The Christian Right already has lots of practice restricting divorce--just using norms instead of laws.

In #HoldingItTogether, I tell the story of an Evangelical mom I call Audrey who considered divorcing her husband after he sexually assaulted her. 1/

vox.com/today-explaine… Audrey can't take birth control, but her husband doesn't like condoms, so she asked him to always pull out during sex, as she wasn't ready for another child. He didn't, and she became pregnant.

At first, Audrey considered terminating the pregnancy and leaving her husband. 2/

It's easy to think of this kind of fear as inherent to motherhood. But it's actually manufactured doubt. As I show in #HoldingItTogether, there's a long history of fear mongering aimed to guilt moms into staying home or gaslight them out of demanding support to work for pay. 1/

https://twitter.com/HilaryMatfess/status/1795805332108706032

Take the Satanic Panic around childcare in the 1980s/90s. Conservative pundits and policymakers used wildly inaccurate stories to stoke parents' fear of childcare providers and create the perception that mothers should only work for pay if they have no other choice. 2/

Of course, if a student struggles with spelling/grammar/writing, it can affect how effectively they convey their substantive knowledge.

But, that's not a reason to punish students. It's a reason to give students the opportunity to submit drafts for review and revision. 2/ Over the past 12 years, I've taught more than 3,000 undergrads, and many of those students arrived in college with very limited writing experience. Some had never written anything longer than a page, and most hadn't learned to write research papers with arguments and evidence. 3/

"Other countries have social safety net. The U.S. has women."

That quote is the beating heart of my new book, HOLDING IT TOGETHER, which will be out June 4, 2024 with Portfolio/Penguin, and which I can't wait to share with all of you.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697130/h… HOLDING IT TOGETHER reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine without the kind of security a real social safety net would provide.

Last week, I asked the first-year undergrads in my Kids and Society class to tell me about the upsides and downsides of remote learning. Their responses might surprise you--particularly for what they reveal about students' attitudes toward chatGPT, cheating, and AI. 1/ The first downside they identified was that remote learning makes it "easy to cheat." Note here that I said *downside.* Which should already be making us question standard assumptions about "kids these days."

Intrigued, I asked them to elaborate. 2/

Annette Lareau is a giant in the field of Sociology--her work has inspired countless scholars and shaped national conversations about families and schools.

Yesterday, I had the honor of toasting Annette at her retirement conference, and I wanted to share those words here. 1/ On Support and Faith

In the “Final Words” of Listening to People, Annette describes the process of fieldwork as what she calls “an act of faith.” 2/

I'm waiting for someone to connect these findings (students perceived women faculty to be more supportive and accommodating during the pandemic; universities have undervalued this care work) to the current reviewer crisis in academic publishing. 1/

link.springer.com/article/10.100… Some faculty used the pandemic shutdown as a chance to be wildly productive. Others were trying to support students and colleagues, often on top of disproportionate family responsibilities, which limited time for research/writing or led to burnout if they tried to do it all. 2/

As I teach my students, kids' clothing only became gendered when capitalists realized they could double their money by selling separate clothes for girls and boys. Before that, kids wore gender-neutral dresses, which better accommodated growth spurts and toilet training.

https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1642978006129082368

These dresses were usually white because white fabric 1) was cheaper (didn't require expensive dyes), and 2) could be easily no bleached when kids (inevitably) dirtied their clothes.

Pink for girls and blue for boys is a capitalist invention, and for a time, was even reversed

For the last four years, my research team and I have been following an Indiana mom I'll call Brooke, who got pregnant when she was in college, at 19 years old. Brooke was considering abortion, but her parents--conservative white evangelical Christians--talked her out of it. 🧵 1/ At the time, Brooke was financially dependent on her parents. She needed their support to stay in college, and they promised to help support her and the baby. Brooke's mom also pressured her to get an ultrasound to "hear the baby's heartbeat" before deciding about abortion. 2/