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This is the second in a series examining issues raised by a blog post from Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck, where he suggested that women’s interest in closing the gender pay gap amounted to a “fetish for money,” and the subsequent apologies for it by himself and Chamber COO David Chavern. Part 1 and Part 2 at the links.

Seth Godin, a popular marketing author, has written extensively about what he sees as the two key elements of future business success: creatively using the cognitive surplus and participating in a gift economy.

Cognitive surplus refers to the time and mental energy modern workers are supposed to have left over after their regular work that’s represented in volunteer projects like Wikipedia, the online reference site.

Many people have commented on the fact that contributors to projects like Wikipedia are overwhelmingly male. Maybe it has something to do with what the AFL-CIO found in a 2008 survey of working women, that nearly half reported having less than an hour a day to themselves.

If a person has less than an hour of time to themselves per day, it’s the extraordinary individual who has any surplus to give.

Making it worse, household and caring tasks are thoroughly seen as women’s work. So much so, that men who do their own family’s laundry, or cook meals they’re also going to be eating, or spend time with their own children are said to be helping out. Which is to say, helping their female partner do ‘her’ work.

Often, a woman who has a steady, male partner may find that it means having an extra person she’s expected to take care of and clean up after for no pay.

Which brings us to the idea of a gift economy. Godin suggests, and I think he means well, that a gift economy is something like an exchange of acts of great art and generosity without expectation of return. He suggests that it creates a virtuous circle of gift exchange that turns the givers into indispensable people who, in the natural course of things will eventually be rewarded.

What would a gift economy look like? What does it have to do with women’s pay?

In 1995, the United Nations estimated that women around the world generated work for which they were not paid to the tune of $11 trillion, or $15 trillion in 2007 dollars, as Raj Patel notes in his book, “The Value of Nothing.” Patel says that in 1995, “The daily work of rearing children, maintaining a household and engaging in civic work … [was worth] more than half the world’s total output.”

Godin suggests that offering wonderful, useful work as a gift will eventually draw a reward. Yet women’s gifts of necessary work, often microtargeted to the exact needs of a particular family, not only bring little compensation, they’re often barely noticed.

Marilyn Waring, in the 1988 book, “Counting for Nothing,” pointed out that economists made good faith efforts to calculate the economic worth of black market activities men were likely to be involved in, and for which no records existed, in order to estimate the value of their activities and add the approximations to Gross Domestic Product calculations. Yet no similar efforts were being made to figure out what women were contributing to the GDP outside the formal economy.

Thus, Waring said, GDP accounting for national economies had established procedures for estimating how much a man who was a pimp or drug dealer contributed to the economy. But a woman who spent all day turning wild children into productive citizens, or a young girl who spent hours gathering fuel or water for her family and took care of younger siblings, neither of them matter to most economists.

That’s a living example of a gift economy. Women historically, and still, do most of the work of caring for others, cleaning up after them, domesticating toddlers and teenagers for no, or low, pay. And yes, even when that work is done for strangers instead of your own family, it rarely pays a good wage, as noted by economics professor, Nancy Folbre:

… Caring often entails commitments to dependents such as young children, adults with disabilities or the frail elderly who can’t afford to pay directly for the services provided. It doesn’t fit easily into the impersonal logic of fee for service or supply and demand.

Further, caring often creates “outputs” that are not easily captured in market transactions, such as the increases in lifetime capabilities created by excellent kindergarten and preschool teachers.

It’s hard to imagine an explicit contract that could enable a care worker to “capture” the value-added – which extends well beyond increases in lifetime earnings to many less tangible benefits. …

And after all that, when women finally have the gall to ask for the real value of even traditionally paid employment, let alone all the things they do on the cheap with all their surplus energy, work that barely gets acknowledged as work, the Senior Communications Director of the Chamber of Commerce suggests that it’s motivated by something like greed.

I don’t think he knows what that means.

Cross posted from SEIU Early Learning.

