women and ambition

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

There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've ... See more

At some point while I was trying to write a dissertation as a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I attended a workshop from which I remember exactly one thing: Touch Your Project Every Day. We all lead busy lives, one of the organizers explained, and it can be difficult to find long stretches of time to focus and work through such a large and i... See more

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous

not

to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter.

“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

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

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 more

Whatever initial appeal this argument has, it owes to the unpleasantness of corporate drudgery in general, not to the predicament of female corporate drudges in particular. Invariably, the job that features in articles like Andrews’s is soul-sucking, pointless and therefore presumed to have been chosen solely for the prestige it confers (although s... See more