"When I started my faculty position, I occasionally would bring our 8-month-old to work. On several occasions my colleagues (male), would say, 'So, you're babysitting today, eh?" If our son had been with my wife, no one would have said she was babysitting, not being a parent. It discouraged me...

When I was writing my book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict in the late 1990s, I was hoeing a lonely field. Feminism was all about domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography. Work-family issues were just...dowdy. Much has changed, and it's exciting to have talented and dedicated colleagues. Heather Boushey...

William and Debra Trujillo worked at the Jim Bridger Power Plant in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Together they had been with PacificCorp, the company that owns the plant, for 28 years. Then their son Charlie got a brain tumor, which metastasized to his spine. Things looked up for a while, but...

I love Maureen Dowd because she is the only New York Times op-ed writer who understands class. Gender...not so much. Case in point is today's "Blue is the New Black" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20dowd.html?_r=1, in which she tackles the issue of why American women have gotten gloomier since 1972, with a trend line...

It's no surprise to the vast majority of us who have both a job and family responsibilities that something's not working at work. The American workplace is perfectly suited for the American workforce...of the 1950s. Even today, when 46% of the U.S. workforce is made up of women and 81%...

Gender, gender, gender. Race, race, race. We read all the time about the role each is playing in this election.

But why did McCain pick Sarah Palin? To revive the culture wars - the wedge issues that have delivered the working class to the Republicans again and again since the...

The culture wars are resurgent, says the New York Times. The Times' analysis of the themes in the Republican National Convention showed that God was mentioned more than any other single theme, followed closely by taxes.

God and taxes. You wouldn't think they were a natural pair.

Actually, if...

She may be. But, as someone who just sent my youngest off to college, and who has dedicated decades of hard work to making the world safer for working mothers -- boy, does this set us up for a bruising.

Is Palin showing family values? Think about it. Here...

On this July 4th, it's worth spending a few moments figuring out how patriotism came to follow the contours of class conflict in the U.S.

Patriotism used to be a given among all classes of Americans. This ended during the war in Vietnam. As the New Deal Coalition waned...

How can Obama "move towards the center" without losing his chief appeal: our sense that he is principled and sincere? The Clinton DLC roadmap was to get into bed with the powers that be in oh-so-many ways, from siding with big business on NAFTA, to welfare "reform" that abolished an...

Of course we do. It's a good thing, too, that Obama had the courage to say so, because this offers a key way to connect with white working class voters.

Responsibility is all over the class literature. "[M]y father made a religion of responsibility," notes Alfred Lubrano, a reporter...

Come, come, now, fellow Democrats -- don't write off someone who is trying to help Obama win the presidency as (of all things) -- a Republican. Some of the comments on my last post eloquently demonstrate the kind of insults that so deeply offend working class voters:

"If I were...

There was a flood of comments to my first post, all the way from, "Uneducated voters respond well to pandering," to "[The working class] needs be respected and their views listened to. But too often their views are not in their best interest.... How do you get them to...

Now that we finally have a Democratic nominee, a burning issue is how Obama can win the voters who went overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton. It's a complicated topic. This blog will offer a game plan over the next few weeks. (I will speak to Obama, egghead to egghead, providing...