Ganapati removing obstacles for women?

India has been on my mind lately. We're right in the middle of one of the biggest festivals of the year: the ten-day Ganapati festival. Millions of Indians across the world will be visiting one another in homes to pay homage to elaborate arrangements surrounding the idol of Ganesh, the god of auspiciousness, the remover of obstacles. Dictated by the lunar calendar, this festival usually hits during monsoons in India, and I remember getting soaked to the bone hopping from one home to the other as we made our way through taking darshan (literally, sight) of relatives and friends' Ganapati. The host would welcome us, give us some prasad (literally, a gracious gift), which was always in the form of a sweet, we'd stay for some pleasantries, and then we'd put our sopping sandals back on and be on our way to the next stop. Morning to evening, for ten days.

We're celebrating out at my folks' place this weekend, and I wanted to bring some sweets to share. I started out with plans to make a couple of different burfis, an Indian equivalent of fudge. I planned on coconut and pistachio, two popular and personal favorites. But the best laid plans... well, let's just say that burfi is a very forgiving dessert. And since India's flag is such a simple triad of colors, it can make for a very nationalistic one as well. 

Coconut and Pistachio Burfi

• 4-5 cups of unsweetened shredded coconut 
• 2 14 oz. cans of sweetened condensed milk
• 1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
• 1 cup shelled pistachios, plus a handful reserved to crush for garnish
• pat of butter, for greasing the pan

Blanch the shelled pistachios by immersing in boiling water for two minutes; then just rub between your fingers to remove the remaining peels. 

Grind into a paste, using some water if necessary.

 

In one pot, dry roast the coconut until it is fragrant (do not allow it to become brown). Remove one cup and add to another pot, with the pistachio paste. Add one can of the condensed milk to the coconut-only pot, and stir continuously over medium heat until the mixture begins to incorporate the milk and the coconut becomes clumpy and less sticky. Add the ground cardamom. Remove from heat. Repeat with the coconut-pistachio mixture in the other pot with the second can of condensed milk, sans cardamom. 

Layer the pistachio burfi on the bottom of the greased pan and pack it in tight. 

Next, divide the coconut-only batch into two halves. Now, if you have saffron, you're a better person than I am and you should soak a bit in some warm water and add the essence to one half of the coconut-only mixture until you reach the desired flag-orange color. If you don't, use some food coloring--I won't tell. 

Layer the white mixture on top of the green. 

And top it off with the orange mixture, remembering to pack both layers tightly. Finally, crush some pistachios for garnish and press onto the orange layer. 

Chill this pan in the fridge for at least one hour, then use a greased butter knife to slice.

 

Why else is India on my mind? The four defendants in the brutal New Delhi gang rape case have been on trial, which ended with a guilty verdict, followed by today's sentencing condemning them to death by hanging. It's difficult to read about the gleeful reactions to the verdict--not because even any small part of me thinks these monsters deserve life, but because these episodes offer relief in the form of temporary moments of vindictive vengeance. They distract from the larger problem of violence against women and the institutional and societal failures that allow women to continue to be vulnerable to such heinous behavior. And, after all, they're unlikely to even die this way. There are 477 people on death row in India, yet only three have been executed in the last nine years, due to an appeals process that can travel up several levels of bureaucracy and a severely backlogged justice system. 

I would like to think that the public outcry in response to this case will not end here, with this symbolic sentence. I would like to think that the bodies that poured into the streets after the brutal rape will continue to band together, to say such violence against women has always been and continues to be one of the fundamental flaws of human societies. I would like to see millions of Indians take to the streets again, saying that this doesn't end with this verdict and sentence.

Millions of Indians in the streets? That's actually not hard. Particularly during Ganapati because the ten days culminate in public processions through the streets that march to the water and immerse their family idols in the sea. Not the most environmentally sound tradition, I know, and I have family members who are starting to refrain from this practice (our NoVa version included), but it does bring millions of Indians out into those streets. 

One of India's greatest freedom fighters, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, actually gave the festival a distinctly political face in the late 1800s. He brought families into the streets for this procession, who until then had celebrated Ganesh in privacy of their homes, and made Ganapati a public vehicle for protest against British colonial reign. 

Wouldn't it be something if millions of Indians took the tenth day this year, next Wednesday the 18th, to march on our behalf and demand that obstacles be removed for the women of India, and, let's face it, the world. That's assuming that you, like me, don't agree that patriarchy is dead.

