It is an honor to be featured in Tribeza Magazine’s People of the Year for 2017-the artists, thinkers, builders, and visionaries shaping the future of Austin.
Continue reading “Tribeza Magazine’s Person of the Year 2017”Gila Jones played it safe in her twenties, following a well-worn path from a government degree from Harvard University to an NYU law degree and a job with a prestigious law firm. After five years with the firm, she took an unexpected leap into the corporate world and became general counsel of an LA-based apparel company. At 31, she traded the security of a defined career ladder for the challenge and responsibility of leading an entire legal operation. Sixteen months in, she’s still leaning in and loving it!
- Name: Gila Jones
- Age: 32
- Work: General Counsel for a Los Angeles-based fashion brand
- Educational background: Bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University; Law degree from New York University
A silhouette of a 1950s housewife emblazoned with the words “emotional,” “bossy” and “too nice” stood out among the other magazine covers depicting skyscrapers and suit-clad executives. I grabbed the magazine off the rack, wondering what exactly the editors meant that cover to convey. Were they suggesting that those descriptors were as outdated as the woman’s bob hairstyle? I sure hoped so.
It was the Harvard Business Review. I flipped to the article, “Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers” (by Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely and Deborah Kolb), and marveled at the image selected to illustrate it: a two-page spread of artist Janet Echelman’s soaring Amsterdam Light Festival sculpture installation. Vital and cerebral, the hi-tech yet animate work evoked the kind of unfettered intelligence and creativity that leaders should possess.
But this article, unlike Echelman’s acclaimed TED Talk, wasn’t about taking imagination seriously. Instead, jargon like “second-generation gender bias” and “identity workspaces” jarred against Echelman’s breathtaking art. The sculpture’s buoyant spirit couldn’t have contrasted more sharply with the article’s neutered corporate speak.
Continue reading “What Does It Really Take for Women to Become Corporate Leaders?”I celebrated a birthday in September and, in true internet-age fashion, did a Google search on women born in my birth year, 1980. Turns out I share it with Christina Aguilera, Gisele Bundchen, Kim Kardashian and Venus Williams. All four are powerhouse women at the top of their games in highly public fields. They’ve built multimillion-dollar personal brands with incredible work ethic and uncommon drive. Three are also moms.
I could look at these peers and see a lot standing between their accomplishments and mine. But that would miss the point. Birthdays give us a perfect occasion to ponder the gap between where we are and where we’ve always longed to be.
I never aspired to be a pop icon, supermodel, reality star or elite tennis player. But I always thought I would be a nationally recognized author. Problem was: I didn’t always work like one.
I suspect that the ladies above grasped early on something that I was slower to recognize. That once you figure out your niche — something you’ve got some talent for and interest in—you’ve got to imagine yourself performing at your peak and find the motivation to pursue the vision relentlessly. Every day.
Gisele remarked in British Vogue: “I tell my five sisters, who don’t work at it very hard at all, whatever you put in, you get out. I’m not afraid of working hard at anything, whatever it is. I just always want to be the best that I can.”
My big dreams remain, but as a mother, I’ve got to be considerably more creative in their pursuit. Getting from point A to point B with a two-year-old in tow requires a bit more strength and flexibility than when I was flying solo. Now I have to work at the dream and at finding time, space and energy to pursue it. Fortunately, motherhood builds just that kind of muscle with its nonstop demands and the ultimate motivation—a little being who’s watching your every move.
Continue reading “Reflecting on Priorities in Life and Motherhood, Two Years In”Mexican moms teach their children to greet adults with a peck on the cheek and few Norwegian women see obstetricians (there, midwives rule). Or so, Cup of Jo’s Motherhood Around the World series teaches us. Reading about American expat moms’ experiences abroad got me thinking about how parenting in my own neighborhood might look to outsiders. Surely, folks from other places might find some of our habits peculiar. Indeed, when I pause to consider them, some of the things I’ve seen—and done—surprise me too.
Of course, what follows is a mix of generalizations, over-simplifications and triviality. But what isn’t?
Continue reading “Strange Parenting Rituals of the Young and Restless”Lydia Netzer’s debut novel “Shine Shine Shine” blasts through locales as far flung as Burma, Norfolk and the moon to land among my favorite novels.
