I’ve added a list (scroll down, it’s on the left) of forthcoming books by savvy feminist scholars to watch out for – and will continue to try to list em as I see em going forth.

Did you catch that front page story in Sunday’s New York Times on “amazing girls”? My gal Courtney Martin has a whole book on the topic (and much more) coming out April 17. It’s called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. (Courtney and I are teaming up to do some joint speaking this summer about feminism’s daughters. Stay tuned…) For a great counterpoint to the article, though, check out Courtney’s post on feministing.com and Patti Binder on What’s Good for Girls.

The other book I’ve listed comes out around Mother’s Day and promises to clear up a lot of the annoying myths about “opting out.” Penned by sociologist Pamela Stone, it’s called Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Stone’s revealing study adds an important counterpoint to Leslie Bennetts’s forthcoming The Feminine Mistake.” I’m not sure yet how it’s a “counterpoint” (I need to read it!), but I urge people to check it out. It looks at what really happens to women who opt out of the workplace and their careers for the sake of their families and sheds light on new research about the American workplace. (Hint: The dirty little secret of today’s work world is that it is not providing work-committed women with the support they need to keep working once they become mothers.)

On a related note, and in case anyone missed it, a special March issue of The American Prospect grew out of an October 2006 work/family research conference sponsored by the Council on Contemporary Families and looks at “Why Can’t America Have a Family-Friendly Workplace.” The issue includes articles by the creme de la creme on this topic: Joan Williams, Kathleen Gerson, Heather Bousey, Janet Gornick, Scott Coltrane, Tamara Draut, Jodie Levin-Epstein, Ellen Bravo, Ann Friedman. These people are all doing amazing work and, like Pamela Stone, merit increased visibility for their solid and grounded research.

The other week, Slate hosted “Memoir Week”, assessing the state of the modern memoir and posing the following question to a group of memoir writers:

How do you, as memoirists, choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them—or do you not alert them at all? If you do, do you discuss the book with family members and friends while the work is in progress? How do you deal with complaints from people who may remember events differently than you?

These are questions I get asked a lot as I travel around talking about our book, Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. When Daphne and I were inviting writers to contribute to our anthology, some told us they wouldn’t be able to write anything about their parents until they were safely 6 feet under. But not me. In fact, the things I wrote about my mother in my essay for the book were things I had already told her. Or rather, wrote to her. I started writing her letters when I was still living under her roof, at age 16. They were love letters with an ultimatum: “If you want to continue to have a relationship with me, pay attention,” they’d generally begin. My mother still has these letters tucked away somewhere in her nightstand drawer.

But still, people who read my essay in Only Child generally to want to know how my mother “took” my essay. And then there’s that other question: “What did your ex-husband think?”

In answer to both: As I finished writing the piece, I decided that ongoing relationships with both Mom and ex were more important to me than any piece of writing. So I made the decision to show them both the draft and give them the opportunity to ask me to make changes before I went to print. Writer friends thought I was nuts to open up my draft to editorial input from the leading characters in my drama. Granted, I was not prepared to completely revise, nor was I willing to let certain details or particular turns of phrases go. But each (Mom and ex) asked for one or two emendations around details that were important to them to mask. I honored their requests.

My mother—like Sean Wilsey’s—agreed that I had the right to tell the truth, and she actually, bravely, agreed with my version of truth when it came to my characterization of her, and of our earlier and often painful dynamic. My ex, for whom wounds were perhaps more fresh, may have told the story a different way, but he, too, told me he saw the veracity in my account. I give these two characters in my drama extreme kudos. They each proved big enough to let me own my experience, my tale. Mom remains my biggest fan (love ya!), and yes, to many people’s surprise, my ex and I wish each other nothing but deep happiness and are still, if at a remove, in touch.

I’d be eager to hear how other contributors to our book have experienced the aftermath of writing about their families — or how anyone who writes personally has dealt with these particular challenges.

Well, March came and went, but hey, it’s never too late for a Women’s History Month post, right?

