Jun 22 2012
By Deborah Kolben at 2:14 pm
The same year I finished college, I also attended my friend’s graduation at Barnard College. While the commencement speech that year at the University of Michigan had been sort of lackluster, I expected that at Barnard I would be inspired. That perhaps I would be talked into a more ambitious plan than following a boyfriend to New Mexico to live in an adobe hut and work at a clothing store (CP Shades to be more specific and the indignity more acute).
Instead, the speaker at Barnard was Joyce Purnick, a longtime columnist for the New York Times and the first woman to head the Metro section at the paper. That day she addressed the lawn full of wide-eyed young women about to enter the work force and told them: Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 21 2012
By Gabrielle Birkner at 12:08 pm
Would women be better equipped to fight the war if more highly educated mothers went back to work?
Get out your virtual pitchforks. I’m about to defend Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Last week, the writer-turned-lawyer curried ire with many a stay-at-home mother (#sahm, in Twitter verse), when she denounced “1% wives”–referring to America’s most privileged, educated women–as collaborators in the “war on women.”
In her red-meat-for-the-blogosphere polemic, Wurtzel argues that “being a mother isn’t really work” because it’s not selective. “A job that anyone can have is not a job, it’s a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation),” she writes. Read the rest of this entry →
Jun 19 2012
By Jordana Horn at 1:39 pm
Being a “real feminist” is apparently when you write an article for a national publication deliberately denigrating other women, and get paid to do so.
That was what I learned from reading Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay in The Atlantic, “1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism And Make The War On Women Possible.” The essay is fairly mean-spirited. Here, for example, is the first paragraph:
Read the rest of this entry →