It seems there’s been a bit of an uptick lately in musings on either side of the internet-is-destroying-our-attention-spans vs. internet-is-changing-our-consciousness-for-the-better debate.

I don’t know which point of view has the right of it, even if I do think I read a lot of edifying and interesting things on the ‘tubes. But what I do know is that, once upon a time, I loved to read books so much that I got myself into trouble for goofing off reading at least once a day.

I got in trouble for reading when I was supposed to be doing homework, cleaning my room, listening to my teacher, studying for church, anything. It made my 5th grade teacher so mad, all that reading stories all the time, she forbade me from picking up a book that wasn’t a textbook or assigned all year, even during recess and lunch when she said I ought to be playing with the other kids. Since I spent more time with books than people in the 5th grade, that was exactly the kind of disaster you can imagine it was likely to be.

It would have ticked of my 5th grade self so much if I’d known I was going to even get to go to college where you’re supposed to read all the time and then practically stop touching books from then on. Oh sure, you know, maybe a couple novels a year, a few non-fiction books for reference (and you don’t necessarily read those through like a novel, anyway,) magazines for planes and trains, that sort of thing.

But no more reading books like a chain smoker, barely finishing one before picking up another one and lighting in. No.

So anyhow, I’ve been reading more books lately to correct this terrible situation. Below the fold, I’m including favorite excerpts from recent reads that I haven’t already loaned out to someone else.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston:

Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage. Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it.

So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired.

… Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of [Joe] tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. in a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let [Joe] know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

I just finished Hurston’s book this morning and I could go on about how much I liked it, but that doesn’t mean as much as to say that it was so real that it was like reading the inside story of my own divorce and past romantic misadventures, like the story of finding that all the things I was told to want were hardly worth having and being glad to finally know it. It was that good.

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer:

The restaurant was devoid of everything except a guy–the maitre d’–who was sitting with his head in his hands. I was not surprised by this. Jobs in some parts of the world involve nothing more than a commitment to turning up and doing nothing for eight or nine hours. When your shift is over you go home and do nothing there as well. If your job is outdoors, then employment becomes indistinguishable from loitering. if your job involves being indoors, then it is often indistinguishable from the most abject despair.

Dyer is a travel author, so his job involves going all over the world, running into new people and mostly losing track of them, which he writes about in this series of autobiographical short stories. I’m only about half through reading it, but that passage there was on the page I opened it up to in the store that made me take it home.

I’d love to be able to add a passage or two from “Lake Shore Limited,” by Sue Miller, “Wishful Drinking,” by Carrie Fisher, or “Wench,” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve already loaned those out again so I can only tell you that they were wicked interesting and I recommend them heartily.

So instead of that, I’ll close with a passage from a book I read a while ago. It’s not exactly a favorite, as such, but most illuminating.

The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli:

Where a fear of God is lacking, the state must either fail or be sustained by a fear of the ruler which may substitute for the lack of religion. But since rulers live only a short while, such a state must vanish as soon as the abilities that sustained it have vanished. Hence it follows that states which rest solely upon a man’s abilities are of short duration and pass from the scene when his abilities are no more; and it seldom happens that they are renewed in his successor. As Dante wisely says:

Seldom does human probity ascend

From branch to branch; and this He wills, who gives it,

That being sought from Him, it may descend.

Therefore, the welfare of a republic or kingdom does not lie in its having a prince who governs it prudently while he lives, but rather in having one who organizes it in such a way that it may endure after his death. And though it is easier to persuade rude men to accept a new order or new opinions, this does not mean that it is impossible to do the same with cultivated men and with those who think they are not rude.

The people of Florence do not think they are ignorant or rude, yet Girolamo Savonarola convinced them that he conversed with God. I would rather withhold judgement as to whether this was true or not, for one must speak respectfully of so great a man. But I will certainly say that multitudes believed him without ever having seen anything extraordinary to compel their believing it. His manner of life, his teachings, and the matters he dealt with were enough to win their confidence. No one should therefore fear that he cannot accomplish what others have accomplished, for, as I said in the preface, men are born, live, and die in quite the same way as they always have.

