The XX Factor: What women really think.

Pondering the Queen's Day Attack

As Slate's foreign editor, I'm always aware of the odd and sometimes iffy news priorities the media invokes when deciding what "foreign" stories to cover. And because I'm prone to guilt (despite being neither Catholic nor Jewish), I spend a lot of time wondering why I'm more interested in one place than another—even when, all too often, the stakes, the body counts, and the atrocities are much more mind-boggling in the place I just can't get all that excited about.

I mumble all this psychobabble because I'm currently obsessed with the developing story of the vehicle that drove into a Dutch crowd gathered to greet Queen Beatrix on Queen's Day, a national holiday. As Britain's Daily Telegraph put it:

Witnesses said that the black Suzuki Swift appeared to deliberately target an open bus carrying Queen Beatrix and her family. ... The car swerved across police railings, where crowds of people were waiting to see the queen pass, and slammed into the foot of a stone monument, where it came to a halt, its bonnet crumpled and scraped.

Thus far, there are reports of four people dead and 13 injured, and authorities seem to have agreed it was a deliberate assault.

Still, four people dead? What's that compared with the body count in the Democratic Republic of Congo? What's the horror of having a car drive at you when you're waving at the monarch (even a cute, right-on one like Beatrix) compared with what civilians are being put through in Sri Lanka? Am I just reacting this way because I've been in a crowd like the one in Apeldoorn, whereas I've never, say, gathered firewood like the women of Darfur (a task that leaves them prone to all manner of horrific abuses by marauders and Janjaweed militias)?

Or perhaps it's a gay thing. Queen's Day is a very gay holiday in the Netherlands. Could this morning's incident be a homophobic attack? Yes, that's my excuse, I'm watching out for my people. OK, guilt gone.

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.