Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Elizabeth Warren, “It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work”

    You may remember, as readers of SeniorWomen.com, that we recently reprised the item we had constructed long ago about Elizabeth Warren. Now President Obama has appointed her as a Special Assistant. What follows is the WhiteHouse.gov blog entry she posted after her appointment.

    Once you’ve read her posting, take a look at her article in the Journal of Democracy (2007), Unsafe at Any Rate; If it’s good enough for microwaves, it’s good enough for mortgages. Why we need a Financial Product Safety Commission

    Fighting to Protect Consumers

    Posted by Elizabeth Warren on September 17, 2010 at 6:00 AM EDT

    Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.

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  • Counter Space, Design and the Modern Kitchen at MoMA: From genuine pleasure to anxiety

    Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Frankfurt Kitchen

    The Museum of Modern Art presents Counter Space: Design and the Kitchen. In the aftermath of World War I, about 10,000 of these kitchens were manufactured for public-housing estates built around Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, as part of a comprehensive 5-year program to modernize the city. Schütte-Lihotzky’s compact and ergonomic design, with its integrated approach to storage, appliances, and work surfaces, reflected a commitment to transforming the lives of ordinary working people on an ambitious scale. Since the innovations of Schütte-Lihotzky and her contemporaries in the 1920s, kitchens have continued to articulate, and at times actively challenge, our relationships to food; popular attitudes toward the domestic role of women, family life and consumerism; and even political ideology, as in the case of the famous 1959 Moscow Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War.

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  • What Color Are Your Socks?

    by Roberta McReynolds

    What a simplistic, mindless question. Ten words into this (including the title) and I’ve quite possibly already triggered several more in your mind: Who cares? My socks … why? You’re kidding, right?

    It just so happens that I am acquainted with a young woman who cares very much about the color of her socks. Correction: make that multi-colored socks. They are Misti’s trademark, the outward extension of the essence of her personality. They mirror her joie de vive — the joy of life.

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  • Shopping at Montreal’s Fine Arts Museum Shop

    “M Boutique,”  an online shop from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, “offers wide a selection of original gift ideas from many different countries, at prices for every budget. There are beautiful items for your home, as well as sculptures, textiles, jewellery and contemporary creations.  Many of these pieces come from Africa, Asia and South America, and echo the diversity of the Museum’s collection or the exhibitions on display. M Boutique features objects with a clear connection to art and design, with particular emphasis on the creations of Quebec artists and artisans.”

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  • Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917–1924

    This exhibit highlights the small team of American women who left the United States to devote themselves to relief work in France during and after World War I. Their leader was Anne Morgan (1873–1952), a daughter of the financier Pierpont Morgan. As she rallied potential volunteers and donors on speaking tours across the United States, Morgan harnessed the power of documentary photography to foster a humanitarian response to the plight of French refugees. Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917–1924 is on view through November 21, 2010.

    With haunting views of ruined French towns, portraits of refugees, and tableaux of American volunteers at work, the exhibition explores not only the human cost of war but also the potency of photographic propaganda and the influence of women’s activism. The show traces the fieldwork of the American Committee for Devastated France, the volunteer civilian relief organization that Morgan created with her friend Anne Murray Dike (1879–1929). Morgan, with her commanding presence and social prominence, took the lead in fundraising efforts, while Dike, trained as a physician, organized activities in the field.

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  • ‘Unretiring’ and Social Security Myths from the Urban Institute

    The Urban Institute released a report, Work and Retirement Patterns for the G.I. Generation, Silent Generation, and Early Boomers: Thirty Years of Change. What follows is the executive summary of that report:

    The choices and constraints confronting older workers contemplating retirement have been changing rapidly. Today’s older adults are generally better able to work than previous generations because health has improved at older ages and jobs have become less physically demanding. Traditional defined benefit pensions, which typically penalize participants who work too long, have been supplanted by defined contribution (DC) plans as the dominant type of employer-sponsored retirement plan. Employer-sponsored retiree health benefits, which generally provide health insurance to retirees before Medicare begins at age 65, are disappearing, making it more expensive for many workers to retire early. Social Security’s full retirement age (FRA) has increased, the retirement earnings test was eliminated in 2000 for those who have reached the FRA, and the delayed retirement credit is now eight times as high as it was in the mid 1970s. All of these changes have boosted work incentives at older ages.

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  • More Children Being Raised by Grandparents Since the Start of the ‘Great Recession’

    by Gretchen Livingston and Kim Parker, Pew Research Center

    One child in ten in the United States lives with a grandparent, a share that increased slowly and steadily over the past decade before rising sharply from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data.

    About four-in-ten (41%) of those children who live with a grandparent (or grandparents) are also being raised primarily by that grandparent, according to the Census data.

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  • CutureWatch, Review of The Constant Liberal: The Life and Work of Phyllis Bottome

    Joan L. Cannon Review of The Constant Liberal: The Life and Work of Phyllis Bottome. There is a dichotomy evident in Phyllis Bottome’s equal determination to do something about injustice and inequity wherever she saw it. Imagine a family that be called dysfunctional mostly because of the self-absorbed and seemingly callous mother who vastly preferred her sister, and a father who was the stereotypical, distant pater familias as the breeding ground for an extraordinarily independent mind.

  • Confessions of a Domestically-Challenged Homemaker

    by Rose Madeline Mula

    If you glanced around my home, you would probably assume that I’m a great housekeeper— a veritable Martha Stewart. But you’d be wrong. True, you wouldn’t see any clutter. No piles of old magazines and newspapers littering chairs and table tops, no unwashed dishes in the sink, no rumpled clothes on the bedroom floors …  Everything looks neat and tidy.

    However, if you paused for a closer inspection, you’d discover my dirty little secrets:

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  • An Adventure on Cape Breton Island

    by Kristin Nord

    The Welps of Connecticut had been having a grand adventure on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, traversing the switchbacks of the highlands and hiking some of its most famous trails. Lisa was posting her exuberant photo impressions daily on Facebook. Then the postings stopped, and her tone shifted abruptly — to Sunday’s missive:

    “Hello everyone, we are stranded at a place called Meat Cove on Cape Breton Island. Came for one night of camping and had a very heavy rainstorm that washed out five bridges. Not sure how or when we are getting out. I guess it’s just another Welp adventure…”

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