… The rulers of republics or kingdoms must therefore seek to preserve the principles of their religion. Having done this, they will find it an easy matter to keep the state devout, obedient, and united. They should seek to favor and strengthen every circumstance that tends to enhance religion, even if they themselves judge it to be false. The wiser they are about natural reality, the more they should do this. Because wise men adhered to this rule, faith in miracles took root even among the false religions, for these wise ones sought to promote them, whatever their source and lent them their authority so that they came to be believed by everyone.

Between Machiavelli and the Godfather movies, a person can acquire a good aesthetic for a political education; it’s all spelled out. Though if you don’t want to read The Prince, even after that, you can always check out The Onion’s brief interpretation of this classic work, “Area Applebee’s a Hotbed of Machiavellian Political Maneuvering.”

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention Joe Biden’s son told the story of the death of his mother and the way his family rebuilt itself after tragedy. Halfway through his speech he uttered a line that still plays in my heart, “And then we married Jill.”

I didn’t have the world’s best childhood. The first 13 years of my life were mirthless and often violent. It is with no sense of hyperbole that I say I am lucky to be alive and writing with you today.

But it wasn’t luck, honestly, it was my mother. My mother took me out of a bad situation; my mother literally saved my life. We left hell and we learned to live – on our own—together. She taught me how to be independent; she taught me how to be happy again.

And then, in time, we met Dennis.

My mother started dating Dennis when I was a teenager and their connection was instantaneous. Within months they were deeply in love and I had a father figure that would make Seth Cohn jealous. Like Jill Biden, when Dennis married my mother, he married into a family. The years between then and now are filled with beautiful moments of a family coming together, of a girl learning to trust a father figure and of a man learning to be a husband and father.

Dennis isn’t a white knight; he didn’t rescue us from a bad situation. My mother rescued herself and rescued me. I’d like to think of Dennis more as karmic retribution. We’d been through the worst, so the universe sent us the best.

I’ve written before about my history of abuse and even the dating violence I experienced. Through the lessons of my mother and my friends I’ve tried not to allow that victimization define me. I think it’s so easy to get so caught up in the aspects of hate and victimization — especially if that victimization happens at a young age — that we don’t trust or accept love and happiness when it presents itself to us.

But I’ve learned – and am continuing to learn – about love and how to appreciate it. And I have to credit a lot of that to the love found between my mother and Dennis.

Firstly, thanks to everyone who commented on my post about self-sabotage. So many of you had interesting things to say (I’m definitely going to get checked out for ADHD) and the feedback really contributed to my ability to think about how to start making positive changes and get rid of self-defeating habits.

It also got me thinking about why this problem is so much worse lately (it has REALLY intensified in the last month). A few months ago, with steady work as a temp, I was doing much less self-sabotaging. I was also very unsatisfied with my job. But, for the most part, I showed up to work on time and got shit done. I was also posting regularly on my blog in my free time, although I still opted for watching The Bachelorette when I had the choice.

Flash forward to now, and I’ve got two internships, both of which are with organizations where I would kill to get a permanent position. Okay, I wouldn’t actually kill, but I would go pretty far. I’m thrilled with the work I’ve been doing and can’t believe my luck at landing gigs like these. So what gives? Why the feeling of listlessness and slight depression that has been nagging at me?

I think one huge contributing factor is this: money. Yes, my new endeavors are incredible, but they are also unpaid. Looking back, I realize that while the work was unsatisfying, one of my favorite things during my time at a job I hated was writing my rent check every month. I grew up with an extreme complex about financial security (we didn’t have much in my family), and I had never imagined being able to pay my own rent. Writing that check every month, despite dissatisfaction at work, gave me such a huge feeling of accomplishment.

To take on these internships, I’ve had to swallow my pride and ask extended family to help with the monetary side of things while I pursue unpaid work for a few months. I realize I am beyond lucky to have someone I can ask, many people do not have that luxury. But for some reason, it seems to me that I have (subconsciously) placed such extreme value on financial success, that regression in that dimension of my own success has put me into a tailspin. The most frustrating thing is that logically, I would say I am more successful now than when I was paying my rent, because I’m heading in the right direction on a career path I’ve chosen, rather than just doing something for the sake of having a job.

