Elizabeth Bernstein is a forty-year resident of Arizona, having moved to the Navajo Nation after graduating from Harvard Law School. There, among other matters, she represented the tribal government before the United States Supreme Court in the case of Kerr-McGee vs. Navajo Tribe. After the birth of their first child, she and her husband left the reservation for rural southern Arizona. Her years as a mother at home inspired her to research cultural messages about childrearing and their intersection with feminism. Later she returned to her first love, mathematics, and began a career as a high school math teacher. She now combines her various interests as she does math tutoring, legal consulting, and writing. Email: ebernsteinlex [at] gmail.com
by Elizabeth S. Bernstein If we find that society values the traits and skills that are associated with being male and devalues the traits and skills that are associated with being female, then it is time to rethink societal values instead of denying the existence of biologically based male-female differences. —Diane F. Halpern, Sex Differences in…
by Elizabeth S. Bernstein In 1973 Betty Friedan traveled to France to have a conversation about the state of feminism with Simone de Beauvoir, whom she regarded as a cultural hero. Friedan’s own opinions had evolved considerably in the decade since the publication of The Feminine Mystique. She would elaborate those changes sometime later in…
by Elizabeth S. Bernstein To follow the popular discourse about the gender wage gap in the United States is to confront perpetual confusion. It is a confusion created at least in part by pronouncements of the type many of us have heard: “Women are paid only 82 cents for every dollar men earn! It is…