Do stay-at-home moms and dads need their own credit cards? According to the federal government, the answer might well be no. At issue is a proposal by the Federal Reserve that seeks to make sure that those receiving credit can actually afford to pay their bills. Currently, credit applicants are judged by their entire household income—in other words, the salaries earned by both partners. Under the proposed regulations, that would change. Instead, applicants would need, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, to demonstrate “independent” income. If they can’t do that, they would likely be automatically denied unless they applied jointly with their income-earning husband or wife.

The possible change is expected to have a particularly large impact on those non-working spouses—who are, of course, mostly female—seeking to increase existing credit lines or applying for instant credit from retailers. Not surprisingly, the first to cry foul were the chains that make beaucoup bucks by issuing such immediate in-store credit (complete with often exorbitant interest rates) to consumers. “Demeaning” howled David Jaffe, the president and chief executive of Dress Barn, in a letter commenting on proposed regulation to the Federal Reserve last month. Other retailers have opposed the changes as well, including The Limited and Home Depot, whose vice president of financial services wondered (also in a letter to the Fed) how women would fare if their homes need “emergency repairs.”

At first glance, it all sounds somewhat ridiculous. What, after all, qualifies as an emergency at Dress Barn? A pantyhose run? But, no matter how self-serving the retailers’ motivations, these stores and their executives have a point. It wasn’t so long ago that women were denied all independent access to banking, credit, and other financial services without their husbands’ permission. This changed with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the 1970s, something we now so take for granted that it almost never occurs to us that a woman’s right to her own credit and credit history is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s so new that many of us over the age of 40 can actually recall our mother’s first individual credit cards and the reverence with which those cards were treated. (In our house, my mother’s first individual card was from Macy’s, a store she eventually would go on to work for as a saleswoman for almost a decade.)

So what gives? Is the Federal Reserve really intent on rolling back women’s rights? Apparently not. Instead, stay-at-home parents (and other unemployed spouses) are potential victims of well-intentioned language contained in the 2009 Credit Card Act. This part of the act was aimed at stopping the practice of getting credit cards into the hands of college students, as necessary a bit of legislation as there ever was. While consumer advocates are generally not fans of instant credit, this is no way to tackle the problem of Americans taking on debt they can’t repay.

Woman holding a credit card by  Hemera Technologies.

Tags: credit cards, Federal Reserve, stay-at-home parents

KJ, I couldn't agree more about Melanie Thernstrom's piece on her very 21st century family.  Thernstorm wore down my default cynicism with her generosity, sensibility, and openness.  Her good spirits contrast brilliantly next to Ross Douthat's sour, cold-hearted assertion that we should return to an era when young, unmarried women were coerced into giving babies up for adoption, so as to spare white upper class people the hassle of using reproductive technology to get babies that look like them. Like you, I find the obsession with having babies in a narrow, society-approved way to be distasteful at best, but usually pretty creepy with a side dose of nosy.

Thernstrom and her husband and her extended family seem like great people, and their choices make sense to me.  What I found upsetting in her story was all the ways the patriarchal nuclear family paradigm was enforced on Thernstrom by the agencies, medical staff, and nosy bystanders in her life.  The technologies used to make babies nowadays are very 21st century, but the attitudes on display come straight out of an era when people picked up their babies from the maternity home (often leaving behind a distraught, depressed birth mother who was made to feel she had no choices), took them home, and pretended they were biological children in order to keep up appearances with the neighbors.  The tube so you can pretend you're breast-feeding weirded me out as much as it did Thernstrom; all that sort of thing does is reinforce the idea that you're not the "real" mother unless you perform certain behaviors that we associate with biological motherhood.

And of course, now as back then, there's this pressure to erase the work and sometimes the very existence of the women who actually have the babies.  Back in the maternity-home era, girls were sent away to give birth and then instructed to pretend it never happened.  Thernstrom received similar pressure to ignore the surrogates and egg donor, in hopes they'd just go away.  Most distressing to me was the advice she got not to seek out surrogates who would be compensated for their labor.  Feminism 101 moment: Not compensating women fairly for their work is one of the ways that a sexist society denies that women's contributions matter.  Kudos to Thernstrom for going with her instincts over all this advice; I believe she's created a model for the ethical use of new-fangled reproductive technologies.

Tags: assisted reproductive technology, Melanie Thernstrom, twiblings

One of my own set of "twiblings" (we call them faux twins around here) had a massive tantrum on the ski slope in our town over break. With all the usual emotions that accompany a kid creating a huge public outcry came an unexpected sense of relief. You could draw plenty of conclusions about us at that moment: that she's an unusually loud child, that I'm a terrible parent, or, if you're more sympathetic, that she was tired but that I was rightly requiring that she carry her own tiny skis anyway. But in our ski suits, helmets and goggles, the one thing you couldn't tell about us was the one thing we usually broadcast on sight to everyone we meet: that my daughter was adopted. (She has three siblings, including one only a few months younger, who were not.)