One of the commenters hit this right on the head:

I came from a very not-successful family background, and experienced crippling anxiety at every rung I climbed of the narrow ladder of social mobility. This resulted in a lot of the behavior that Tyla describes. Yes, I always knew that if I didn’t keep on my game, I might wind up back exactly where I came from. Which would have been horrible in ways that exceeded merely not having money.

But sometimes that pressure was more paralyzing than enabling. And sometimes the abuse of repeatedly reminding myself of how horrible my life would be if I didn’t leap through the next hoop successfully only resulted in my being a complete wreck after getting through the hoop.

At this moment in time, I am moving forward at a rate that astounds me in every aspect of personal success, except for finances. I think that the fear of financial failure is so crippling at this point, that it is largely contributing to my self-sabotage. As I described before, the other time self-sabotage reached an all-time high in my life was immediately after I moved to New York, and I wasn’t able to find work (largely because of my propensity to spend my time doing things other than looking for work). Evidently, the larger the possibility for financial ruin, the more paralyzed I become.

So the question becomes this: When I consciously value financial success so much less than other types of success (job satisfaction, good relationships, etc), why does the possibility of financial failure paralyze me? I need to figure out how to get my subconscious on board with the idea that when it comes down to it, the things I am working on now are so much more important than making a lot of money. If I don’t, I won’t be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities in front of me, which are unbelievable.

I’m afraid this may be easier said than done. Although, maybe I really do have ADHD and these problems will be easier to address once I’m medicated. I’m going to go call my doctor now…

I’ve met some of my closest friends online (heart you, tumblr), found soulmates through twitter and consider gchat a form of foreplay. It’s through the Internet that I’ve been allowed to spend these weeks writing with you.

As it’s been on feministe, my writing on my blog is pretty personal. We’ve all been told to write what we know and I’m guilty of taking that to an extreme. I post photos of myself; I ask for advice on even the most mundane of things and share experiences ranging from a difficult childhood to funny conversations with coworkers.

On the whole it’s all been positive. I’ve received great advice from total strangers and turned those strangers into some of my closest confidants. In short, the Internet has done right by me.

But then I decided to cut my hair.

For years I’ve wondered what it would be like to chop off my hair. Finally, in March, I did it. (Coco Chanel once said, “When a woman cuts her hair, her life is about to change.” Considering that I moved 3,000 miles about two months after chopping my locks, I think Coco may be on to something.)

Before I went through the actual hair cutting process I asked for opinions. Multiple times. Some of you may guess what happened next. I received an influx of e-mails from people who had a deep opinion on the length my hair; strangers who seemed invested in what I did with my appearance. Dudes sent in notes about how they have thoughts about what it would be like to run their hands through my hair. They said they’d regret it if I chopped it all off, that I’d be less attractive, that it would ruin their illusion. These people seemed to feel some sort of ownership in my appearance. To be crude, their e-mails felt like stockholders who had misgivings about design changes in a new line of products.

The responses shocked me; in some ways I was even a little scared. I took my personal e-mail address off my blog and reassessed the ways in which I present myself online. I realized that I’d allowed strangers to see intimate sides of me, but wasn’t necessary ready to deal with the ramifications of that false sense of intimacy.

A few creepy e-mails haven’t stopped me from posting mundane notes about my life, but it has made me reassess certain online safety precautions. Yes, I still do post photos of myself (with short hair!) but I’m more cautious.

I imagine that many of you also keep personal blogs and perhaps you also struggle with the level of intimacy you create. As I continue to learn and grow from my own experiences, I’d love to hear more about yours. How do you talk about your personal life? And if you do post your image on the web, how do you deal with that?

I’ve always been a high achiever. One of the only people in my high school class to move farther than five hours away for college, I attended a top ten school then moved to New York to start my real-person life.

