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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 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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"'When the baby is 3,” my mom told me on the phone the other day, “a mother gets half her chi back.'"
I expelled a puff of pent-up hot air and asked, 'And the other half?' No answer."
Read more at The Washington Post.
I am standing before a small audience in Columbus, Ohio, apologizing for what I’m going to read. “It’s about motherhood,” I say, then quickly qualify, “but you know, more than that! It’s about stories, and self, and the meaning of home.”
I have been doing this for months, explaining the book I’ve written as something along the lines of “about motherhood but not really,” until finally, in front of this audience, the absurdity of my intellectual scrambling strikes me. What male writer feels the need to atone for essays about, say, war? I imagine him hurrying to clarify: “But really they’re about the human struggle, triumph over adversity, and the meaning of self.”
Read more in The Los Angeles Times.
Photo: Terence Patrick
"I met Vianney Bernabé in the buffet line at the Fiesta Inn during the Fulbright orientation in Mexico City. I was struggling to contain my toddler, who was a hydra-like mess of limbs fighting to race freely up and down the corridor. “She’s beautiful,” Vianney said, and we started chatting. Vianney’s English is quintessential California: lots of “likes” and drawn out “yeahs” and “killed its,” with big vowels and sentences that curl at their ends into question-like realizations. She is petite, with a tensile, restless energy. Her wavy black hair is often corralled in a low ponytail, and her features are chiseled: fine cheekbones, fine collarbones, delicately contoured fingers. They are the features of a violinist, which she has been since she was eight years old."
Read more on Pacific Standard.
"I had been travelling around the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca in Mexico for months, talking to returned migrants – men who spent decades in laundromats in Los Angeles or shovelling snow off the highways of Indianapolis or serving burritos to the paunchy Republicans of Cincinnati – before I wound up in the tiny mountain village of San Pedro Cajonos, at Pedro’s hamburger stand. Painted bright blue and white, it was just big enough for a fridge, a grill and a man. Pedro was a scrawny, bony guy with wavy hair and a long crooked nose. He watched us approach with an intensity that made me feel exposed – odd in a rural region where many men retain layers of guardedness until mezcal or fiesta loosen them up."
Read more at Aeon.
My husband is from Guelatao de Juárez, a village of three hundred people in Oaxaca’s remote Sierra Norte, where tortillas are pressed by hand, bread is sold by burro, and he and his classmates once chased an infuriated bucking bull as part of a school assignment. I am from a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where crossing guards in safety orange escort gaggles of children across sleepy crosswalks, and impassioned debate erupts in City Council over cat leash laws.
Read more at Oxford American.
“You are an animal,” my husband told me. We were in bed. The context was not what you’d expect. A baby was latched onto my right breast while the left leaked an opalescent waterfall of milk.
“I’m a mammal,” I said. This is about as deep as our conversations got in the first month of parenthood.
Read more at The Paris Review.
As you leave the Valley of Oaxaca and wind up the narrow switchbacks of unpaved mountain road, the sun loses its lowland sultriness and grows sharp. Roadside stands appear, selling small peaches, and bantam villages pass into and out of view, offering glimpses of hanging laundry, calla lilies in mossy streams, and men joking around in half-built houses.
Read more at Harper's.