If you own a lawn sign business or are among those who favored changing to a more gender neutral title, you’ll be happy to know that Newton’s Board of Aldermen voted 19-5 Monday to assume the name City Council starting Jan. 1.
Opposing the change were City Councilmen candidates Gentile, Ciccone, Baker, Danberg and Albright.
Why not Emily Fleischer for City Council? Or Amy Mah? Cheryl Lipof and Ruthanne Schwartz? Since gender equality is so important to these women who supported this agenda item (even though they all deferred to taking their husband’s name over keeping their birth names). Continually thrilled Newton’s Board of Aldermen engaged in more mind-numbing rhetorical conversation while the potholes grow larger and the public services compete with the roads in the ‘Garden-City-deterioration-race’.
@Janet Sterman: You must be joking right? No one could be that petty…or is it mean? Certainly not someone who holds a leadership position with Newton’s Democratic Committee. Yeah, must be a joke.
GASP- We will have City Councilors – Just Like Waltham and Watertown. Now if we could only get Newton to clean the snow off the streets like Waltham and Watertown that would be great! Or have a Mayor like Waltham that is accessible to its Constituents.
WOW – The other W’s ( Weston, Wayland and Wellesley) we love to compare ourselves to have Selectman.
Thank you to the BOA who voted NO on this.
And I am glad to now be a school committee member not a school committeeman.
Greg-
How and why did this post switch places with the post on Setti Warren? Posts are in chronological order, but it was changed. How come?
@Paul: We move threads regularly here for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we want to make sure that a thread with a lot of interesting comments stays closer to the top. Sometimes we move up something that’s newsworthy or timely up or exclusive to this blog. Sometimes it’s for variety. And sometimes we do it just to keep the conspiracy theorists busy. (Joking about that one; our conspiracy theorists don’t need any extra conspiracies.)
In this case, I moved the state of the city thread below this thread for two reasons: 1. The state of the city speech actually happened before the aldermen/city council vote last night. 2. There were two back-to-back threads about the aldermen/city council vote so for variety I thought it might be good to break them up and have something in between.
More than you probably wanted to know, but there you go.
A lot of thought into that, thanks Greg.
Paul – You need to get out more often. So too does anyone else who actually noticed that one thread on the Village 14 blog was moved above or below another.
Just a mean and unwarranted post, Jane.
I have a strong attention to detail, the change was clear to me without any effort. Simple question, easy answer from Greg.
Some of the meanest people that I know hold leadership positions. In fact a recent study of most CEO’s in this country found that they were mostly male, six feet tall or taller, were cunning liars and had other traits that are normally associated with sociopaths.
@AlisonHaran
Who are you inferring are sociopaths? Certainly not Newton’s Mayor or the president of the Newton-Needham Chamber of Commerce?
Oh, no! Does this mean we’ll never again witness the ritual misuse of “Alderman” as plural in Village 14 posts and Tab headlines? (As in “Board of Alderman”?) Guess I’ll just have to look forward to my first sighting of “City Counselor,” as if City Hall were one great big summer camp. I’ll also miss going to hearings in what I always liked to think of as the Aldermaniac Chamber. I’d say it won’t be as much fun in a Council Chamber, but really, when was it ever fun?
Ms. Heller, with all due respect, I will bet you a dollar you can’t find “Board of Alderman” in a TAB headline… at least not since late October 2014.
I’d like to interrupt the straying off topic to raise something that I was sure someone would bring up but hasn’t…
Congratulations to Alderman Norton for her leadership on this. Along with her freshperson colleague Alderman Leary, these two new alders have managed to enact two noteworthy changes this year, this and the plastic bag ban.
Agree with the measures or not, it’s significant — and not typical — for first year alders to have this sort of success.
Alas both are destined to be one-term Aldermen….but hopefully long time City Councilors.
OK, cynics and topic-changers, back to you.
@Janet Sterman-It seemed that Greg was implying in his comment to you that if a person holds a leadership position then it excludes them from being mean. I find that rather comical because in my experience in corporate America as well as life in general some of the meanest people do in fact hold positions of power. In order to get ahead in corporate America nowadays and break through glass ceilings and achieve the status of CEO in any major US corporation you need to be male, six feet tall or taller and also be a bit of a sociopath according to a recent article that I read. That is all that I was saying.
No Alison: I thought it was both mean and, I will add, undignified for Janet Sterman to judge individuals for deciding to take their husband’s last name. What gives her the right?
Further, I can’t believe that her views can represent the views of the Newton Democratic City Committee where she holds a leadership position. Disgraceful.
Will it be officially Councillor? or Councilor ?
and @Greg-
I think Janet was simply trying to make a point and state her opinion on the juxtaposition of certain feminist choices. While it may not have been done in a way that pleases you (or others), it is entirely unfair to question whether she should have a leadership position in the NDCC based on a style of post or opinion she expresses.
She was not saying anything on this blog as a representative of the NDCC.
Do each of your blog posts represent the opinion of the Chamber? I would hope not. Let’s allow for individual opinions that we might not agree with as long as they do not incite violence or threaten public safety.
PS: nice job on the “freshperson”. I found it funny and not snarky at all.
@Charlie: For Twitter’s sake I hope it’s Councilor.
Also, I appreciate your perspective on Janet’s comment. Yes my comments here do not necessarily reflect the position of the Newton-Needham Chamber (unless I expressly say so) but at the same time, I would not deliberately deride any of the chamber’s member businesses.
I’m pretty certain that Aldermen Norton, Sangiolo, Lappin and Fuller are all active Democrats and active with the Newton Democratic City Committee (even if we elect our aldermen without party affiliation.) I’m pretty sure they are among those on the front line of campaigning for and supporting Democrats here. Sterman could have stated her opposition to the gender change without the personal attacks. It was, as I said, undignified given her position.
