Whose Expectations?

So, last week, a couple of conversations got me thinking. One, with C, an extremely preggo woman, divvying her time between readying her professional replacement and getting the other little duckies in a row (when she’s not taking maternity-modeling gigs) ahead of the impending wee one’s arrival, was talking about how she thinks she’ll come […]

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Expectations? Check.

So clearly, you don’t often start the day thinking of “The Graduate.” But I was reminded of the iconic film about post-grad angst this A.M. via an op-ed from the Daily Pennsylvanian, written by Juliette Mullin, a senior at Penn, where, Mullin writes, students tend to equate the Penn seal on their diplomas with a […]

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Expectations, Part 2: Are We Our Own Worst Critics?

So I was pondering Shannon’s post yesterday about expectations, and thinking about how women today are often crushed under the weight of great ones. Then I started thinking about the ways in which those expectations lead many women to feel — or be — judged. And then, I got pinged by serendipity. First, I came […]

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Great Expectations

There’s something to be said for having low expectations: you’ll rarely find yourself disappointed. Or as baffled as “Confused 20-Something,” who’s two years out of college and quit her job at an educational nonprofit when she was accepted at an alternative certification program to become a middle school teacher only to find, now, she can’t […]

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The Year of The Woman, and The Hefty Burden of Making Choices

The Year of the Woman? Oy vey. It’s a phrase that’s always struck me as ridiculous. It would be one thing to declare it the Year of the Short, Redheaded, Left-Handed Woman, or the Year of the Unmarried, Urban-dwelling Thirtysomething Woman, or the Year of the Woman Who Doesn’t Want to Have It All, but, […]

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One More Reason Women Are Undecided?

I frequently hear from former students – usually bright, idealistic twentysomethings — long after they’ve exchanged their college dreams for, you know, reality. Often, these women are more than a little shell-shocked when they come face to face with the disconnect between their high expectations and life out there in the real world of work.  […]

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The Glorious Gloria Explains It All

It happened again the other day:  I was being interviewed by my introductory journalism class when I got The Question: Are you a feminist?  Of course, I shot back.  Beat.  Are you? The young woman was the tiniest bit flummoxed at being put on the spot.  Well, she said.  I guess it depends on how […]

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How The Pursuit of Happiness Makes Us Crazy.

The last time our family got together — finding all of us in the same zipcode at the same time is a rare and wondrous feat — we hunkered down in a suite at the Holiday Inn Express (Backstory not important). With no bar or restaurant in sight, our family of foodies trekked to the […]

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Mommy Wars? Media Myth!

I think it’s time to send the Mommy Wars off to bed once and for all. Best-selling novelist Deborah Copaken Kogan would definitely agree.  Kogan was one of the featured break-out speakers at last week’s Sun Valley Writers Conference and her talk on the myth of the mommy wars provided food for both thought and […]

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Just Like Us

In an epic case of What-Goes-Around-Comes-Around, Janice Min, founding editor of Us Weekly magazine (a magazine which traffics in “cute mum and baby” porn and is nearly singlehandedly responsible for introducing terms including “baby bump” and “post-baby body” into the lexicon) who helmed the junkreading juggernaut for six years and now collects her paychecks from the […]

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