Fueled by strange and nuanced characters, emotional heft and serious action, this stellar novel deftly probes the dark matter of marriage and motherhood. Over two generations, it mines the characters’ long-held secrets and festering wounds to reveal depths of strength and vulnerability.
Netzer brings many talents to bear on this project—deeply imagined characters, fresh humor and cinematic sweep. She moves assuredly from the subatomic particles of identity—the stories we tell ourselves—to the supergalactic forces of creation and birth, literally labor. And she does so without undue adherence to chronology or order. I loved its messy, far-ranging ambition.
The roving, offbeat novel is at once a romance involving two remarkable individuals bound together from youth, a belated-coming-of-age story and a moving portrait of motherhood in damning circumstances. It all orbits a woman, named Sunny, who appears to be anything but.
While other novels have earned more critical acclaim, this is one whose characters lodged themselves in my gut. It’s the kind of story that you digest, instead of merely read. Its ideas—particularly about women’s obligations to those we love and the deep reserves of fortitude we must tap to fulfill them—must be broken down, absorbed and consumed by the body.
Over and over again, the high drama of car crashes and intimate betrayals is grounded in the telling details of Sunny’s personal topography—the lies she tells, the objects she covets, the illusions she nurtures. As a reader, I witnessed Sunny reimagine herself through retellings of her story on the playgrounds of her youth, in an elective poetry class in college, at a housewarming party in adulthood, in her own mind. More importantly, as a woman-mother-wife, I empathized with the thorny tangles of manipulation and maturation evident within her shifting personal narratives.
“When you are sitting on a three-legged stool and you’ve kicked out all three legs, but you’re still sitting upright, must you assume that you’re just so good, you levitate? Or, must you assume that you were sitting on the ground all along?,” Sunny ponders when another of life’s meteors comes crashing her way. “When there’s nothing left to burn, maybe you have to set yourself on fire.”
Ultimately, like its protagonist, this novel doesn’t just shine, it blazes.
I began planning my daughter’s second birthday party just hours before it was scheduled to start (of course!). I knew from my crazy blog habit that I should have ordered gorgeous personalized party invitations, lemonade bottles and goodie bags adorned with elegant fonts, photography and tiara imagery from Pinhole Press weeks before.
But I’m a lover, not a planner. Or at least, that was my response to my mother, who asked about the party relentlessly in the two weeks leading up to it.
Continue reading “How to celebrate a two-year-old’s birthday”I’m on a quest to learn to cook this year, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have doubts about the whole thing.
I want to cook at home to save money, be healthy and create more occasions for my family to gather. I also want to use home-cooked meals to teach my daughter about personal wellbeing, the environment and their interconnectedness.
I do not want to be (or even pretend on the internet to be) a domestic goddess. I just don’t buy the cooking nostalgia served up by food writers and pundits who long for make-believe good old days. You know, the ones when smiling women with little economic and educational opportunity enjoyed spending their days in hot, confined spaces whipping up wholesome feasts.
I can’t mine my history for those days because they didn’t exist. And while I understand Michael Pollan’s point that Go-Gurt has major shortcomings, I bristle when he calls for us to eat what our great-great-grandmothers would recognize as food. It’s impossible for me to be wistful for the diet of cornmeal, salt herring and pork that slaves like my foremothers subsisted on.
Continue reading “Why Cook? Why Now?”My master bedroom is currently a blank slate, or a beige slate, to be more exact. It’s that shade of blah most frequently found in hotel rooms and apartment complexes. The neutral color is very tranquil–good for sleeping–and goes well with just about everything.
But we can do better. Here are my initial ideas for moving in a slightly more colorful direction. (NOTE: These are all things I really like. There is no advertising or sponsored content on this site.)
1. A watercolor that combines the beige and gray I love so much with a touch of color. This one is Andre’ Foreman’s Jade Elephant from E&S Gallery.
2. A pendant shade chandelier to add light and texture over head. This one is the Mod Pendant Shade Chandelier from Shades of Light.
3. A bold, abstract rug to keep things cozy like this Surya Signature Collection pick from Rug Studio.
4. An upholstered, tufted headboard makes a statement. I spied this Bernhardt Jordan Button-Tufted Wing Bed in the window of Ruth & Ollie in Richmond and have to have it.