So first, my congrats to the 2007 honorees of National Women’s History Month. Very cool, I thought, that the theme was “Generations of Women Moving History Forward,” and that Third Wave Foundation’s Executive Director Monique Mehta was among the honorees.

And speaking of history, last week I contacted the scholars behind this terrific online resource called “The Second Wave and Beyond.” Check it out. It’s still under development. Lookin forward to seeing it grow.

Point blank, women need to write more op-eds. So if you’re in NYC, check it out!:

“Voicing Your Opinion”

Op-Ed pages are a powerful forum for public discourse, and a well-written piece can affect social change. But with limited page space, editors tend to favor the powers-that-be. Enter the Blogo-sphere and on-line citizen journalism, opening the field to a broader range of voices. Media opinion-makers explore the impact of this new phenomenon.

Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Tunku Varadarajan, Editorial Features Editor, Wall Street Journal
Matt Stoller, political activist/blogger
Sheryl McCarthy, Columnist, Newsday; Board of Contributors, USA Today
Andrzej Rapaczynski, Editor and Director, Project Syndicate
Catherine Orenstein, contributor, New York Times, Washington Post (moderator)

When: Wednesday, April 4, 200706:30 PM – 08:00 PM
Where: NYU Steinhardt Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues, at 10th Street)
Go to http://www.cencom.org/ to register. The event is free.

Friends have started to ask me what I’m working on next. I’m thinking of working on a book with the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership. As such, I’ve been scouring the shelves for books on women and leadership. (If you know of any good ones, please send me a post!)

As far as I can tell so far, the few books on leadership aimed at women seem to focus on ambition, promise power, and encourage readers to cultivate a “bad girl” attitude in order to achieve it. Their titles are telling: Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do, by Kate White. Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess by Susan Jane Gilman. And most recently, Am-BITCH-ous: Learn to Be Her Now by Debra Condren. I have to say, I love absorbing these books and more or less laud their bad-ass bad-girlness. But I have two qualms with this general approach:

1) Teaching women to be smartmouthed goddesses or gutsy and amBITCHous can’t take place in a vaccuum. It’s not just inner change, but external change that’s needed (the personal is STILL political, no?)

2) These titles leave me wondering, is it possible to claim ambition as a virtue for women without having to claim ourselves as “bitches”?

I welcome any thoughts.

Continuing the thread on women academics writing “crossover” books, George Washington University English professor Gayle Wald recently came out with what looks like a fantastic biography, Shout, Sister, Shout: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and to great critical acclaim. Since Marco and I just rented Walk the Line, I’m goin’ straight out to buy some Sister Rosetta as a supplement! Looking forward, too of course, to the book. (Kudos, Gayle!)

Of course, not only are the girls in NYC going public and making noise this week. Check out my friend and colleague Alison Piepmeier, Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the College of Charleston, in an ABC news interview about the anti-abortion legislation passed this week in her state.

Read more about the scary legislation here.

What a generative few weeks it’s been for the girls here in NYC! Just bursting to share news of my friend Rebecca Segall’s new venture here on the Upper West Side:

Writopia is a new afterschool writing center offering community and creative writing workshops for young writers, ages 12-18. Rebecca (left) — who is herself a brilliant writer and from whom I’ve learned a great deal about writing nonacademically — launched the site last week, and if you know people with kids who are into writing, please please pass it on. My Marco designed the cool logo.

And attention women writing books about women’s lives: I may be a bit late in the discovery, but because I just learned about this, I just have to pass it on:

MotherTalk is a place where readers and writers connect through literary salons, blog tours, podcasts, radio, writer’s community, and more. What an ingenuous idea. I already adore these people and hope to learn more later today.

Last night I finished teaching a 5-week online seminar for scholars in women’s studies on translating their ideas into book proposals for a trade (aka nonacademic) market. A shout out to all you fabulous participants! This group was great, and some book contracts are certain to follow.

