A couple of front-page stories in Tuesday's papers -- one from the East Coast, the other from the West -- frame a pretty effective portrait of these United States in this election year.
With unemployment climbing across the country, the New York Times reported that "for the first time since the women's movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began."
Working women now earn a third of America's total household income, and by and large, only those homes with a working wife have made real gains in their standard of living over the last eight years. Yet, over that same period, the percentage of women employed outside the home has fallen to where it was 12 years ago. Meanwhile, the median hourly pay of women 25 to 48 years of age has fallen from $15.04 in 2004 to $14.84 last year.
This corrosive pattern holds true, according to the federal statistics, for all American women, regardless of education, race, ethnicity or marital or familial status.
In other words, things are tough all over, particularly if you're a woman -- unless, of course, you're Candy Spelling.
As the Los Angeles Times' Roger Vincent reported Tuesday, television mogul Aaron Spelling's widow has paid $47 million for a 16,500-square-foot, two-story penthouse condominium atop a new building going up in Century City. The lower floor of the Widow Spelling's new digs will include a living room, a dining room large enough to host a 25-person dinner party and "staff quarters." The upper story will include a 4,000-square-foot master suite, massage and exercise rooms, a conservatory with rose garden and a pool.
Actually, Spelling is downsizing and will be practically camping out by comparison with the 123-room, 56,500-square-foot home -- L.A.'s largest -- that she and her husband built in the late 1980s. How she'll get by without the gift-wrapping room or the doll museum is anybody's guess. After all, even when you're reducing your carbon footprint, you need a place for all those shoes. As Vincent wrote: "At a time when headlines are focusing on plummeting home prices, foreclosures and bad loans, the sale highlighted the vast differences in the region's housing market."
