Certain women in history are normally celebrated during Women’s History Month — the suffragists, women scientists. Yet in the history of every community across America are women whose influence inspired and encouraged generations of younger women. Not long ago, I read an article about the final gifts of the Adams Trust in the daily newspaper [...]
Pat Summitt: A Champion of Courage
Pat Summitt. Her name is synonymous with women’s college basketball. She is women’s college basketball. And she is suffering from early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type. We tend to place our sports heroes up on a shelf. A really, really high one. And, though we expect some of them to do incredibly stupid things like beat [...]
Raise Your Hand if You Support Universal Preschool
Sometimes, our society gets caught up in the idea that achievement is a giant scholarly test-acing gold medal gold star. To that end, there’s a big race to nowhere (a film I highly recommend seeing) and a sense that “best” is defined by Ivy Leagues and the goods that supposedly follow thereafter, even though there [...]
Marissa Mayer & Her Private Nursery Throw “Having it All” Debate for a Loop
As the news continues to be flooded with stories about Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer, her ‘no more telecommuting’ decree and stories of the private baby nursery she had built next to her CEO office, what is Anne-Marie Slaughter saying? Remember her? If the name isn’t familiar, I’m sure the Atlantic article she wrote last year is [...]
The Ultimate Girl Fight? Taylor Swift Versus Amy Poehler & Tina Fey
I wonder if Vanity Fair knew there’d be trouble as soon as it dove in. Probably. Trouble is probably exactly what it wanted to stir up. Imagine you’ve scored an interview with the planet’s most visible, popular songstress. Imagine that, over the course of that interview, said songstress makes criticisms, veiled or otherwise, of two [...]
Mary Baker Eddy: Feminist Extraordinaire
“A native of New Hampshire, a child of the Republic, a Daughter of the Revolution.” Oh, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, loved to describe herself as a daughter of New Hampshire! She represented generations of family and neighbors who tilled its soil, birth communities, those who created schools and churches to nurture [...]
The Feminine Mystique of a Two-Year-Old
Friday was a long day in my house. We had all of our children home from school for a snow day, which made working even more difficult. Recently, I purchased a copy of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, because I felt like it was one of those required reading books for being a feminist. [...]
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Radical Feminist, Then and Now
It’s Women’s History Month, so I want to offer a shout-out to a radical thinker who believed vehemently in the equality of the sexes at a time when many thought the idea preposterous. She advocated for equal access education, contested the necessity of marriage, and dabbled in free love. She suggested that only a classless [...]
Sovereign Nation of One
As I embarked on a personalized week-long retreat with SpiritQuest, a spiritual retreat company, in Sedona, I take a deep breath and realize a very important thing. I am sovereign. Standing at a crossroads in my life I find myself in a uniquely liberating position. Sovereignty. I divorced last year, making me single after a [...]
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I Want My Mother Back
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Charles Ramsey and the Racial Language Barrier
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Brave’s Merida is Herself Again. But for How Long?
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Can “Maybe” Empower Our Children in Times of Fear?
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Will My Ice Floe Have Starbucks and Wi-fi?
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The Sound of One Hand Praying?
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Pussy Riot: Feminist Punk Icons on Film
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Two Very Different Takes on Working Family Flexiblity
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The Doubled Edged Sword of Murder Charges Against Ariel Castro
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What is REALLY Important to Military Families
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Joanne Bamberger: @Jonathan, That is an excellent point. We should ...
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Jonathan Menon: Not that this comment of mine has any real relevan...
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Christina Gleason @ WELL, in THIS House: I think this would make a huge difference in the e...
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Beverly Uhlmer: Thank you, Deb. I have lived in several different...
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Gena: P.S. Code switching is not slang. It is the abilit...