genuinely shocked. "What about the security?" Now I was shocked. This guy had been in the business 50 years, witnessing God knows how many tanking media enterprises and in-with-the-new, out-with-the-old staff reorganizations, and he still could use the words "security" and "newspapers" in the same sentence without laughing.

There's more security in being a part-time working mother married to a steadily employed husband, as Crittenden well knows, although the situation irks her. A former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Crittenden writes that she's only made around $15,000 per year freelancing since she left the Times in 1983 to raise her son. Her credentials are far more impressive than mine. So why does she make so much less money?

One reason might be that she lists The Nation, Working Woman, and McCall's as magazines that have published her articles. I know from hard experience that no institution places the fascist boot so firmly on the face of the freelance writer as side-of-the-angels leftist rah-rah sheets and the pecky henhouses of women's magazines. I only started to make real money after I gave up trying to work with either. But of course the real reason Crittenden isn't cashing in is that she hasn't needed to make more.

"It is especially below the belt," she writes, "for an unmarried, childless woman to say to a mother's husband, as an acquaintance once said to mine, 'I wish some man would support me while I write a book.'" Yes, that is below the belt, because it goes straight to the guts of a fallacy in Crittenden's polemic - that she unfairly lost money when she quit full-time work to raise her son. But she's stayed married and her husband has evidently stayed employed. If, as Crittenden convincingly argues in her discussion on divorce, marriage is a partnership and what a working husband earns should belong equally to his non-working wife, she doesn't have much to complain about.

It is true that years of this can make a person soft, and leave long-married and unemployed (or part-time working) mothers in the lurch. Crittenden makes strong and valid points about how unfair and inadequate most child support payments are to divorced mothers. "The middle-class professional mother who has...cut back on her career for the sake of her family quickly discovers that when it comes to divorce, no good deed goes unpunished," she notes in the book. I didn't have a chance to find out personally; my husband left when our daughter was less than a year old, and that's a big reason I make more than $15,000 a year - I have to. I get a decent amount of child support, but the vast majority of our daughter's expenses depends on what I earn. That I earn it setting my own hours and on my own terms, however, doesn't strike me as a giant social problem.