If you have been following the project, you know I have met some cool women this year. Every place has offered me a glimpse into women doing their thing in relation to their landscape, and it’s safe to say that these women kept that going.

They also gave me something else: exposure to women who want more, for themselves and for all of us.

These women started by entering an industry that has long been run by and ruled by men. The apparel, the gear, the bathroom practices, the schedules, the communication styles, the rules. All of it. Women have been involved for generations, especially as daughters and family members of lobstermen and fishermen, which gave them real knowledge: how to trailer, drive, and dock a boat, read the tides, tie a knot, navigate the water. It also gave them a kind of protection, since they were traditionally treated as, “so and so’s daughter” out on the water.

But over the past several years, women have been on the forefront of an aquaculture movement to grow oysters and kelp, among other things. They began by attending free classes, where they learned things like how to grow oysters, but not about how to drive the boat to get to the cages that float on top of the water or below it, depending on their farming style. Women working in partnering organizations and universities noticed. They surveyed. They listened. They created courses for women, and they adjusted the curriculum.

Then they listened again.

More mentoring? More social support? More access to information about how to adjust work built for a 6’2” body to one that is 5’2”? Done. Some of what these women figured out about protecting their bodies is now helping their male counterparts too, whose bodies are also wearing down from repetitive lifting and hauling.

This refinement of women’s programming led to the formation of the Women and NonBinary Aquaculture Network (WNBA to them). It began as an informal network. Women gathered. They ate pizza, chatted on rafts, toured each other’s farms, commiserated…and planned. All while wearing boots that were actually insulated and sized to a woman’s foot, so they weren’t standing in freezing water with their toes falling off in the depths of winter as their male counterparts wore insulated footwear–and teased them. They didn’t understand that women didn’t have access to the same gear they did. The women advocated for new sizes and insulation, and now they have it. An early win, and one of many to come.

I went in thinking that I would be focusing on the work of the WNBA and how they are evolving into a more formalized collective structure, but what I found was that much more was happening. A smaller group within the WNBA is beginning to organize a cooperative. For them, their experience in the overall industry has gone from, “I could really use some social support and help getting my questions answered,” which the network is helping with, to (pardon my language) “fuck this shit; we need something better.”

So they are building what they need.

They are seeking counsel from organizations specializing in the formation of cooperatives, and starting what they know will be a long but worthwhile process of creating new infrastructure. They hope their cooperative will help them secure access to shared leases for their on-water farms, purchase gear that can be shared, share trailering to get their oysters where they need to be before ice melts, and create a formal pool of labor for tasks like cleaning, harvesting, event shucking, and of course, social support.

They are starting with the basics first, but they plan to work their way toward systems for prepared meals they can grab as they get off the water, laundry support, a therapist, maybe a grant writer to help them grow their cooperative.

These women are planning for something bigger than themselves: support they can build on their own terms. They are done waiting.

Hear from Suzanne Rourke in the video below. ⬇️

Maine, especially as you travel up to the mid-coast and then up and down to the east, depends on a working waterfront. The lobstering and fin-fish work that keeps our country well stocked is a primary source of income for many, and a way of life. But it’s changing. Waters are warming, pushing the work farther out to colder waters and putting the quantity and quality of lobsters and certain fish at risk. And second-home buyers are taking up waterfront space, making it harder for the people who actually work the water to get access to it.

Maine is in transition. It’s worrisome in some ways, but aquaculture offers one alternative to earning that works with a changing climate, and it also helps improve the quality of waters and the health of people eating the nutritionally dense products coming out of the sea. Not all change is bad, but it’s clear that it’s not at all easy.

Women in the WNBA are gathering and organizing, and some of them are now working to formalize that support into a cooperative others can access.

Keep your eye on them, because what they are doing is creating the blueprints for many of us to use and adapt. 👏

The women of the water have spoken. They want more, and they are out in those freezing waters building the models we all need to start thinking differently about what women’s work looks like.

Caitlin Hopkins, Farm Manager, Little Busters

This is what kept running through my mind during an exercise class last Friday. I rarely do Pilates, and Friday was one of those days when I thought it would be a good idea to take a class, but it was really only because I wanted to be with my sister-in-law.

“Almost there,” the instructor said, and I fell for it. As a former runner, I know you should never say that to someone in the middle of a hard effort. But at least I was suffering among others, and it made an hour of muscle shaking bearable. I know Pilates isn’t really suffering, but the idea of suffering among others has been on my mind these last few days, because this week I saw actual suffering, and I’m noticing that being among others is what seems to make it bearable.

