Mommy Markets
MEGHAN COX GURDON has missed an opportunity to preach what she practices in her review of Wendy Sachs's How She Really Does It ("Professional Mothers," July 18).
In addition to deflating some of the myths of the feminist movement, Gurdon might consider that many women are currently in the work force because they have no choice. Staying at home might mean losing your house.
The experiences of news anchors and actresses are novel. It is easy to criticize the choices of women who have the income to walk away from their jobs, but it is specious to compare their career ambitions to those who have no such luxury.
Further, the idea that women should instead have children in their 20s and enter the work force later would require the same kind of social shift that pushed women into the work force. It presupposes marriage in one's early 20s, implying an instant return to traditional sexual mores.
People pursue their education in their youth and build credentials in their 20s and 30s. To begin later is not necessarily easier, and likely means your peers have left you in the dust.
Instead of laying guilt on the mother whose child bawls his eyes out at day care, Gurdon, as a writer--a working mother--who is able to stay home, might offer some entrepreneurial suggestions.
Markets ultimately reflect demands. As markets came to value women as much as they valued men, they can come to value parents, but only if we demand it.
We might demand improved flex-time arrangements for both parents with the aid of technology: home office, contract, and project work. Such solutions acknowledge our present economy while allowing mothers and fathers to be successful as both professionals and, more important, as parents.
Eileen Norcross
Arlington, VA
Go Mudcat
I'M PLEASED THAT Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, portrayed in Matt Labash's "Hunting Bubba" (June 20), is a Democrat. He brags about cheating to pass his real estate exam, is a "former" drinker with moonshine in the cooler, claims to have a 200-word vocabulary, and can't finish a sentence without profanity. Clearly all that makes Mudcat superior to the Dems' recent presidential candidates. As a recovered Democrat myself, I encourage the party leaders to do exactly as he says.
Kevin Kennedy
Puyallup, WA
Foreign Brains
ROBERT SATLOFF is correct: There were more international students in U.S. universities in the last academic year for which data are available, 2003-04, than there were the year before 9/11 ("The Brain Drain That Wasn't," July 25). But it isn't fair to hold those of us who worry about international student enrollment trends accountable for newspapers' sometimes overblown headlines about dramatic declines (although there have been dramatic declines at some schools and from some countries).
Here are the facts, so readers can judge for themselves: After increases every year since 1972, international student enrollments at U.S. universities leveled off during the 2002-03 academic year and declined during 2003-04. Preliminary data suggest a further decline in 2004-05, which followed the imposition of new visa procedures in 2002. When it becomes exponentially harder to get into this country, and then fewer people come, one is justified in supposing that the former had something to do with the latter.
Is the downward trend ephemeral or long-term? No one knows. But no enterprise that waits to take corrective action until it has definitively lost its market will long be in business. Advocates of educational exchange are not alone in sounding the alarm. Secretaries of State Powell and Rice, among many other national leaders, have frequently expressed concern and have promised corrective measures to ensure that the United States does not lose its edge in attracting the precious resource of international students.
Suggesting that concern over international student enrollment is nothing but exaggerated rhetoric is both wrong and a disservice to an important national asset.
Marlene M. Johnson
Executive Director & CEO
Association of International Educators
Washington, DC