My blogger friends in Chicago are asking folks to please visit the new Planned Parenthood Aurora blog and comment. The blog should be a place where pro-choicers can gather to discuss the situation not just in Aurora but around this country. Please join me in passing on the blog to friends & other pro-choice allies. Psst – pass it on!
One more related to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s new book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Loved Kathryn Harrison’s review of it in the NYTimes Book Review this weekend, especially this line:
Hillary Clinton, who famously refused to “bake cookies” in the background of her husband’s career, is an Amazon, destined to be as much the property of myth as of history, between which lies a vast and unfixed common ground.
(Pic is of First Ladies in 1994, left to right: Nancy Reagan, Lady Bird Johnson, Clinton, then the current First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush.)
I’m on a panel with Ulrich next week – details here. Do come!
I’m back from my dear friend Rebecca Wallace-Segall’s wedding weekend — at a bonefide dude ranch in upstate New York! I love weddings that draw on tradition and simultaneously subvert. Groom Jeremy rode in on an ATV, his long hair flying in the wind. Rebecca rode in on a horse, and the horse bolted. Instead of wedding cake, friends baked pies. This is a pic of me and Katie Orenstein (the same Catherine Orenstein who teaches the fabulous op-ed writing classes for women) pretending we are a two-headed buck.
Mazel tovs and dude-like high fives to Rebecca and Jeremy (aka Rebeccemy)! Sending you both tons of love, always.
So as promised, I’m occasionally posting readers’ questions (and my answers!) about the intersections of feminist blogging, scholarship, and journalism here.
Q: I’ve been working on an essay I’m thinking about posting, but it’s also one that I want to try and get published once I’ve had a chance to do some more research and polishing. In your experience, does publishing a portion or draft of a piece on a blog make it difficult to get that piece published in a scholarly journal later on?
GWP: I sometimes use blogging as a way to think through ideas I am writing about for publication elsewhere. More often, I’ll do a post around links that I want to return to and mull over for a piece I’m working on. But here’s the thing: When I rework an idea I’ve blogged about for the purposes of publication (ie, the non-blog variety), I will word the idea very differently. My blog voice is much more off-the-cuff and this-just-in sounding than anything I would write for a magazine or journal. Scholarly journals, like magazines, generally want proprietary content. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do a post around an idea that’s part of an article you are submitting elsewhere. I would argue against posting a large portion (ie more than 500 words) of something you will repurpose verbatim — both because the publication may not favor that and because you don’t want to be plagarized before you’ve published in the journal. But if you do decide to post a portion, I suggest being up front about it when you submit the article to the journal. Does anyone have additional thoughts, or experiences around this issue to share?
I’m late to posting today (meetings, meetings!) but I’ve got a good one for you. My friend Marci Alboher, author of the book pictured left, has launched a blog called Shifting Careers over at the New York Times. The tagline of the blog? “Smart thinking at work.” With Marci behind it, smart it will be for sure. Heck, already is. Check out this post, on why the best-places-to-work for women lists matters. Or this one, on what Marci did when the Times designed a logo for her featuring a man. Or this one, on her writing mentor Susan Shapiro and how to be a good mentee. See what I’m sayin? This blog has become my new must-read. Do check it out, and if you like it, post comments and send Marci some love.
Ok, I know I’m all about the panels today, but here’s another one — save the date! I’m moderating 🙂
The Tenement Museum presents…
Feminist New York
Thursday, October 11
6-8 PM
Lower East Side Tenement Museum Shop
108 Orchard Street at Delancey
Join us for a panel discussion with Pamela Thompson & Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, authors of the recently published Every Past Thing and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Our panel will discuss the private and public acts of New York women during the late 19th and early 20th century. As the moderator, I’ll put the issues in a contemporary feminist context, too. Free and open to the public – but RSVPs requested (Bookclub@tenement.org).
Dying to read it. Here’s Faludi in the Times today, sounding off on “an exaltation of American masculinity in an intergalactic crisis.” Cowboy president, anyone? (Actually, the book sounds like much more than Backlash sequel, but I loved me that book so much….)
Sometimes there is just too much panel goodness going on in this town. I am SO going to this one. Join me?!
Tuesday, October 16, 7:00 p.m.
Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor
Admission: $8
Are increasing numbers of elite women voluntarily opting out of serious careers thereby betraying feminism, stalling their own development, and gambling with their own and their children’s economic futures? Moderated by E.J. Graff, senior researcher at Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University. Panelists include Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University California at Hastings; Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research; Ellen Bravo, author of Taking On The Big Boys: Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation and Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor emeritus Brandeis University. Sponsored by the Wolfson Center for National Affairs.
(Thanks to Anthony Deen for the heads up.)
I’m back in NYC – whew – and wanted to send a shout out and a warm welcome to Marco (see post below)! And thank you so much to everyone who channeled good thoughts and sent the sweetest emails asking about my dad. His surgery went swimmingly, and he’s back at work already. I repeat: whew.
And also just a quickie reminder. Come one, come all, to the Woodhull Writers Well tomorrow!
Ok, I’m hitting the hay now. It’s been a LONG couple a days.
This is guest blogger Marco with the first in a series of posts here on Girl With Pen where I aim to examine cultural and media-enabled myths and expectations regarding men — our desires, peeves, habits and obsessions, such as they are. But first, a few words to explain my feature title, lest I be confused with those oily, sarcastic, Coors-and-testosterone-addled shlubs who haunt the comment threads over at Broadsheet.
No sarcasm is intended. I’ve adopted the “good sport” moniker as a kind of badge of honor ever since it was bestowed on me by Nona Willis-Aronowitz at dinner. To explain further: after Dee’s reading at New York’s KGB Bar recently, we went out for a chocolate dinner reward at the Bald Man (aka Max Brenner) with Lauren Sandler and Nona Willis-Aronowitz (but you knew that already if you read this post). I’m a big fan of Broadsheet (and of course Girl w/Pen) because I happen to enjoy listening to smart, funny, sassy women, whether the subject is “the patriarchy” or relationships— and there was a whole lot of talk on the latter at this particular venue. To be fair, we also touched on Nona’s upcoming road trip and Dee’s traveling WomenGirlsLadies panel; it all coalesced around talking up, rediscovering and re-mapping the American Woman between the coasts, between cities and between easy polarities.
There’s something cozily mesmerizing about following the Moebius loop of women talking about women talking; something also about the instant camaraderie of firing marshmallows over the table brazier and sharing dark chocolate fondue — probably the closest I’ve yet come to summer camp (not a typical option back in my ‘hood, back in the day). Anyhow, when Lauren’s husband and a buddy showed up it was suddenly three boys to three girls, and there was a palpable thump, like ballast shifting in the hold of a ship when it changes course. Nona sort of shook her head as if to clear it and smiled at me. “You’ve been a good sport for putting up with all the Sex-and-the-City stuff,” she said. I smiled back and shrugged. “Not at all. It was fun.” And it was. Now it was time for the men to high-five and reel out the batting averages… not. The new subject was Lauren and Justin’s cool digs in Williamsburg— midcentury modern or New York eclectic?
Domicile trumps locker room. Almost always OK by me.
My next post: lock and load—— Halo 3 hits the streets and guy-outlets like Spike TV go into frenzy mode. Meanwhile that study on guys, gals and first-person shooter games surfaces in The Economist, and makes Jezebel go “Hmmm…”