One question a friend taking the course asked me toward the end was how I decided to bypass the traditional academic path and whether I’d recommend the path I’ve chosen instead to others currently situated in the academy.

I’ve never regretted my decision to bail on the academic job market as soon as I finished my PhD. It was tough telling my beloved dissertation advisor–though believe me, she was relieved when I eventually got the words out because I went through half a box of Kleenex before I could even speak so she must have thought I was about to reveal that I had some fatal disease. “Let a thousand flowers bloom” was her response, much to my relief. I imagine not all of them are like that.

After the degree, I spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan, then as a Research Fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. I knew I wanted to write for a popular audience—that was why I’d left academe. I’d grown weary of writing prose that came to feel like a straight-jacket on me and was anxious to join the fray of young women then writing about feminism. Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After, you could say, was my motivation. I wanted to take her and others on in print, and in a way that I, too, could be heard.

So I tried to become a freelance writer. I was in the ridiculously lucky position of having funding to do this (not something I would encourage anyone to count on – long story). Though it may sound idyllic, I hated it. Lack of structure, lack of accountability (I didn’t have an agent or a publisher yet), and lack of a community doing the same thing I was doing (I was new to NYC at the time) made me feel extremely isolated and I sunk. When you start out freelancing for magazines, you spend 90 percent of your time pitching editors and 10 percent writing actual articles. Launching the web-journal The Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard during this time saved me. But I did manage to write an article for Psychology Today that got me the attention of an agent, and ultimately, that connection changed my life.

Two books later and with the support of an incredible writers’ group, the Invisible Institute, behind me, I’m still not writing full-time, nor would I choose to be. I need structure and colleagues like I need oxygen. I learned this when I went to work as a projects director at the National Council for Research on Women, after my Barnard gig was up. I worked for NCRW 4 days a week and wrote on the 5th. I wrote early mornings before work and weekends. This carried me through the completion of my first book (a co-edited anthology) and a draft of my second (Sisterhood, Interrupted). I left my staff position at NCRW in July, because I was ready to shift the balance.

Writing now makes up about 50 percent of my week. The other 50 percent I spend consulting and working on special projects for women’s research and policy centers. I’m freelance again, but this time, it works because I’m working with organizations and I get to go to office places. Believe me, this makes a huge difference. After having suffered the isolation of writing a dissertation and then some painful years trying to write freelance full-time, I still get turned on by things like staff meetings and supply closets.

Would I recommend the path I’ve taken? I admire and have huge respect for my friends pursuing academic careers and would never say one route is better than another. It’s more a matter of what perch you want to offer your contribution from, and in what voice. And, most importantly, your tolerance or capacity for risk. Leaving a stable job with benefits is risky and not for the faint of heart. I personally couldn’t have done it without support from family and, for a while, a husband.

But now here’s my plug: Feminist thinkers trained in the academy are so often experts at producing trenchant cultural analysis. We need this, and we need this stuff in public venues. The under-representation of women’s voices and the lack of women- and girl-centered topics in mainstream media coverage is nothing short of appalling. Feminist scholars have this incredible opportunity to frame popular debate. Can they do it from academic perches? Possible. But not easy. Which is why the National Women’s Studies Association and I created this course (“Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade”)—to help those who have committed themselves to academic careers and academic contributions also consider crossing over and learn to write for trade. The Woodhull Institute is another organization helping, and encouraging, women scholars to write for popular audiences. They offer amazing writers’ retreats, which I highly recommend. And then there’s Katie Orenstein (see previous post!), out there teaching women experts of all stripes and fields to write op-eds.

It’s a propitious time to be thinking about popularizing your thoughts and your writing if you are a feminist scholar because of these resources and trainings that have recently emerged. Stay tuned for more from me, too….The NWSA course may be just the beginning.

Be sure to check out Thursday’s New York Times article about my good friend Katie Orenstein’s forward-looking efforts to get more women–across generations–to pour their passion into writing op-eds. Go, Katie. You give me hope.