Journalism: Opinion & Articles

Students Talking: The Case for Teaching about Gender Violence

Inside Higher Ed

The movie Women Talking, based on the novel by Miriam Toews and nominated for Best Picture at this weekend’s Academy Awards, has something to teach those of us who teach. I make this claim well aware of the vast differences between most U.S. college students and the group of Mennonite women who have gathered in a hayloft to decide what to do in the wake of multiple rapes. Will they do nothing, stay and fight, or leave?

Topics: Gender-based violence, Higher education & teaching

The Teen Brain

Allergic Living

Sydney Harris, a self-assured, 19-year-old college student, wasn’t always so comfortable with her food allergies. When she was diagnosed with severe allergies at the end of eighth grade, she had to “navigate through a whole new world of challenges.”

Topics: Chronic illness & disability, Motherhood & parenting

Marking Sacred Time: An interview with poet Eliza Grizwold

Boston Review

In 2012 and 2013, poet and journalist Eliza Griswold traveled to Afghanistan to collect and translate landays, an oral form of poetry popular among Pashtun women, in collaboration with Seamus Murphy, a photographer who has worked in the country for more than thirty years. Griswold’s translations appear alongside Murphy’s photographs in I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Topics: Travels, Writing

Food Allergies and the Good Enough Mother

Allergic Living

When my child was diagnosed with multiple food allergies nine years ago, I could not have predicted the anxiety, guilt, and self-blame that I would experience as a mother. 

Topics: Chronic illness & disability, Motherhood & parenting

Non, the French are not better moms

Coauthored with Deborah Siegel

CNN.com

The “mommy war” between stay-at-home and working mothers is in danger of being overshadowed by another maddening contest: the one between mothers in the U.S. and France. Two recent books, Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé and Karen Le Billon’s French Kids Eat Everything, make the case that French parents raise kids who behave and eat far better than their American counterparts.

Topics: Motherhood & parenting

The Allergen-Free Cake That Wasn’t

The New York Times Motherlode Blog

Nearly one-third of food-allergic children are bullied because of their allergies, according to a study published earlier this year in Pediatrics. Rather than blame the bully, what if we spun the discussion and asked: What does it take to create truly inclusive environments?

Topics: Chronic illness & disability, Motherhood & parenting

When Valentine’s Day is Dangerous for Kids

CNN.com

Today on Valentine’s Day, my child and I will sift through the candy received from third-grade classmates and throw most of it away. Although the tradition of trading chocolate and sugared hearts seems harmless, it actually poses a risk to my child and the millions of other American children who suffer from severe food allergies.

Topics: Chronic illness & disability, Motherhood & parenting

Mothers on the tenure track

The Mothers Movement Online

I loved The Nanny Diaries, the 2002 bestseller by a pair of former nannies who served up a merciless satire of the overly moneyed in Manhattan, their neglected children and their exploitive ways with the domestic help. Part comedy, part class commentary, the novel was a good laugh, and I expect I'll enjoy the movie version that opened on Friday every bit as much.   But as a working mother, I can't help noting how little the story has to do with reality—either with the situation of parents like me, who depend on nannies and babysitters to care for our children, or with the lives of most women who work as caregivers.

Topics: Gender & cultural change, Higher education & teaching, Motherhood & parenting, Work & caregiving

Who’s Your Nanny?

The Washington Post

I loved The Nanny Diaries, the 2002 bestseller by a pair of former nannies who served up a merciless satire of the overly moneyed in Manhattan, their neglected children and their exploitive ways with the domestic help. Part comedy, part class commentary, the novel was a good laugh, and I expect I'll enjoy the movie version that opened on Friday every bit as much. But as a working mother, I can't help noting how little the story has to do with reality—either with the situation of parents like me, who depend on nannies and babysitters to care for our children, or with the lives of most women who work as caregivers.

Topics: Motherhood & parenting, Work & caregiving

OTHER JOURNALISM TEXT

Other journalism includes articles, features, opinion, profiles, and reviews published in newspapers and magazines including Art Papers, The Christian Science Monitor, The Journal News, The Mothers Movement Online, Ms. Magazine, and Time Out New York.

Topics:

Book reviews

Understanding the real impact of abortion bans, one woman at a time

Review of “Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America,” by Shefali Luthra

The Washington Post

Undue Burden focuses on the stories of those who are attempting to navigate an unraveling health-care system while pregnant. Luthra brings their voices to life, and she locates her subjects in their larger contexts — socioeconomic, political, religious, historical — thereby exposing how abortion bans disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, including women of color and undocumented women and girls.

