Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Follow up to What Women Want: Equal Benefits for Equal Premiums

    Women’s Policy Inc included testimony in their newsletter from various witnesses in front of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee committee. What follows is selected from the WPI Newsletter, The Source:

    Jim Guest from Consumer’s Union: “Common health needs specific to women too often are not covered under current health insurance practices. We heard from numerous women who found themselves with coverage delayed or denied because of very common health needs, such as benign fibroids, previous fertility treatments, pregnancies and the like.”

    Marcia Greenberger, president of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), discussed the results of a report issued by NWLC: Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Insurance Market Fails Women, saying, “The [NWLC] investigated two phenomena: the ‘gender gap’ the difference in premiums charged to female and male applicants of the same age and health status in samples from each state and the District of Columbia … and the availability and affordability of coverage for maternity care across the country…Based on this research, NWLC found that the individual insurance market is a very difficult place for women to buy health coverage. Insurance companies can refuse to sell women coverage altogether due to a history of any health problems whatsoever, or charge women higher premiums based on factors that include gender, age and health status. This coverage is often very costly and limited in scope, and it fails to meet women’s needs. In short, women face too many obstacles obtaining comprehensive, affordable health coverage in the individual market simply because they are women.”

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  • Dorothea Lange – “Just to Come in the Room Where She Was”

    One rarely sees pictures of the photographer Dorothea Lange. The woman she photographed who became the face of the Depression is the migrant woman, Florence Owens Thompson. But it is the photo taken by Lange’s husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, of Lange herself atop the roof and hood of a car that is striking in its own way and a reminder of their own relationship.

    An excerpt from “Face to Face with Paul and Dorothea,” Professor Emeritus Clark Kerr’s memory of the couple, printed in a California Alumni Association, California Monthly:

    Although Paul’s original interest in Dorothea stemmed from his conception of the camera as a tool of research, their relationship became far more than a professional collaboration. It became a great love affair. Paul later said: “It was always a wonderful thing to see her. Always. Just to come into the room where she was.” Years later, I would visit Paul in the old redwood house on Euclid Avenue which Dorothea had chosen for them. As Paul played Beethoven softly on his hi-fi set, we would talk about being on the ground in the Thirties. Dorothea’s name would come up and Paul would sit there with tears streaming down his face as I recalled his tender words – “just to come into the room where she was.”

    But back to Florence Owens Thompson, in Lange’s own words:

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  • An American Ballroom Companion

    The Library of Congress website Western Social Dance provides not only a background on the history but dance instruction manuals and video clips:

    For centuries, in Europe and wherever Europeans have settled, the ballroom was the perfect setting for men and women to demonstrate their dancing abilities, to show their awareness of the latest fashions, and to display their mastery of polite behavior – qualities required for acceptance in society. The importance of dance and appropriate conduct was echoed in manuals that date back to the early Renaissance, to a time when courtiers, gentry, and wealthy citizens were fortunate enough to have a private dancing master or to have taken advantage of the skills of itinerant masters who traveled from one court to another.

    The grandeur of the Baroque court of King Louis XIV and his court at the Palace of Versailles set the stage for a new style of dance that would spread to royal courts throughout Europe. With the development of a dance notation system, published in 1700 by dancing master Raoul-Auger Feuillet, French court dance could be taught in every palace and manor house. By the end of the eighteenth century, when ideals of democracy swept through nations, group dances gained popularity, so dance instruction manuals, as well as etiquette books, were published to enlighten a growing middle class of Europeans and European colonists, especially those in the Americas.

    In the era of the nineteenth century, a proliferation of publications were intended to aid those who needed to adhere to the expanded rules and regulations surrounding the growing ritual of the ballroom. As well as knowing the most fashionable dances, precepts for the ballroom also included the organization of balls and the protocol of invitations, introductions, choice of dances, and appropriate music. Dance instruction manuals and corresponding etiquette and fashion manuals provided instruction for fashionable dances, appropriate ballroom conversation, and even the handling of silverware in the supper room.

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  • Forgetting and Remembering

    Ferida Wolff writes: My memory has become somewhat erratic. One woman I know who had, over the course of sixty years, propagated thousands of houseplants and now finds she can’t remember their names. Surely her extended botanical history would qualify as long-term memory.

  • Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth

    Although Gourmet magazine has produced and shipped its last magazine in print, editor Ruth Reichl is the peripatetic star of Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, to be seen weekly on local PBS stations, which means … check your local listings.

    Sixty-eight years after its debut, Condé Nast has decided to fold its colorful, sophisticated and travel-laced magazine, taking refuge on the road with “cooking adventures in all the most delicious places.” Gourmet will be continuing it’s fabulously successful website, Epicurious, however, as well as Bon Appetit.

    The first episode takes Ms. Reichl to Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, the “cradle of American food.” Making cheese, preserving jam and vegetables, spending time with the butcher and fishing for trout with Frances McDormand (the star of Fargo) are ingredients of the segment. “This is the way we all want to cook,” says Ruth:

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  • Academic Earth, Civil War and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches

    We’ve mentioned Academic Earth previously for a single lecture but decided to expand on its course offerings broadcast from various colleges. Here is another example of what’s offered at this site:

    The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877.