When I read Melanie Thernstrom's NYT Magazine piece "Meet the Twiblings,"on how she and her husband had babies born five days apart to two surrogate mothers, using his sperm and the same egg donor, my first thought wasn't "wow." It certainly wasn't, as with so many commenters to the piece on the Motherlode blog, "why didn't they just adopt?"—"just" and "adopt" being two words that should never appear in conjunction with one another. It was "man, they're going to get so tired of explaining that one."

When we set out to create our families, we have a tendency to get  caught up in the mechanics. Trying to get pregnant, experiencing infertility, and adopting are all-consuming activities. A few years later the reality of the result of all that singular focus takes over. The books on the topics collect dust on the shelves; the blogs go unvisited. Just as baby milestones fade into unimportance with the passing of the years, how you form your family is at its most important when it's happening. Once it's done, it's done. Meals, homework, appointments, sports—all of those things quickly push even the most complicated birth story into the background most of the time for the families involved. But in some situations, it's the first thing about us that other people see.

Assisted reproductive technologies may be relatively new, but they're well on their way to joining adoption in the great pantheon of "personal things about us that don't worry most people but still may lead those around us to draw cliche'd conclusions about our lives." Adoptees are assumed to suffer from the "primal wound" of removal from their biological mother or, at the very least, mixed emotions about their origins. "Sperm-donor kids" and their egg donor/surrogacy/combinations thereof brethren are perhaps "not all right," in the words of Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt, authors of the "My Daddy's Name Is Donor" study and a Slate article about the same. They interpreted their study as finding that adults who were aware that reproductive technology assisted their birth were "suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused, and feeling more isolated from their families" and that adult adoptees were "struggling more" than those raised by their biological parents. "Suffering." "Struggling." What kid wouldn't want to wear those labels every time she walks into a classroom?

My daughter wears the complexities of her origins on her face whenever she's with any member of her family. Thernstrom's "twiblings" will carry theirs along to any activity where their birth dates get written on a form. Whatever baggage the people around them associate with adoption or reproductive technologies, these kids are going to be stuck with it—and that's surely a part of why Thernstrom made her family's story so public. "I made up my mind to be completely transparent about it," she writes, and in doing so, she sometimes felt as though she were "inviting a Greek chorus of doleful commentary." But what she never said was that in inviting that chorus, she must have hoped to shield her kids from it: to make their birth story (and stories like it) such common knowledge that the people around them would never give it a second thought.

That's a fantastic goal, and hers was a beautiful, gratitude-filled expression of it. But 40-plus years of international/inter-racial adoption haven't taken us past the point where people do a double-take when encountering a family like ours. Thernstrom has years of deflecting curiosity and assumptions ahead of her, and eventually, she and I will both have to teach our kids to do the same. Meanwhile, I wish her tolerance, a thick skin, and plenty of anonymous tantrums on ski slopes.

Tags: adoption, assisted reproductive technology, Melanie Thernstrom, sperm donor kids, twiblings

When my brother really wants to piss me off, he holds up a finger and says, “Shh. Men talking.”

I thought that “quiet, ladies, men are talking” was the sort of antiquated comment now relegated entirely to the realm of sarcasm and sibling needling, until news came out that ESPN announcer Ron Franklin has been suspended for pulling just such a stunt.

Apparently, Franklin was in a Friday meeting with his fellow ESPN announcers Ed Cunningham and Rod Gilmore, and the three were discussing Gilmore’s wife’s election to mayor of Alameda, Calif. Sideline reporter Jeannine Edwards tried to get involved in the conversation, but Franklin tried to shut her out, reportedly saying, “Why don’t you leave this to the boys, sweetcakes.”

When Edwards fumed about being called “sweetcakes,” Franklin suggested she might prefer “asshole.” Edwards rightly complained. Later that day, the two worked together on coverage of the Chik-fil-A Bowl, but Franklin was suspended before the Fiesta Bowl.

Franklin’s dismissive attitude toward female sideline reporters has cropped up before: In 2005, he condescendingly called sideline reporter Holly Rowe “sweetheart” during a Notre Dame-Purdue game.

What’s frustrating about this incident, beyond the fact that Franklin is a sexist fossil, is that many of the sports blogosphere commenters are using this as an opportunity to continue to air complaints about female sideline reporters. On SportsByBrooks, the blog that broke the story, commenters are turning in insightful gender critiques like, “Having women talk about football is like having men describe childbirth” and “So why do we need women calling football? Have we not been feminized enough by now? Ron, show some class. Jeannine, grow a pair.”

To paraphrase Clueless (after all, I am a foolish woman), searching for meaning in Internet comments is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. Yet it still bugs.  It seems to have been lost on both Ron Franklin and his supporters that those “boys” were discussing a woman in politics—a realm that is at least more friendly to women than sports reporting.

Photograph of Jeannine Edwards by Jeff Golden/Getty Images.

Tags: espn, Holly Rowe, Jeannine Edwards, Ron Franklin, sideline reporting, sports reporting, sweetcakes, women sports reporters