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“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Betty Friedan wrote in “The Feminine Mystique,” in 1963. Taking a new role as a productive worker is “the way out of the trap,” she added. “There is no other way.”
Read the full piece at the New York Times Book Review.
Part nurse, part waitress, part savior, part seductress, the airline stewardess was both a character conjured from male fantasy and an avatar of an era of unprecedented female freedom. As Julia Cooke describes in her recently released book Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am, most stewards in the early days of air travel were men, but as the jet age bloomed in the mid-20th century, airline executives grasped and advertised the appeal of a certain type of young woman who could emit an alchemical mix of glamour, cosmopolitanism, know-how, and adventure. Cooke quotes Pan Am’s chief executive, Najeeb Halaby, on the company’s efforts to outdazzle its rapidly multiplying competition: “We must add to [our excellence] ‘a new dimension’–that is, emphasis on what pleases people. And I know of nothing that pleases people more… than female people.”
Read more on Lit Hub.
“No societal shift has impacted my adult life as profoundly as the extended closure of schools during the pandemic. At first, I mourned my career, which I gave up to facilitate the purgatory of Zoom “school” for my first grader. Then I mourned my family’s precarious, hard-won harmony, which dissolved into endless fights about time, work and space. Finally, I mourned the faith I’d held, without ever recognizing it as such, in public institutions. I discovered I no longer believed in school. I no longer believed in many of the systems I’d taken for granted as mostly valuable and functional. I spun out into despair, then anger, then a flat, terrible resignation.”
Read more at the New York Times Book Review.
“At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, kids clamber over one another in an enormous anthill maze. Carpeted, encaged in wire mesh, consisting of layers of looping and overlapping low tunnels, the Limb Bender, as it is called, spans a storey and a half, and usually contains anywhere from two to four wailing toddlers stuck in its dead centre. Eventually, while a crowd of parents politely holds back snickers, the mom or dad of one of the stuck babes valiantly begins belly-crawling his or her way upward, hissing with as much mustered sweetness as possible: ‘Come down, Callie.’”
Read more on Aeon.
“My dad was 51 years old the first time he traveled abroad. He came to visit me in Southern France, on my first trip overseas, at age 20. I was spending a year in Aix-en-Provence, and my dad and stepmom and little brother gamely traipsed around fields of lavender, knocking their heads on the entrances to Lilliputian restaurants and politely not making snide remarks about my new penchant for wearing skirts over jeans.”
Read more at The New York Times.
“For the past five years, I have struggled with anxiety. Most of it has centered on my daughter. Here are some of the things I have worried about: lead in children’s jewelry, flame retardants in pajamas, food additives, BPA, how many words are enough by age 2, restaurant crayons made in China, the VOC level of paint, whether glitter is toxic.”
Read more at The Washington Post.
“Jamie got pregnant immediately. She and her husband were delighted. “We didn’t think anything could go wrong.” Jamie pauses. “It”—the “it” being the possibility of a descent into all-consuming fear—“didn’t even register.” What did register were the damaging effects of nitrates and the dangers of aspartame. Jamie poured all of her occupational and educational energies into the project of the uber-baby. “I was laser-focused on, like, I wasn’t going to destroy my baby by eating a turkey sandwich! I didn’t even think to worry about anything with me.”
Read more at Guernica.
“As a new mother, I worried about mouse poop in the small cabin where I lived. About fracking chemicals in the water. About glyphosate in the oatmeal. About flame retardants in pajamas. About phthalates in toys. Although it constantly overwhelmed me, I thought my anxiety was normal, even necessary. After all, it was my job to protect my child. When I mentioned my fear at my six-week follow-up appointment after birth—the sole instance of medical care many new moms receive in the entire year -postpartum—the midwife shrugged and chided me that anxious mothers make anxious children.”
Read more at Time.
“I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?”
Read more on Longreads.
“I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, my husband’s hometown. I said I was going to “live from writing.” I had no idea what that really meant, but it was a leap I wanted to take.”
Read more on Longreads.