Are All New Mothers Endowed Equally?

(this piece was originally published on www.momsrising.org, as a contribution to "Moms Get Real About Race in America: A MomsRising.org Blog Carnival in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.")

There could be a lot of reasons I see everything through a race lens. I have a biracial son, for instance, and I know I’m going to get questions about why a whole lot of folks who look like his mother seem to live differently than the folks who look like his father. I’m also a political scientist who focuses on race politics, so it’s my basically my job to see race everywhere.

Or maybe I see race everywhere because it really is everywhere. In the world of public policy, practically any issue you can think of can be challenged to demonstrate racial equity: education, healthcare, employment, climate change, you name it.  Racial disparities are real and impact the opportunities that children of color, for instance, have compared to their white counterparts.

After having my first child last year, I started working on a book that looks at the politics of pregnancy. For the first time I thought I’d not have to apply the race lens. I’m completely consumed in the world of restrictions and regulations on women’s bodies: Can you choose whether you have a doctor or midwife? Can you try for a vaginal birth after having a cesarean section? Can you eat salami? Can you continue your anti-depressants? I thought, if anything, the world of epidurals, midwives, and soft cheese wouldn’t trigger questions about equity.

Turns out I was wrong. As I read debates, pored over legislative history, and talked to dozens of friends and acquaintances who have been pregnant themselves, my race lens has followed me. I quickly saw I couldn’t escape it because a pregnant woman’s race can play an important part of her pregnancy— different races have different access to prenatal treatment, quality hospitals, and safety, for instance.

Yes, some people concern themselves with whether they can eat deli meats during pregnancy while others worry about being victims of violence. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ranking what I think to be valid concerns—trust me, as someone with cult-like affection for Potbelly’s, I am not judging and it most certainly was on my list of concerns. But what makes the latter group more troubling to me is that it is composed disproportionately of women of color.

Research on intimate partner violence (IPV), for instance, has shown that black women report higher rates during pregnancy (Hispanics report slightly lower rates, and enough research hasn’t been done on Asian or multiracial women).  It doesn’t seem to require a study to show that violence is decidedly bad on a pregnancy, but, yes, we have research on this too:  surprise, surprise, the majority of women who experience abuse experience it multiple times during pregnancy, and they are more likely not to receive prenatal care until the third trimester. There are odd details in there too, like most of the injuries occur to the head. And then race appears again—this time concerning white women, for whom the “frequency and severity of abuse and potential danger of homicide [is] appreciably worse.”

And then there were the rates of teen pregnancy that also differ by race and ethnicity. Here too, young women of color experience pregnancy at disproportionately high rates. See the chart below.

Pregnancy, Birth, Abortion, and Fetal Loss Rates Per 1,000 Women Aged 15–19 Years, by Race and Hispanic Ethnicity — United States, 2005

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010.

Pregnancy at such a young age influences whether new mothers will stay in school and finish the education that will eventually offer better job opportunities at higher wages in the workforce. As any parent knows, being pregnant and then raising a child will certainly make finishing school at the same time feel impossible. And so we have the dropout rates that we have—when young women get pregnant, school supports are rare (though they are wonderful when they DO exist!) and new mothers end up dropping out. And this precipitates a cascade of negative effects: without a high school diploma, women become economically insecure members of the workforce.

I fortunately did not have to worry on either of these fronts during my pregnancy. I have the good fortune to be in a supportive, healthy relationship with my partner who believes that parenting is just as much a father’s responsibility (and joy!) as it is a mother’s. I am also, woefully, one of the overeducated—the ones who prove that the education-as-it-correlates-to-income curve is, in fact, curvilinear. At some point more education (like a Ph.D.) seems to reduce wages, as many of my underemployed friends will tell you.

But, particularly on the anniversary of the March on Washington, it is important for me as I reflect on the politics of pregnancy and parenthood to think about how all mothers are not endowed equally. When Dr. King described his ideal society, presumably he meant a world where women, of any race, were enabled to lead healthy pregnancies.

When my son asks us inevitable questions about race, my husband and I are going to be honest with him and talk about race and class and the continued segregation that makes these categories determine the level of opportunities available to children. It would be great if the rest of the country could try and do the same.

We should all Expect Better, and then ask some more questions

Yes, I know about Emily Oster's new book released today that questions conventional pregnancy wisdom.

Yes, I think her work is quality and that a social scientist's interpretation of the data around pregnancy restrictions and recommendations is much needed in our discourse about women's health.