Topics:

How trans athletes became targets in the culture wars

Review of Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates, by Katie Barnes

The Washington Post

Fair Play is an excellent and much-needed examination of current debates about transgender and intersex athletes. As a sports journalist who covers LGBTQ+ issues, Barnes brings nuanced, in-depth analysis to complex matters that have been oversimplified, misunderstood and sometimes distorted.

Topics:

Forge

Review of Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising, by Brandi Morin

LIBER: A Feminist Review

For decades, the movement to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in North America has used a range of strategies to show non-Native people what Native people have known for hundreds of years: Indigenous women and girls, as well as queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people, are disproportionately victims of violence and homicide.      

Topics:

Report Card

Review of Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School, by Kendra James 

LIBER:  A Feminist Review

In the mid-2000s, Kendra James was the first African American legacy student at the Taft School, an upper-crust boarding school in Connecticut. The young James had visited the school during her father’s reunions, which gave her a sense of connection and familiarity, yet nothing prepared her—not her middle-class suburban life, her New Jersey public school education, or her upbringing by college-educated parents—for the ordeal of her three years at Taft.

Topics:

Transforming Parenthood

Longform review of How to Be a Girl: A Mother’s Memoir of Raising her Transgender Daughter, by Marlo Mack

Women’s Review of Books

Transgender children are in the news. This is, at best, a mixed state of affairs. A recent spate of documentaries, including the 2020 HBO film, Transhood, aims to provide less sensationalistic and more nuanced storytelling than previous mainstream media coverage, with trans youth sometimes acting as authors or co-creators. But increased visibility in both traditional and social media has met with backlash.

Topics:

The Eye

Review of Beauty, by Christina Chiu

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

Christina Chiu’s fast-paced and unsettling novel, Beauty, follows the life trajectory of Amy Wong, a second-generation Chinese American living in New York City whose plans to forge a career in fashion and find love get derailed.  

Topics:

Master Mind

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

In 2012, women’s and gender studies scholar Charlotte Pierce-Baker published a memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son, which explored the experience of mental illness and addition in an African American family.

Topics:

Bold Lives Matter

Review of The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation, by Jodie Patterson

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

Amidst the recent boom of parental memoirs about raising transgender kids, Jodie Patterson’s The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation provides a refreshing and consequential examination of the author’s experience raising her youngest son, a “boy called Penelope.”

Topics:

Litany of Madness

Review of Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

I can’t remember the last time I read a book as original and disturbing as Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater.

Topics:

Stories Matter

Review of Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi; Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta; The Book of Memory, by Petina Gappah

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

In her now-famous 2009 TED Talk, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains the “danger” of knowing only a “single story.”

Topics:

The Woman You’ve Never Heard of Who’s the Reason You Practice Yoga

Review of The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, by Michelle Goldberg

Women’s Review of Books

View article as PDF »

You don’t have to own a mat to know that yoga has transformed from a countercultural interest into a multibillion dollar “growth industry.”

Topics:

ADDITIONAL BOOK REVIEWS TEXT

Additional book reviews published in Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, The Christian Science Monitor, In These Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times-Union, Women’s Review of Books, The Washington Post, and Yale Alumni Magazine.

Topics:

Creative Nonfiction: Essays

Can yoga help parents of teens during the pandemic?

Motherwell

You wake up each morning never knowing which way it’s going to go. Some mornings you go into his bedroom and he starts to stir. You raise the blinds and the sun streams in. He smiles. Or, he doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t cry out, either. You smooth his hair back from his wide forehead. He can hide behind his hair, it’s getting so long. His chubby cheeks are just as smooth as when he was a little boy, before he entered this gangly phase.

Topics: Mental health, Motherhood & parenting

Dressing Up

Minerva Rising

I grew up in a time and a place where it was quite clear what girl and woman meant. I chafed at some of these expectations and met others. Most of all, I wanted to be pretty and smart, capable and adored. I liked dressing up, which my parents expected me to do for special occasions. Some dresses I loved. Others left me feeling torn.

Topics: Gender & cultural change, Motherhood & parenting, Trans kids

Parenting without a Rope

The Good Mother Myth: Redefining Motherhood to Fit Reality - edited by Avital Norman Nathman

View article as PDF »

The third time my child almost died from a sip of milk was entirely my fault.

Topics: Chronic illness & disability, Motherhood & parenting

The Valley of the Kings

A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley

View article as PDF »

I peered at the itinerary clipped onto my handlebars and read the name: “Abbaye de Pontleroy.” In front of us, the sign read “Fermé.” “Strike two,” my husband said, getting back onto his bike.

Topics: Travels

Dog Days and Dark Nights

Ducts: The Webzine of Personal Stories

Five years ago, my newly married husband and I moved to Senegal, West Africa, where losing electricity was as common as the goats that wandered the arid Sahel. The first time the power went out, it was late afternoon.

Topics: Travels