President George W. Bush has said that "W is for women"; Bushwomen
author Flanders has assembled a group of 60 or so issue-oriented essays by various authors who argue the contrary. The "Family Time Flexibility Act" can actually result in the loss of pay for professional women by reclassifying them as managers ineligible for overtime. Women in Afghanistan remain remain disenfranchized (to the point of being at risk of rape by armed factions and of forced marriage) despite their "liberation" from the Taliban. The administration's support for the gradual recriminalization of abortion, for the campaign against Title IX, for the imposition of global gags on discussing family planning and for the cutting of welfare and health care by converting to block-grant financing, together result, Flanders argues in her introduction, in the "W Effect"—i.e., "stealth misogyny." Though many of the pieces were previously published in places like the Nation
or Ms.
by the likes of Ehrenreich, Steinem, Pollitt and Sheehy, an account of the sharp rise of domestic violence against military wives and excerpts from "Baghdad Burning," a Baghdad woman's blog by "Riverbend" that reports firsthand on the occupation, are just two of the less familiar sources and stories. While there are a few diatribes that pompously overstate, the polemics always take off from verifiable facts on the ground. (July 1)