Yes, I agree with a number of her conclusions--namely, that moderation is key.  One of my favorite lines is "It isn't that complicated: drink like a European adult, not a fraternity brother."  I think the most important conclusion that I share in common with Oster is that neither of us is actually making recommendations for other women's pregnancies--we both study, research and investigate common pregnancy do's and don'ts to navigate our own pregnancies and make our own decisions. In the end, though, readers should be left to their own decision-making mechanisms. In the case of my work, at least, I just hope they're armed with enough information to make a decision based on knowledge and not fear.

Yes, Joe Scarborough makes my head hurt:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Do I think Oster's work scooped my own project on the politics of pregnancy? No.

After a couple of weeks of indigestion, I calmed down and realized that the major do's and don'ts that Oster tackles in her work are typically about ingestion and exposure to a long list of substances traditionally banned from pregnant women's diets and lifestyles: alcohol, caffeine, raw milk cheese, hair dye, exercise, etc. She applies an economist's eyes to the randomized trials and peer-reviewed research out there on these topics and comes to her own conclusions about the restrictions that seem hysterical and those that seem reasonable and evidence-based. Applying reason to pregnancy? Kudos to her.

Considering child care

Alissa Quart has a piece in The New York Times today that looks at the financial burden, and often impossibility, of child care on American families. Given that one of my chapters tackles exactly this topic, it piqued my interest. Why would a book on the politics of pregnancy discuss post-birth child care? Because we put our son on a daycare waitlist five months into our pregnancy—twenty months later, our number (a pessimistic 35) has not budged.

If parents are lucky enough to gain admission for their children, Quart discusses the crushing costs. Citing research from University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Joya Misra, she writes that the cost of center-based day care surpasses one year of tuition at a public college in thirty-five states, as well as DC. 

But it's not only the price tag that has parents in despair. Despite resounding evidence that investing in young children’s care reaps huge social benefits, the United States is currently suffering from a severe scarcity of decent day care facilities.  A survey conducted by the National Institute Child Health Development deemed only ten percent of facilities to be “high-care” nationwide and a recent cover story for The New Republic by Jonathan Cohn described the overall quality of day care in our country as “wildly uneven and barely monitored, and, at the lower end, Dickensian.” 

An expose like this, on the dismal state of American child care, surfaces once every year or so. In general, comparisons are made to other industrialized nations, where states invest heavily in quality child care facilities and parents are even offered tax incentives if they stay home to take care of their own children, given that it is considered to save the state a huge sum of money. 

Pamela Druckerman also discusses the American day care dilemma in her comparison between parenting in France and the United States, Bringing Up Bebe. As an American expat in Paris, she compares the quality of care that her first daughter receives from state run crèches with day care back home in the States. 

At least half of any crèche’s workers, Druckerman writes, must pass rigorous tests in reasoning, reading comprehension, math, human biology, and psychological reasoning. Another quarter must have degrees in health, leisure or social work.

But what really wins Druckerman over with her own daughter’s experience in the crèche is its dining experience. Again, the rumored four course meal: “a cold vegetable starter, a main dish with a side of grains or cooked vegetables, a different cheese each day; and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit puree.” Lunch is prepared by an in-house cook from scratch each day. Soon Druckerman admits to thinking of her daughters’ caregivers as the “Rhodes Scholars of baby care.”

The first day cares were established during the Industrial Revolution in both countries, because women simply had no choice but to leave their homes and enter the workforce. Horror stories of children being tied to bedposts all day while their mothers worked in factories became so common that the crèche was established in France in the mid 1800s. News of this arrangement spread to States soon thereafter.  In France this child care system was seen as a state investment in helping create responsible new members of society, and enabled mothers to participate in the workforce with confidence that their children were in good hands. 

In the U.S., however, born more out of necessity and continued for dubious reasons such as “Americanizing” the children of immigrants, child care never developed as an institution that could help socialize children into well-adjusted, independent and developmentally advanced individuals, as it did in other industrialized nations.

We do ourselves a disservice if we just think that this set of circumstances that conspire to disproportionately punish women in the workforce are happenstance. American day care is so dismal because the state has long seen the care of children outside of the home as inferior to a mother’s care—the proper place for a woman is in the home, tending to her children’s needs, so significant state subsidies have been nearly unimaginable for the majority of our country’s history. 

Let's not even deign to discuss the wild possibility that a father might also be considered a parent. When the government collects data on parents and work life balance, for instance, the mother is termed the "designated parent" and the father is a "childcare arrangement." Yes, you read that right. 

