Educational Leadership

Texts That

To create lifelong readers,
we need to give students reading
materials that leave them
wanting to know more.
Gay Ivey

Hunkered down at Barnes and Noble one morning with my favorite Starbucks comfort drink, I savored a weekly ritual—an extended o-not-disturb period with the Sunday New York Times. As usual, I flipped to the op-ed pages to find columnist Maureen Dowd’s latest contribution.

From the moment I read her opening line—“Women are
getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl”—I knew this was
going to be a good one. Dowd lamented that
When women stepped into male-dominated realms, they put
more demands—and stress—on themselves. If they once judged
themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, and dinner parties,
now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens,
dinner parties—and grad school, work, office deadlines, and
meshing a two-career marriage. (2009, p. WK9)

I could relate, and I immediately thought of several female friends and colleagues who are even more compelling examples of this phenomenon. I sent several of them an electronic link to the column, knowing that a lively e-mail conversation would ensue over the next day or so. I also read some of the hundreds of reactions from other readers of the column that were posted on the New York Times Web site (www.NYTimes .com), some ardently agreeing with Dowd and others expressing their outrage.

Less than a month later, the release of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything by Maria Shriver (Simon and Schuster, 2009) generated a flurry of media attention centering on the plight of working women. I was drawn to morning news show interviews, blogs, and more editorials that extended my thinking about Dowd’s ideas and prompted me to consider related issues, such as equal pay for equal work, the changing expectations placed on men, and the

social and political implications of women serving in powerful governmental and executive roles. I will likely keep pondering these issues as I seek out or stumble across texts, both print and digital, that give me new ways to think and talk about them.

Of course, not everything I read for information has such an expansive societal reach. I’ve been known to conduct extensive research on different brands of shoes that are stylish and yet comfortable enough to help me stay on my feet throughout a six-hour professional development workshop.