“Profiles of bestselling and iconic author Elizabeth Gilbert tend to begin with a declaration of what she is currently doing or feeling, presented with a touch of irony. Elizabeth Gilbert is owning her past mistakes. Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t afraid to show her scars. Elizabeth Gilbert wants to see how alive we can be. Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t care if you think her new book is chick lit. Each hints at a suite of hopes and fears with which women writers often contend. Gilbert represents the fantasy of many women writers — the juggernaut bestseller, the speaking gigs and financial success and adoring fans– and also the nightmare: the contempt of critics, the "chick lit" label, the inability to crawl out from under a single book that has been deemed unabashedly female and therefore unworthy of serious critique.”
Read more on The Outline.
”A marathon is a ridiculous event. Kids dressed as tacos hand out marshmallow gel packets — the precise color and consistency of sperm — to thousands of bib-wearing, Lycra-clad humans hobble-running way farther than their middle-class working-professional bodies want to allow. People vomit and cry and stumble. People shout “YOU’VE GOT THIS BUDDY!” at other people vomiting and crying and stumbling. Spectators clang cowbells and hoist the pixelated faces of their loved ones on sticks. A marathon is a painful enactment of the absurdity of contemporary life, our alienation from physical labor, our hunger for meaning and purpose and community. It is also an excuse to lie flat on one’s back wrapped in a blankie like an infant, weeping in public.
I’ve run four of these. I’ve quit one.”
Read more at Gay Magazine.
"I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race."
Read more on Longreads.
“He was the third contractor my husband and I brought in for an estimate on a new roof, a major renovation we never saw coming, were not sure we needed and were agonizing over.
He talked on and on: shingle types, slide after iPad slide of water damage and hail destruction. Finally he got to the numbers: $16,000 for the roof but — for us, just for us! — $12,000.”
Read more at The Los Angeles Times.
“In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.
Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home.”
Read more on Longreads.
Illustration: Grace Helmer
My four-year-old daughter has recently started to notice skin color. “Mommy,” she points out when we take a shower, “your skin is white, and my skin is brown, and Papi’s skin is brown!” With a four-year-old’s mania for classification, she lines up our arms in order of deepening darkness. She counts: “Two browns, and one white!”
Read more on The Guardian.
Photo: Jorge Santiago
Around 10 a.m. on Oct. 27, I left my house in Squirrel Hill to go for a run. As I waited to cross Murray Avenue, a police car raced up the center of the street. I found it strange, but I kept on, passing dozens of Jewish families heading to synagogue. I ran in the street to give them room. I saw one mother beckon to a little boy lingering on the threshold of their home, and I smiled at him. Then I entered the park and disappeared into the reverie of my music and my run until, 20 minutes later, my husband, Jorge, called.
“There’s an active shooter in the neighborhood,” he said. “Don’t come home. We’re not allowed to go outside.”
Read more at The Washington Post.
"Every once in a while, I take a trip and leave my 3-year-old daughter behind. I drop her off at my parents’ farm in southeastern Ohio, where I load the fridge with blueberries, kiss her, and say goodbye. On the return drive to Pittsburgh, I feel bittersweet and fragile. My life has a missing piece."
Read more at The New York Times.
On 19 June, Ice officers descended on Fresh Mark, a meatpacking plant in Salem, Ohio, and detained 146 workers. The scene was chaotic. “Nos cayó la tormenta,” one worker told me: the storm descended on us.
One minute, people were slapping labels on packages of bacon. The next, there were uniformed men shouting, “Go!” Many workers thought the building was on fire. They fled outside to handcuffs and the swirling lights of police cars. Three men hid in a storeroom, crouched on stacks of wooden pallets. They waited it out and escaped. All the other Hispanic workers were detained, even those with work permits.
Read more at The Guardian.
"Each time my husband returns to Pittsburgh from Mexico, I tell him he has that exquisite pueblo smell. It lingers on him for days. I cringe pointing this out: It seems a detail that belongs in the short story of a 19-year-old who has just spent a semester abroad — he smelled of wood smoke, leather and pine as he spun me around — but it is true. He grabs me and pulls me to him, takes a sensuous whiff of my hair: 'Mmmmm,” he says. 'You smell like Target.'"
Read more at The New York Times.