How might things have evolved differently in this country had our government established an agency that oversaw child care facilities, similar to the Mother and Infant Protection service that the French state formed after World War II? What might it take to convince our state that child care is a responsible investment, given the huge social benefits to not only children, but their working parents and the economy as a whole? 

I'm not quite sure what my husband and I would have done had we not had an amazing network of family to care for Desmond while we both worked full time. He really hates bedposts. 

A Fresh Start

It’s been a busy couple of years—I got my doctorate, I found a job, I gave up a job, I found another job, I had a son, I quit a job, and now I’m looking for a new job. But I’m back!

In the spirit of new beginnings, I’m repurposing this blog as a place where I think about how to make sense of all the different pieces of my life right now: work (politics), food (recipes), family (kids and products), home (DC), dreams (travel), interests (feminism) and obsession (pregnancy). That last one probably takes a bit more explanation.

My pregnancy with my son Desmond blew me away. I had never exactly looked forward to being pregnant and I had a suspicion as to why. As soon as I became pregnant, it was confirmed. The pregnant 'condition' was one of neurosis, restrictions and warnings. There were a lot of decisions to be made, for sure, but it seemed like women were not in charge of their own pregnancies. I became sort of obsessed with researching the roots of debates—from debates over insurance restrictions that chose obstetricians over midwives, to what sort of deli meats I wasn’t allowed to order at Potbelly’s.

So I’m putting all that work into a book project called The Political Pregnancy.  I tell the story of my nine month pregnancy, discovering a new political debate each month. I look at food and drink restrictions, parental leave entitlements, and childcare preparations, amongst other debates. And I try to explain the politics behind why we are where we are right now. When a Senate candidate can call ‘rape pregnancies’ a gift from God (yeah, what a charmer, right?), there’s no way that everyone thinks a pregnancy should be only a woman’s business—it is political and it is up for public debate. And some people are batshit insane, so I uncover some crazy episodes.

But back to the blog. I’m going to post things here that interest me right now. I’ll continue to post recipes and discuss food. But now I’ll also post some products that I think are cool, places I'd be interested to visit, fun kid-related ideas, and stories I come across while writing my book. It’s basically going to be my head for the next long while. Welcome to the umpteenth narcissistic blog! 

And, I’m not going to lie: a lot of it is going to focus on food!

So, let’s toast to a fresh start.

Fresh Start

A rosemary scented grapefruit cocktail

• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 2-3 long sprigs rosemary
• 4 cups fresh squeezed grapefruit juice*
• 3 oz vodka
• 2 oz Triple Sec

Photo courtesy of www.whatsheshaving.com

1.     Make the rosemary syrup: In a small saucepan heat the sugar and water until the sugar has completely dissolved. Add rosemary, simmer for 5 minutes and turn off.

2.     Once cool, mix the rosemary syrup with juice, vodka and Triple Sec in a pitcher.

3.     Serve over ice with a rosemary “stirrer.”

*if using store-bought juice, which can be a little sweet, reduce sugar a bit.

Feminism's a wild game

These little Palin tidbits are like vials of crack and the media's our pusher. Are we, as a nation, so completely and hopelessly struck with ADD that our news networks don't think we can sit through more than 10 minutes of questions with such a high profile candidate? Here's the latest, courtesy of CBS and its latest ploy to boost ratings.




Let's break this down a bit, shall we?
Climate Change: I formed a subcabinet to deal with it and it doesn't matter whether it's man-made (read: I don't like blame when it's pointed at my party, but did Obama invent the SUV? Because then I'd like to get back to you)
Abortion: I want a culture of life in this country and would counsel women to choose life over an abortion; I don't want women to go to jail for having an abortion (read: Choose is a conjugated what-of-what now, Katie? Heavens no! I don't support choice--that's those other folks over there. Yes, I want to make abortion illegal, but only for those nasty liberal doctors who perform abortions--not for the women who choose to get them.)
Homosexuality: I'm not going to judge gay people (read: now I'm using that word 'choice' correctly-- right, Katie?)

And, of course, feminism: I'm a feminist because I provided wild game for my family (read: I'm a hunter AND a gatherer--take that, Hillary!)

Did anyone else think that we'd one day see the mother from Bobby's World running for the second highest office in the country? I'd rather have Brian from Family Guy, and, if you don't watch the show, he's a dog.