I wonder why Janet didn’t mention the male politicians in Newton who hyphenate their last names? I guess it only bothers her when females hyphenate their names? I do not know when hyphenated names came into fashion. I know that they did not exist when I was growing up. I noticed them coming into popularity in the 1990’s.
Paul – It wasn’t meant to be mean. Just a reality check. Really. Bloggers come and go and sometimes people get carried away. No problem – we’ve all received the same message at one point or another.
The next blog party is a way off, but you really should come to the it. We’re really a friendly crew. We all laugh about dustups, then get past them and yap about our families, kids, and a bit about the city. In the past, anonymous bloggers used to feel comfortable coming to the event, but that hasn’t been the case more recently and that’s too bad.
Charlie – It was the tone of the message. Demeaning to the choices women and men make about the name they choose. Do I think of party affiliation/position matters when I read a post such as that? Yes, I do. A political position representing a group of people, such as chair of a ward committee, is very different from a person’s daily job.
Alison, my grandfather was Portuguese-American (see what I did there?) and his name was a hyphenated combination of his mother’s and father’s last names: Dutra-Silveira. He actually legally changed his name to Dutra back in the 1930s because he learned that people were less likely to hire an architect with a hyphenated name–not that changing his name from two hyphenated Portuguese surnames to one made things THAT much better. (As an aside, in the 1950s, my mother was a classmate of Coretta Scott King, who lived in the same dorm at the New England Conservatory of Music. All of the Jews, Blacks and darker skinned ethnic women whose names ended in vowels like my mother all lived in a dorm that was segregated from the white women’s dorms at NEMC. But I digress.)
When my wife and I got married, it was very important to us that our children all have the same last name as ours. Because I was accustomed to hyphenated names in my own family, it was not such a leap for me to take her name and combine it with mine. For her part, she was not opposed to taking my last name on principle. Rather, she did not want to take my last name because it was Mahan. That was because her name is Anne, and at the time she worked at Minuteman Home Care, and she did not want to have to answer the phone at work with “Hello, this is Anne Mahan from Minuteman.”
On another somewhat humorous note, the day after the vote, a fellow lawyer at work said “let me be the first to say, do you realize that, as an attorney, you will now be referred to as a Counselor and a Councilor?” So, yeah. No one else has to ask me that now. Ever.
@Greg, thank you for the kind words. While I docketed the title change, in reality I was just opening a jar that had been loosened by many others over the years. In fact during our debate on Monday Councilor-to-be Lappin described her numerous efforts over the years to try to build support for this very change; this was an idea that had been percolating until the right time when we as a Board and as a City decided we were ready to do it.
Congratulations to all the new Councilors and our new City Council. (Really like “Opposing the change were City Councilmen candidates,” Greg.
Paul, I’m glad Greg answered your question, I had noticed it too. Others have wondered about things but soon learn to do a quick CBA before posting (like I just did) knowing that asking will risk petty insults or snarks (My favorite word of the day. Wish it had been in use in my high school teaching days. And not to be confused with Snorks.)
It’s too bad that after being insulting, Jane offered a “politician/celebrity’s apology” which is actually a convoluted statement about her (impossible to know) intentions, the need for a reality check (?), bloggers inconsistency, and their tendency to get carried away (?). Then inexplicably she redirects from explaining her reaction back to her original position that the question deserved her insult but “since we’ve all been there” it’s not really a problem. Then she invites you to the blog party along with pointing out what a shame it is we newer bloggers have stopped coming. I think she just answerred the question of why that is.
I think what Janet said was inappropriate and mean regardless of her political position or otherwise, but it does seem to carry more weight when insulting people by name over a personal matter (name choice) who are members of the organization she supports. For one thing women need to stop insulting women for their personal choices. The “I’m more feminist than you” pettiness gets us nowhere. If she had a legitimate reason to criticize a member for a policy decision that goes against the organization’s stance, then critize that.
As for someone’s “day job” not mattering as much as someone’s “party affiliation/position” when posting, I think there’s a grey area there. I disliked Janet’s manner of personal criticism just as much before I knew anything about her other than what I’ve gleaned from her posts. I also like or dislike Greg’s tendency toward being snarky without factoring in his day job, even though I do know what it is.
Sometimes posts are just posts, anonymous or not. Not knowing the details of a poster’s life, doesn’t invalidate the position expressed; it can be taken just as an opinion added to all of the other opinions used to formulate an idea of what people think about whatever is being discussed. Maintaining that an opinion is less valuable if the commenter is unknown can be a smoke screen for the real reason of wanting to know.
If a poster discloses who he is, his career, income level, type of residence, etc. his opinions on an affordable housing proposal will be colored by that knowledge by readers. If he is wealthy, etc., his views would be weighted just as they would be if he had an income and assets that would qualify him for living in affordable housing. Regardless of which side of the debate he is on. But they are still the opinions of a resident so they should be thrown into the mix like any others.
It’s the same with age, parenthood, renters vs owners, occupation, even the mode of transportation used. How many times have posters referred to “large black SUVs,” “yoga pants wearing young moms,” “stay at home moms,” “greedy landlords,” “riff raff,” “dangerous homeless,” “unwanted residents who need subsidies.” The list goes on and on. Why would anyone want to have their opinions viewed through those lenses?
@Ted Hess-Mahan-Thanks for sharing that with us. I had always wondered if you were somehow related to the Hess Corporation family? I can relate to the story that you mentioned about your wife and the tongue twister that your last name created for her. I have a friend who is named Carol and she married a man with the last name Burnett. She did end up taking his last name after much reluctancy and is going through life as Carol Burnett now much to her chagrin.