I’m simultaneously proud of what I’ve accomplished (woohoo! Go, me!) and frustrated about where I’m at in my life at this point (currently doing three unpaid (albeit amazing) internships, borrowing money to pay my rent, and praying that at least one of these turns into a job), because I know that I should be farther along. Frustratingly enough, I also know that throughout all of this my biggest obstacle has been (drumroll please)…me. I am a master of self-sabotage.

I’m not sure when this started exactly. I’ve always procrastinated more than normal. Case in point: My freshman year of college, I waited until the night before a 17-page research paper was due to even begin doing my research. I got an A+. (I didn’t even know you could get an A+ in college.) This trend continued throughout my college career; I always barely finished my work before the deadline, but even when I thought the finished product was sub-par, it received high marks.

I’ve got a few theories here. Maybe, the reason I always did this to myself was because if I waited until the last minute and ended up receiving low marks, I’d feel as if I had an excuse for my failure. Or maybe it was because the feeling of accomplishment was that much larger when I got a high grade AND pulled an all-nighter, completing huge amounts of work in record time.

The scary thing is, I’ve carried self-sabotage with me into post-collegiate life. I waited until the month I graduated to apply for jobs, and even then, I only applied to one. When I got to New York, I didn’t spend my time diligently hunting for employment. Instead, I sat on my ass (in the apartment my boyfriend at the time was paying most of the rent for) watching tv and feeling sorry for myself. This was probably the low point in my life. I let myself spiral into a depression so deep I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Finally, I fell into a job. The temp agency found my resume online and called me. If they hadn’t, I might never have gotten my self-esteem back up to a respectable point; I might have continued to stew in my lack of confidence, putting my expensive education to use at Banana Republic. Thankfully, the job, while not a job I particularly liked, reassured me that I am smart, I have skills, and damn it, any organization would be lucky to have me as an employee. I worked there for eight months, until the position became full-time and (despite my stellar performance) they hired someone else.

At this point, I’d like to say that I had kicked self-sabotage’s ass. It certainly looked like it. Within a few short weeks, I secured two very different internships in a field I’m really excited about, something I couldn’t have managed to do a year beforehand because I was too busy stabbing myself in the back.

Unfortunately, I’m starting to realize that while things are much better, I haven’t stopped undermining my own success. I sit watching The Bachelorette instead of writing blog posts. I hit the snooze button so many times that being on time for work is no longer an option, even if I skip a shower and take a cab. I drink too much wine even though I know it is going to make me feel hung over, really hindering my ability to be an asset at work. I scrape by on the bare minimum, because I know I can.

And all of it makes me want to scream. “What the fuck, me?!?! Why are you doing this to yourself? Over and over? You have opportunities in front of you that many would die to have, and you’re going to fuck it up because you want to sleep fifteen more minutes?” (I curse at myself a lot.)

Just this morning, I sat here researching self-sabotage for this post instead of reading the notes that will prepare me for a meeting I’m hoping I’ll be asked to sit in on later this afternoon. (I DID take a break to read the notes.) But I’m back to research now and HOLY SHIT. I just found a list of questions about how to tell if you’re self-sabotaging, and it’s not even funny how many of the questions I answered “yes” to.

When will I stop being my own biggest enemy? My life is pretty incredible despite all of my own efforts to hold myself down, what might happen if I didn’t create obstacles to my own success? What might we all do if we could stop, take a deep breath, make a decision to stop getting in our own way, and then stick to it?

How do you get in your own way? How do you choose not to? I could really use some tips.

“Beautiful women have a lot of power. … From what I’ve seen, they get away with whatever they want.”

I overheard that during a break yesterday. A nice seeming man, late 30s or early 40s maybe, white, was chatting with the bartender in a mostly empty restaurant. That was what he said before launching into a meandering chat about the child he and his wife were expecting, and how he thought having kids kept a person feeling young. He did actually sound like a nice enough person, as much as you can tell such things about someone after only hearing them talk for a little while.