Laura is a close friend of mine from high school, and I remember her arguing with her sister, Lynne, about whose turn it was to use the car, if one stole the other’s clothes, and other things sisters fight about when they adore each other, but are also close in age and share the same style. Lynne has been in my life all of these years because of this, and she has always been a woman adored by all who knew her. She married a man named Ryan, equally beloved.

Six months ago, Ryan got up from the dining room table after a Valentine’s Day dinner with Lynne and their daughter at Laura’s house, went into the bathroom, and 15 minutes later crashed through the door after it was forced open, and died on Laura’s kitchen floor. No signs. No warning. Just one moment there, and the next, gone.

Lynne stood in front of over 100 people this week with one arm around her daughter to thank us for coming to the golf tournament held each year in honor of the two babies Lynne and Ryan lost as infants from congenital heart defects. Their names were Ava Lynne and Thomas John, and neither saw their four-month birthday. Lynne and Ryan channeled their grief into fundraising for Boston Children’s Hospital via the Two Tiny Hearts Golf Tournament to help drive research on congenital heart disease.

This year’s tournament was re-named the Ryan Mazzeo Memorial Golf Tournament to benefit Two Tiny Hearts.

Losing two children and a husband. THAT is suffering.

And yet... Lynne keeps showing up. As a mom to her 7-year-old daughter; as a middle school teacher; as a daughter herself; as an aunt; as a friend; and as an organizer. She keeps showing up. And wherever she goes, she is surrounded by people. Her suffering may not be visible to most of us, but she has allowed herself to be loved, supported, and surrounded by people, who help carry her through her days.

Some days it looks like students and teachers at her school saying good morning, or telling her how beautiful the flowers are that were planted in memory of her children. Other days it looks like her friends who have become “aunties” showing up at her daughter’s dance recital wearing Faunties t-shirts.

She has the ongoing love of throngs of friends, and always, her family, who have walked every day they can with her.

Lynne didn’t choose the suffering she has to endure. But she has chosen, again and again, and sadly, again, not to suffer alone. She keeps choosing to be among people. This is helping me see that if you have to endure suffering, real suffering, it’s better to suffer among others.

So as my legs shook and my back buckled from the imbalance of not having abdominal strength, that phrase kept coming to mind: if you have to suffer, it’s better to suffer among others.

There are a lot of people suffering among us.

People carry more than we realize.

But showing up, gathering, and making time for connection can do more good than we realize.

Ryan died on Valentine’s Day with a heart full of love, and the people who surround Lynne and their daughter every day carry that love on in his memory.

Our son just turned 21. He’s heading into his senior year of college, just back from a study abroad semester in Spain, and he spent this summer working one-on-one with young children on the autism spectrum. He’s been traveling as an American at a politically volatile moment, observing different kinds of parenting, and noticing what life looks like for people who don’t share his identity.

He’s also deciding what kind of man he wants to be and how he wants to move through the world. He’s being exposed to more, and he’s reckoning with more.

This is a pivotal time in his life, and upon reflecting on that, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s been like raising a son in today’s world.

When he was young, I remember noticing the moments when I parented to help him learn to manage himself—like how he reacted to frustration—versus when I parented to help him learn to manage being in the world he was in:

“Why didn’t you tell me about Sandy Hook?”

“What do you mean?”

“We talked about Sandy Hook in social studies today, and when I asked what it was, people thought I was being disrespectful.”

“Well, you and your sister were in the same grades as those children when that happened. We live in CT, so we were not only reeling, we were trying to protect your innocence.”

I also noticed the times I tried to prepare him for being a man in our world and start framing how he might need to think about women. “You are bigger than she is…You can’t just push someone when you are angry…Hold the door for the person behind you… That magazine is objectifying women…Please, don’t ever watch porn.”

I especially noticed the difference as I did my part to prepare both of our kids for college. For my son, I added condoms to his luggage. I took every opportunity I could to talk about decision making, relationships, and how I expected him to do the right thing if he saw a young woman in a dangerous situation. However, we also had serious conversations about how he needed to be smart about making sure there were people witnessing him dropping a girl off safely. He understood why. I remember reminding him that men can be victims, too, and that he should never allow a romantic partner to hurt or demean him. Bad things don’t just happen to women, and I think the world forgets that sometimes.

My daughter’s preparation was different. We talked about not drinking from open containers, building a reputation, birth-control options, because she will need to consider what she might choose to do for herself and what others might choose to do to her. We talked about Uber safety and what sex trafficking looks like in today’s world. The list of topics felt endless, and the consequences for forgetting something felt dire.

Two different worlds: my son navigating the world with the inherited power he didn’t ask for, and my daughter navigating the world without it.

Then there’s the balance of what to take and what to leave from the evolving cultural guidebooks about how to be “a man.” I heard my son ask my husband once which side of the sidewalk he was supposed to walk on. “I should try to walk on the outside closest to the street, right, so the woman is safer because she’s farther away from it?”

