Go with the flow…and meet AtMP

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How do you balance your time when you’re trying to deliver the services you offer, keep up your marketing programs, continue to network, start a new organization (including people, websites, sponsors, etc. etc.), get in your usual single-handed household/car/pet chores, keep up your exercise, and enjoy the spring weather?

Can it be done? Well, probably some things don’t get as much attention as you’d like. And maybe, like me, your choice of what’s going to get the most today is randomly determined. But if you’re like me on this, too, a beautiful spring day makes all things seem possible and you figure what you miss today you’ll get done another.

Was delighted this past weekend to meet a bunch of members of what will soon become a sister organization to SWWAN — the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP). Their website is www.unmarried.org and that alone can tell you why we feel a good fit! They are committed to political action to change the unfavorable status of single people/couples under the law. Stay tuned as we develop our relationship…

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Barbara Payne, May 7th 2007 | Posted in beautiful spring day, multitasking, single working women, unmarried

African sons respecting their single moms

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Can you imagine a grownup son deciding to change his name to include his mother’s instead of his father’s? Seems it’s happening with some regularity in Kenya, according to this article, which also talks about neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s book “Raising Boys Without Men,” applauding the single “maverick moms” who help their sons grow up to be good men who also have an appreciation for feelings.

Apparently to use a feminine surname in Africa is highly unusual (in the U.S. our surnames don’t denote gender) and invites ridicule from others. Yet more young sons of single moms are choosing to do it anyway because of the deep respect they have for what their mothers went through to raise them.

It’s great to hear this. After watching a documentary last night about the 50 years that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spent trying to win the vote for women–and a few other rights like abolition, and the right of married women to own property–it makes me feel that it might be easier for men to appreciate women and be willing to grant them respect and equality if the economic distance between them isn’t so wide as it is in a lot of the U.S.

Perhaps there’s some of the class war about women’s equality…much as racism can be viewed in that way.

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Barbara Payne, May 5th 2007 | Posted in African single women/mothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, motherhood, single mothers, single working women, Susan B. Anthony

Poverty is bad–but we have options

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Found some stats about unequal women’s pay at this student labor website. Fortunately, many single working women are now very successful financially, but when you think about the implications of these facts for a lot of other single women, you can see how far we have yet to go.

Significant: “If married women were paid the same as men in comparable jobs, their family incomes would rise by nearly 6 percent, and their families’ poverty rates would fall from 2.1 percent to 0.8 percent.”

Even more significant: “If single women earned as much as men in comparable jobs, their incomes would rise by 13.4 percent and their poverty rates would be reduced from 6.3 percent to 1 percent. And if single working mothers earned as much as men in comparable jobs, their family incomes would increase by nearly 17 percent and their poverty rates would be cut in half, from 25.3 percent to 12.6 percent.”

I don’t love statistics. They can be jimmied around to “prove” pretty much anything you want. But they can still give us some guidance on what we should be shooting for. The fact is that more and more people are remaining single–doesn’t look like that trend is changing any time soon–and that 40% of births in the U.S. today are to single mainly-adult women (not teenagers).

So it appears that the simple move of paying men and women equally for the same work could quickly and dramatically change the landscape for hundreds of thousands of our children…both today and in the future…without having to think up or do anything else. And how would businesses adjust? The same way they have always done to “impossible” increases in the minimum wage.

Be inspired by how the Grameen Foundation is empowering people–and attacking poverty at its roots. These are the folks that SWWAN will be contributing a portion of its revenues to.

Now if we want to talk about saving businesses money, let’s talk about health care costs.

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Barbara Payne, April 29th 2007 | Posted in equal pay, mothers, poverty, single mothers, single working women
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