And I thought, wow, if conventionally attractive women really had as much power as he thinks they do, why aren’t they running everything? Why aren’t they the majority of CEOs? Why aren’t they the majority of officeholders?

Because it must be granted that women who fit a certain standard of appearance can sometimes get perks from that. It may be easier for them to find romantic partners. It made the news a while ago that women who were considered attractive tended to earn higher wages. Even if they might be too pretty to work in a bank or a traditionally male, blue collar workplace, you know, worse things could happen to a person than being born into a conventionally attractive female body.

It’s just that, at this point in time, it seems like 40-60 something (mostly white) men sympathetic to corporate control of everything are the people in society who actually can get away with whatever they want and do have a lot of power. They can rip off the government, rip off their customers, spread poison all over the face of the world and be so negligent that they get away with letting their employees actually die on the job.

As Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of Green For All said earlier this year, in a DC speech given shortly after the BP Gulf oil spill really hit the news, ‘First, we have to lift up that 11 people died just because they went to work.’ I think I remember that pretty close to the way she said it, because I’ve found myself thinking about it often. It’s a guess, but I have a feeling that BP’s senior management isn’t getting a Vogue spread any time soon.

Who is it that gets away with whatever they want, again?

The incident reminded me of a conversation with a male friend in our living room a few months ago. He said that, sure discrimination was bad, but “women these days” need to look at “how they behave.” He was referring to how it seemed like attractive women had an easier time getting out of traffic tickets, and he was thinking of one woman in particular, one that he wanted to date but hadn’t been able to strike up a relationship with.

And that was something to do with me, how? That was something to do with all women these days? Sure did suck that we still haven’t closed the wage gap, but look, this one woman got out of paying a ticket because she was pretty and men wanted to do things for her. Facepalm. We haven’t spoken since. Which is sad, because he’s not a bad person, nice enough. I just couldn’t think of anything to say in that moment that I wouldn’t have regretted, so I walked off to another room of the house and couldn’t turn around to look when he said goodbye, let himself out.

Like I said, he’s a nice enough guy, you know?

Hey there, Feministers! I’m Tyla, and the kind ladies here at Feministe have asked me to guest blog for two weeks. I’m beyond thrilled to be here, even though I’m a little late. You see, my guest blogging stint was supposed to start on Monday. When I was asked earlier this summer what weeks would be good for me, I thought, “Hey, by late August, my life will definitely have calmed down. I’ll have plenty of time to write really great, well thought out posts that everyone will love.” At that point, I was working as a temp and (I thought) very near to becoming full-time and salaried (every girl’s dream).

Since then, my life has done a total 180. Not only am I no longer in that position, let alone on a steady salary, in actuality, my job was given to someone else. I’m not complaining. The upset gave me an opportunity to follow a passion of mine, and since then, I’ve secured not one but two internships of my dreams. This week is the first week of the two internships happening simultaneously (both of them are supposed to be three days a week…but some smiling and sweet talking has helped me negotiate that situation). Also, my roommate and I are moving to a new apartment this weekend. If any of you have looked for an apartment in New York, you probably know that it is the closest to hell a New Yorker can get. Other than bedbugs. And oh yeah, we’re dealing with that this week too.

For clarity’s sake, I’m not whining. I’m having the time of my life and I couldn’t be more honored to try to squeeze guest blogging at Feministe into my all too hectic schedule this week and next. Bottom line, I’ve learned to never say “By then, life will have calmed down a bit,” because I know for me, and probably for most of you, life calming down doesn’t ever really happen. We learn to juggle. And we learn to deal. And on our good days, we smile and we’re thankful for the things that are going right. (Good thing you caught me on a good day…)

Thanks for having me!

(I just read the guest-blogging instructions and I’m supposed to tell you where I typically write. I have a blog called Learning to Live Without a Microwave. I have been slacking off there as well, see craziness of life mentioned above. I’ve been told that I may get to do some writing at my new internship at Saveur magazine, but since I just started today, I really can’t be sure about that one yet. Keep your fingers crossed for me!)

Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck decided to commemorate the 90th anniversary of suffrage, the recognition of women’s right to vote, by suggesting last week that women who want equal pay have a “fetish for money,” and recommending that women focus our energies on “choosing the right partner at home.”

His post was titled “Equality, Suffrage and a Fetish for Money.” Instead of quoting at length, I’ll let Peck’s own comments on Twitter, in response to SEIU’s Kate Thomas, give you the shorter version in his words:

No. Point was pay is just one thing of value. To achieve your values need to pick the right job/right partner. (1/2)

Fixating on pay as the only thing of value shows a fetish for money. (2/2)

In the post itself, he approvingly quoted another writer who compared women’s interest in equal pay to the famously greedy, stingy Disney character, Scrooge McDuck.

Peck went on to say that “individual choices” about how much time women take out of paid work are responsible for most of the pay gap. The mysterious reason for all this extra time off that women end up taking? Peck doesn’t say explicitly in his own words, but he’s clearly referring to family responsibilities, as spelled out in the section of the New York Times article that he quotes at length in the body of his post.

The message seemed clear enough: if women chose not to have children, they didn’t have much to worry about. Only someone with a “fetish for money” would be concerned about the rest of the pay gap.

After his post was roundly bashed on other blogs, Peck added a sort-of apology, and the next day David Chavern, the COO of the Chamber wrote a post walking Peck’s statements back. But this is cold comfort, because the Chamber has lobbied for years against legislative efforts to reduce gender disparities at work, particularly fighting hard against accommodations for pregnancy and motherhood.

The market has failed women, failed their families. What’s truly offensive is that neither Peck, nor Chavern, nor any of their colleagues will acknowledge it. Chavern pretends complete ignorance of the well-documented reasons why women do better in environments “they create for themselves.” Presumably, environments women create for themselves don’t regard their experience as parents as a trivial annoyance causing mental incapacity.

Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, laws against pay equity have been delayed and are still insufficient. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, the US is alone in industrialized countries without paid leave for new mothers.

They can’t apologize sweetly enough to make these assaults on the financial security of America’s working families less damaging.

Photo courtesy, Julien Haler on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed, 2009.

Cross posted from SEIU Early Learning.

About four months ago I decided to move from my sunny apartment in San Francisco back to my seaside Maine homeland.

Over the course of a month I packed up a life I’d created for myself and shipped it to the other side of the continent. During the packing process I went through a major cleanse. I donated 12 bags of clothes to Goodwill, I sold furniture and I left furniture on the street (fun fact: If you put anything on the street in San Francisco it will disappear before you turn around. It’s like magic).

The end result was 18 medium sized boxes of items I thought I could not live without. 18 boxes of clothes and dishes and memories that seemed essentially to me being me; my life in 18 boxes.

In the three months since, I’ve left those boxes packed. I’ve lived out of two suitcases and it’s been fine. Are my clothing choices slightly more limited? Yes. Does it really matter? No.

Next week, when I move into my new apartment, I’ll be reunited with those 18 boxes. In the time that’s passed, I’ve forgotten what they contain (except for my ruby red Kitchen Aid and my tea cups. I have vivid dreams about being reunited with my tea cups and food processor).

Part of me wants to leave those boxes locked away in my parents’ garage for a little bit longer. I’m tempted to start over with fewer things and just see what happens. I want to leave those 18 boxes tucked away and go back to them in a few years and review what they contain (this would also satisfy my childhood dreams of becoming an archeologist). I probably won’t end up doing this (mainly because my dad is pretty eager to get his garage back) and next week I may write you a post all about how wonderful it is to be reunited with what you’ve (temporarily) lost.

I know I should use this time with you gorgeous feministe readers to talk about gender and sexuality and, well, feminism. But today my contribution is a question about stuff. And what we think we need versus what are just items we’ve collected. Perhaps we all need to be prompted to get rid of the things that don’t actually matter and just see what happens.

Except your ruby red Kitchen Aids. Never part with those.