women and ambition

“Curious about how does one ‘have it all’? 3 young boys, 2 booming businesses, an incredible creative partnership and new business with your husband... what does hired help look like?” - Joanne

‘All’ isn’t possible, or even desirable. For me, a full, fulfilling life requires plenty of room for living and all the unplanned stuff that inevitably... See more

“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,... See more

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

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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... 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... 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... 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... See more