    This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877 … Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

    A lecture from that course is Why Does the Civil War Era Has a Hold on the American Imagination? is an introduction to the larger course, given by Yale’s David W. Blight.

    One of the books the professor is using is Louise May Alcott’s experiences as a nurse in civil war hospitals, Hospital Sketches. It can be read in its entirely at Gutenberg:

    “He lay on a bed, with one leg gone, and the right arm so
    shattered that it must evidently follow: yet the little Sergeant was as
    merry as if his afflictions were not worth lamenting over; and when a
    drop or two of salt water mingled with my suds at the sight of this
    strong young body, so marred and maimed, the boy looked up, with a
    brave smile, though there was a little quiver of the lips, as he said,

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  • Poetry: Off the Page [iTunes]

    Off the Page, a review from the Scout Report, Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin; Sponsored by University of Wisconsin – Madison Libraries.

    Listening to poets is always enjoyable, and this collection of poetry readings is quite a pip. The site contains performances from the past five decades, and visitors can listen to dozens of British poets read a host of different works. On the homepage, visitors can browse through these offerings via the areas “Poet”, “Date”, and “Location”. The earliest recordings here include the Scottish modernist Hugh MacDiarmid reading Moonstruck, Stony Limits, and The Eemis Stane. Other poets represented in this collection include Allen Fisher, Caroline Bergvall, Harriet Tarlo, and Attila the Stockbroker. The site also includes a set of links to other online audio collections, performance organizations, and online performance archives.

  • Grandman’s Boxes: The Puzzling Newspaper Article

    Roberta McReynolds writes: Her time capsules would not be discovered for over twenty years. I had the impression that the contents were arranged to make sense to me, working on the assumption that she understood I would be the one to discover them someday.

  • The States of Marriage and Divorce

    by D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center

    In Arkansas and Oklahoma, men and women marry young – half of first-time brides in these states were age 24 or younger on their wedding day. These states also have above-average shares of women who divorced in 2007-2008.

    It’s the opposite state of affairs in Massachusetts and New York. Their residents marry late – half of ever-married New York men were older than age 30 when they first wed. These states also have below-average shares of men and women who divorced in 2007-2008.

    Remember the classic country song: All My Ex’s Live in Texas? Well, George Strait was on to something. Looking at numbers, Texas is indeed home to more thrice-married adults than any other state, about 428,000 women and 373,000 men. But that’s partly because it’s home to so many people, period. Looking at rates, about 6% of Texans who ever have been married have wed three times or more. That is similar to the national average (5%), but well below the leaders in this category – the neighboring states of Arkansas and Oklahoma – where about 10% of all ever-married adults have had at least three spouses.

    Meantime, back in New York and Massachusetts, just 2% of ever-married adults have been married at least three times, placing them at the bottom on this measure among the 50 states.

    These findings are drawn from the recently released 2008 American Community Survey, which offers the most detailed portrait yet from the US Census Bureau of marriage and divorce statistics at the state level. This is the first time the survey has included estimates of marriage and divorces within the previous 12 months, duration of marriages and Americans married multiple times.

    National Picture

    On the national level, the Census Bureau survey showed that a shrinking share of Americans are married2 – 52% of males ages 15 and older and 48% of females ages 15 and older. The proportion of Americans who are currently married has been diminishing for decades and is lower than it has been in at least half a century. The age range used in standard Census tabulations dates back to the days when more people married as young teenagers. Among Americans 18 and older, the proportion currently married, but not separated, is 55% for men and 50% for women.

    Nationally, the median age at first marriage has been climbing for decades: It now stands at 28 for men and 26 for women, meaning that half are younger and half are older when they wed. Among married Americans, the median duration of their married life in 2008 was 18 years. Among men, 9% are divorced; among women, 12% are.

    About 2.3 million men reported that they wed within the previous year, and 1.2 million said they divorced. About 2.2 million women said they wed and 1.3 million said they divorced. About one-in-twenty Americans who ever have been married said they had been married three or more times. That comes to 4 million men and 4.5 million women.

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  • How Reverse Mortgage Lenders Put Older Homeowners’ Equity at Risk

    The National Consumer Law Center* in Boston has released a new study about reverse mortgages, How Reverse Mortgage Lenders Put Older Homeowners’ Equity at Risk

    From the Introduction:

    “The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and other federal regulators that oversee banks were slow to recognize the threat posed by the recent boom in subprime mortgage lending,
    and slow to act. So it was noteworthy when, in June 2009, Comptroller John C. Dugan, went before a gathering of bankers and warned of a danger growing in a market designed to serve the nation’s seniors: ‘While reverse mortgages can provide real benefit, they also have some of the same characteristics as the riskiest types of subprime mortgages — and that should set off alarm bells.’”

    “During 2008 more than 100,000 seniors used reverse mortgages to tap more than $17 billion in home equity. Within the mortgage industry, reverse mortgages continue to grow despite the economic downturn, with volume more than doubling between 2005 and 2008. Despite a summer slowdown in originations, 2009 still appears
    to be on pace for a record year.”

    “Certainly, the continuing availability of reverse mortgages is good news for seniors who need to cash out some of their housing wealth to supplement Social Security, to meet unexpected medical
    costs, or to make needed home repairs. But growth in the reverse mortgage market has unleashed other, more malign forces.”

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