My friend and colleague in the fight for family caregivers, Janice Lynch Schuster, recently had a conversation with her children about what may happen when she becomes older. It went like this, as Janice wrote in Fierce Urgency of Now: Family Caregivers and the Future that is Upon Us for the blog Disruptive Women in Health Care: Just before Mother’s Day, I was a guest on an Al-Jazeera news segment focused on the challenges of aging in America. It was my first-ever news appearance, and, later, I proudly showed a recording to my adult daughters when they came by to visit. The segment included a...

In Part I of this guest post by Cyma Shapiro, we explored the fundamental economics of choosing midlife mothering. Here, we listen to experts and midlife mothers weigh-in on this increasingly prevalent life choice. You can pop back to Part I of this post , if you wish, to refresh your recollection before moving on to Part II. What price will women pay to achieve motherhood? At what cost will someone over age 40 go to, to fulfill a dream of loving, nurturing and having a family? Does the increasing number of women choosing new older parenting mean that the sheer economics of it all require...

I wrote this post for The Shriver Report, where it originally appeared on March 21, 2014. They have kindly given me permission to post it here in full. Here is a link to its original appearance. Everything I know about how women got the right to vote in this country began with a movie called “ Iron-jawed Angels ”. I was invited to a screening in the Library of Congress before the HBO broadcast. It was then that I realized that women’s suffrage, treated like something of a footnote in US history class, was such a controversial issue that women had been beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and...

On Monday, March 17, you can watch The Shriver Report's new documentary "Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert" on HBO. This film traces the daily frustrations of a single mother of three kids who works as a direct care aide in a nursing home. While the film drills down into the details of Katrina's life, the point of the whole film is that 42 million women in the US are walking a high wire every day. Working at low wage jobs, they put off their own needed health care or filling their prescriptions in favor of putting gas in the car or paying for child care. Missing a...

The best thing about March is the annual outpouring of information about women. This year's rich harvest includes some terrific profiles of women's work in photography, theater, and museum leadership. Make no mistake - new ground is being broken here, and we are still seeing many "firsts". My own WHM observance began last week, at the National Geographic's Women of Vision exhibit. Going in, you only know you will see the work of 11 female photojournalists. I wondered, will their gender be obvious in their work? Do they choose different subjects than men do? Do they see the world through a...

We’re poised at a sweet spot between the release of The Shriver Report in January, and the arrival of March as Women’s History Month. Momentum is growing for paid leave and paid sick days, candidates for the 2014 mid-term elections are shaping their campaigns, and think tanks in DC are churning out data on women at a furious pace. Nancy Pelosi and Kirsten Gillibrand have been pushing their Women’s Economic Opportunity Agenda with legislation to promote pay equity, paid leave, paid sick days, accessible and affordable child care, and an end to discrimination against pregnant workers. Under the...

I wrote this post for the Mothers Central Blog , where it appeared on January 16, 2014. Kate Fineske, the mother-in-charge of the site, graciously gave me permission to cross post it on my own blog, where you will find it in full below. Check out the rest of Kate's collection about parenting, motherhood, and how we achieve the impossible every. single. day - but only after you've finished reading this post! Mention politics to most people, and their eyes glaze over. Who can blame them? It’s depressing, an endless display of bad behavior by self-serving and self-important stuffed shirts. And...

In the past 24 hours I've come across three items in two major newspapers that are totally unrelated, but in light of each other, suggest to me that women's status in the US may be sliding back faster than it is moving forward. Maybe you'll agree? The first is an column by Dana Milbank, a political writer at the Washington Post, entitled Courts Reap What They Sow . The primary message is that recent decisions of the US Supreme Court have allowed those with wealth and power to exert tremendous influence in elections, the selection of candidates, and the shaping of policies. This ocean of cash...

My New York Times Sunday Dialogue piece on pro-family policy changes that could improve caregivers' economic security elicited a number of responses. One led me to a post by Valerie Adrian, a mother of 3 currently pursuing her Ph,D. in Sociology on the opposite side of the country, but engaged in issues of gender and work like I am. Instead of the usual middle class context for "opting out" she wrote about "... my own experiences as a working class mom in the secondary sector, for whom staying at home meant a little dignity and autonomy, even with tighter belts." I offer below excerpts from...