5. A pop of color in the form of a Lulu & Georgia Wild & Free Pillow in Ruby Red.
6. A shiny bench for when sitting, not sleeping, is in order. This one is Ethan Allen’s Xanadu Bench.
First, a warning: Don’t judge “Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection” by its cover. The illustration and the title give the wrong impression.
The cover (designed by a man, incidentally) features a glorified stock photo of a white woman in stilettos, button-down shirt and trousers standing on her head while peering at a laptop. Outsized blood-colored boxes imprison white text stamped across the poor woman’s body.
Ugh.
Written by Debora Spar, a mother of three and the president of Barnard College, the book is related to sex, power and the quest for perfection. But, more interestingly, it’s preoccupied with the 101 ways that women set themselves up for perpetual disappointment, anxiety and dissatisfaction, by pursuing a perfection mirage.
The sex/power business reads like a primetime exposé and comes across as much less astute, inspired and upbeat than the book itself.
(Steps off soapbox.)
A Sweeping Account
Like the women it examines, “Wonder Women” is probably trying to do too much. Bloated with research and anecdotes, it is part memoir, part cultural history, part survey of gender research and part self-help—all with an upper-middle-class-white-woman bent.
Read it anyway.
In each chapter, Spar examines the siren song of perfectionism in a different facet of women’s lives—childhood, body image, love, sex, wifedom, motherhood, work and aging. She discusses the origin of off-the-chart expectations in each area, highlights the contradictions inherent in the pursuit of perfection and foreshadows its demise. We cannot hear this enough.
Taken separately, there are few surprises in Spar’s notes on the sexual revolution, evolutionary biology, eating disorders, contraception, childbirth, parenthood, relationships, glass ceilings and the beauty industry.
The book’s real achievement is in range, not revelation. It’s the accumulation of these doomed perfection quests from girlhood to death that astounds. Spar’s unrelenting variations on the theme of feminism vs. perfectionism over 300 pages make an impact.
This Book’s For You
I recommend this book for any woman who has ever piled on too many responsibilities and then buckled under the weight. And what woman hasn’t?
Read this book because of Spar’s voice. This accomplished woman (who might be suspected of having it all) generously illustrates the book’s arguments with examples culled from her own life. She comes across not as a distant academic, but as a real (if unusually curious and well-read) woman in the trenches, figuring life out as she goes.
Her personal accounts—like the time she crashed her minivan into a telephone pole racing to her daughter’s ballet recital—ground the book in a way that the raft of research alone could not. And her witty, opinionated tone makes otherwise dense material lively and palatable for readers.
Read this book because of its examples of real women making conscious trade-offs to pursue their big dreams. As I wrote in a previous post on not-to-do lists, women would benefit greatly from making more deliberate choices about what we’re going to do (and not do) in our daily lives. It’s the antidote to living by default, aspiring to unrealistic ends and disappointing ourselves.
Read this book for its cogent discussion of what the heck has happened to feminism, the institution of marriage, the workplace, standards of beauty and other pillars of women’s lives over the last 50 years. Agree or disagree with the specifics of Spar’s analysis, but appreciate her sustained exploration of why even privileged women feel unfulfilled and stuck despite unprecedented opportunity.
Resist the Myth
Read “Wonder Women” once for its sweeping review and then refer back to it as needed. Let it fortify you against the pressure to do more and more, better and better.
Feeling unsettled after reading “news” like this un-ironic account of the 17 creams and oils that comprise 72-year-old Martha Stewart’s beauty regimen from the New York Times? See Chapter Nine: Memories of My Waist. It’ll remind you that aging is inevitable, the media is largely inept at embracing it and women can (and must) make their own choices in response.
Thinking about adding yet another project, responsibility or expectation to your life? Refer to Chapter 10, where Spar writes, “[Women] need to realize that having it all means giving something up—choosing which piece of the perfect picture to relinquish, or rework, or delay. Having choices means making them, and then figuring out how to make them work.”
Go forth and work it!
P.S.
I just read that an updated version of “Lean In” is due out in April. Focused on recent college graduates, it will include new advice on finding a first job and listening to your inner voice. I hope “Wonder Women” gets a second printing with a better cover!
