women and ambition
by sari and · updated 1mo ago
women and ambition
- Hello newsletter friends, happy to see you. Thanks for your patience as I hobble back to regularly scheduled programming after pretending to feel fine the last three months. It feels like best practice to fake it, but I’m bad at that, so I’d rather say: I’m pregnant and the first three months were very rough on me physically and I wasn’t up for any... See more
from When summer is over and fall hasn't started, it's by Alison Roman
sari added 1mo ago
Alison Roman announces her pregnancy
Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must
... See morefrom The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips
sari added 4mo ago
She may agree with the poet Mary Oliver that “creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration. . . . It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching,” or with Gertrude Stein, who warned, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
from The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips
sari added 4mo ago
- “Too much life enters this house,” Tillie Olsen, the writer, labor activist and mother of four girls, wrote in a letter to the poet Anne Sexton. “Up at 6, breakfast in shifts, lunch packing — then, if no one ill, or it isn’t a holiday, or any of the other ORs, the day for work until 4, sometimes longer or an evening — depending on housework load, s... See more
from Opinion | The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering
sari added 5mo ago
- I have heard tales of creative rushes during the postpartum period, of women who ride the energy of human creation to power other creative acts. It is a beautiful idea, and one I would of course hope to experience. Make a human AND have a personal creative renaissance!? Yes, please. But alas, this is very, very far from my current state of affairs,... See more
from Magic 8 Ball Mind by Rachel Katz
sari added 6mo ago
on mothering, productivity, and caring for an infant
- True confidence is believing in the validity of your own core desires, which also means identifying what you’re willing to sacrifice and bear for certain conditions to yield fruit. When there are competing needs, true prioritization reveals itself. A woman defining her own career path will learns this across various dimensions.
from ambitious women by Nix 🕊
sari added 7mo ago
- I’ve spent a lot of time with intelligent and determined women.
What have I noticed? Achieving the vision of ease is ironically arduous. It’s diligence and conscientiousness behind the scenes. Behind glamor is effort . I absorbed early that beauty and competence aren’t heaven-sent but goals to continuously chip away at. Many of us silently believe t... See morefrom ambitious women by Nix 🕊
sari added 7mo ago
- For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.
Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political play... See morefrom The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus by Edmund White
Faith Hahn added 9mo ago
- I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. S... See more
andrea and added 10mo ago