He was trying to pull from the guidebook his grandfather and father may have been influenced by, while also sitting in classroom spaces operating from a newly written guidebook…in draft form.

When he returned from his study abroad program this spring, he shared a social experience he had. He had intentionally waited to answer a question in his class until it was clear no one was going to say anything, and when he did, a girl said, “Of course THE MAN is the one to TALK FIRST.” I could feel his confusion as he said, “Mom, I swear, I waited the right amount of time. No one else was saying anything, so I thought it was ok to speak.”

I understood why that girl said what she did, and I saw how unhelpful it was when trying to create better conditions for all students to participate in discussions. It was the generalization that stung, because he felt like he was intentionally trying not to do the very thing she accused him of doing.

He’s trying. We’re trying. So many people are trying, but it’s impossible to raise a young man in today’s world without dealing with the idea of “men.”

What we were attempting to do as parents was focused on helping him become the best person he could be for himself and as a citizen of the world. We were parenting him. We were helping him learn to manage his reactions, his size, his strength, his choices, and the specific ways he might accidentally cause harm or be harmed, because he was a singular person figuring out how to live as an individual. But he’s also part of a group, and the world is often unkind to groups.

I regret to say that I have been part of the problem I’m writing about now.

Over the last several years, I’ve caught myself making sweeping comments about “men” as one category while trying to explain something. Many of those comments came as I was finding my own voice, understanding my own value, working through my own frustrations, watching our culture wake up socially to things that have been ignored. And I wasn’t thinking about the harm I could be doing to my son as I did so. Here I was trying to raise a man who could live his life while creating conditions that allowed women to live theirs too, but then making him sound like he was the problem in the world and no matter what he did it would never be enough, because “men”...

Broad strokes come easily when you’re angry for good reason and frustrated by the pace of change.

I adjusted my approach to parenting after I overheard my husband and son talking about men who are genuinely trying to understand the ways the world is built for them, and what it might be like to walk through it as a woman. I heard their frustration, too, on how hard it can be to be a man who is trying, yet, gets swept up into narratives about men as the enemy.

That same tension shows up in what I write, too. I’m new to Substack, and it’s been fascinating to see that the two most popular pieces have been The Corporate Wife, about women finally being recognized for their contributions, and She Was Not Ok, about golfers who kept playing as a woman was being assaulted nearby.

I started off responding to the comments on She Was Not Ok, but then I felt conflicted about the idea of acknowledging something in the form of a “like,” if the comment included a sweeping generalization of men or perpetuated man hating. I wanted to acknowledge the writer and the writer’s perspective, but not make the world harder for my husband, son, and men who are trying. Yet I understood those comments and saw them for what they were: pain. Those women likely experienced something that led them to feel the way they do, and it’s not for me to comment on; it’s for me to learn from.

The same felt true when I read the comment from someone blaming the #MeToo movement for the fact that nobody on that golf course moved to action, saying it’s women’s fault that no one helps anymore and that chivalry is dead.

I sat on my town’s Board of Education from 2019 to 2021, during one of the biggest social justice movements of our time, and I learned to tell the difference between people who troll to scare and intimidate, and people who’ve arrived at anger through something they experienced. I read that person’s comment as the second kind. I didn’t agree with it, but I recognized it, because I’ve talked with enough men who’ve shared what these past few years have been like for them, and I assumed that comment came from a man.

I’ve seen and experienced a lot myself. I’ve been a young girl, a teenage girl, a college girl working in a bar during karaoke wing night and 99 cent beers, a rape crisis counselor, a middle-school teacher, a woman in a parking lot at night, a corporate wife, a solo traveler, a first responder, and a parent. I understand, at least in part, the world women walk through, and there is daily reason to be enraged by what we are forced to tolerate.

When I was in Barcelona for my Women’s Work project, I was there to study feminist urbanism and the women’s collectives working to redesign cities around care rather than capitalism. Because cities were built for the needs of working men, their efforts involved examining how women experience a city and how different infrastructures affect a woman’s feeling of safety. While I was there, I became aware of just how often I consider safety as I move through my day. I realized that I was both consciously and subconsciously on alert all day long. Should I take the stairs or the elevator? Should I walk down the quiet street or the crowded one? Where are the women on the train, so I can stand with them? Do I look too friendly? Should I take the metro at night and walk the distance to the apartment, or should I take an Uber and be sure I communicate that someone is waiting for me at my destination, even though that wasn’t true.

What we are up against is real.

But I also know that some men are trying.

There are many who will run toward danger to stop it and have. Who’ve been falsely accused of things they didn’t do. Who are genuinely trying to work out what it means to have inherited power they didn’t ask for.

