Muhlenberg To Host Award-Winning Journalist Crittenden For Lecture On Motherhood
Award-winning journalist and author Ann Crittenden will give the second annual Danielle Dionne Guerin Memorial Lecture in Women’s Studies at Muhlenberg College, Wednesday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall. Crittenden’s lecture is titled “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued.”Tuesday, March 18, 2003 00:35 PM
Award-winning journalist and author Ann Crittenden will give the second annual Danielle Dionne Guerin Memorial Lecture in Women’s Studies at Muhlenberg College, Wednesday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall. Crittenden’s lecture is titled “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued.”
Crittenden’s recent book of the same title is a stunning indictment of an American economic structure that imposes overwhelming economic penalties on mothers. In “The Price of Motherhood,” she utilizes her background in economics to expose the vast inequality and staggering costs of motherhood in the United States. Here are some of her findings:
· College-educated women pay a “mommy tax” of over a million dollars in lost income when they have a child.
· Most statutes of family law are antiquated and fail to provide mothers with either financial equality in marriage or financial security in divorce.
· The work of at-home mothers is excluded from GDP statistics, they are not officially counted in the labor force, and there are no Social Security provisions for them as they grow older.
Crittenden deftly dismantles the myth that choosing to have a child is a silent
agreement on a woman’s part to submit to these inequalities. Instead, she clearly shows how, with the proper recognition and reward for the contributions that mothers make, all members of society would experience a benefit – an economic benefit.
As a reporter for the New York Times (1975-83), Crittenden authored a series on world hunger that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She was also a financial writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek, a reporter for Fortune, a visiting lecturer and MIT and Yale, and executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington, D.C. Her previous books include “Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and the Law in Collision,” which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1988, and “Killing the Sacred Cows: Bold Ideas for a New Economy.” Her articles have appeared in The Nation, Foreign Affairs, McCall’s, Lear’s and Working Woman, among others.