And many are trying to do that as artists, so their impact can be felt more widely.

For those of you who’ve seen The Odyssey (spoiler alert for those who haven’t) there’s a moment in it that relates to this conversation.

It’s the scene where Odysseus’s men approach Circe’s cabin. I remember feeling scared for her as the men approached, and I got really tense and watched between my fingers as she raged and changed the men into something else. I thought she was evil for doing something so extreme to men who’d just arrived hungry looking for food. A minute or so later, when it was clear she had turned them into pigs, I understood: we were watching a metaphor play out.

And I thought of my son, who’d already seen the movie. My heart hurt a little thinking about how that horrifying scene might have landed for him, watching men depicted as pigs the way they were on that big screen.

Then the director did something I appreciated: he created time for Matt Damon’s character to help us understand what we had seen. He had Odysseus enter the room, sit with the woman, and listen to her talk about her experience. He asked directly if his men had hurt her and did his best to understand her point of view. Then he left with his men, ensuring she remained unharmed.

That director created time to educate, to show what a path to change can look like in small moments, and to model what a man who is trying looks like. I felt that his artistic choice, in an already long movie, honored both the real fear and experiences of women and the work so many men are doing to even things out.

I haven’t asked my son how that scene landed for him, but when we have a quiet moment together, I will.

As the mother of a son and the wife of a man who is trying, I see so many moments where sweeping generalizations and man hating can have the opposite effect of what we truly want.

But we didn’t try to create this dynamic. We have ended up here.

American culture has proven time and time again that conditions for oppressed people don’t change unless change is forced, often through policy. That means the cultural pendulum has to swing way over to one extreme side to get people’s attention and create enough pressure for change. Unfortunately, what’s also true is that there is a cost to that. When the pendulum swings too far to one side, there is backlash. Real backlash.

I wish I could say I have hope that things will be different for women soon, that life will be safer. But the way women have been positioned throughout history is so entrenched that I think, even where progress happens, we have a long, hard road ahead. History has shown that when we push too hard, there’s resistance. That’s why I wince when I read man-hating comments, sweeping generalizations, or anything with that “absolute” tone that creeps in when we talk about men, not because the anger isn’t earned, but because I know we will have to endure a period of consequences.

So, do women throughout the world really hate men? No, I don’t think so.

I think women just carry real pain, and man-hating is what that pain sounds like. It sounds like anger, and that anger is earned. But that doesn’t mean it’s the way forward. But until some new ideas get time tested, it’s a big piece of the how we advocate. We are all hoping for new ideas.

I’m also hoping for my son, for my husband, and for all the men who are trying, that they can take what they’re learning about being a man in a world built for men and help build one that’s built for everyone.

We have a long way to go, and I don’t know how we will get there, but I know that sitting down and listening to understand is where we start, because it’s where we’ve always started: by trying.

Like most people, I always seem to have something I’m striving for, something I’m yearning for, something I’m healing or running from, and a rotating list of things I want to adjust about myself (or others). The optimist in me knows things tend to sort themselves, but I can get stuck in these mental spaces for too long sometimes, never really feeling settled, which is why something that happened this week felt so special.

On Wednesday evening, I found myself bundled up on Second Beach in Newport waiting for the sun to set. No phone. No book. No journal. Just me with my hood pulled tight around my face and toes tucked under a blanket.

Teenage girls sat nearby. They were out of earshot, but close enough that I could see they had arranged themselves in a circle around open pizza boxes.

Suddenly I was 16 again, sitting with the girls I thought would be in my life forever, and I felt a little pain in my heart. I missed that circle and the feeling of security that came with it.

But then I remembered I had recently been in a circle of women, when our book club met outside. That circle offered the sense of security I needed after an intense encounter, and I remember wishing that every woman had a circle like the one I was in, because being surrounded by women is the best way to walk through life.

My mind shifted back to the girls.

In them, I saw myself at 16. Each of them became one of my friends before life and divorce and ambition pulled us all in different directions, most re-assembling into couplets — except for one, who left for the Peace Corps and was never seen again. I could see them all, hear their voices, picture them laughing, and memories came flooding back. I pictured us driving down beachy roads in college listening to the Indigo Girls, skinny dipping late at night in dark waters, playing with risk the way only teenagers can, and putting pepperoni bread with yellow tomatoes on top under the broiler after work. I pictured us seeing our bridesmaids’ dresses for the first time, standing at each other’s weddings, and sitting with our babies and our worries.

And instead of feeling sad that our original group no longer existed in the form I thought it would be in forever, I felt grateful that we had that time together. “It was fun while it lasted,” I thought.

Then I saw two pre-teen girls running into the water and was reminded of my two best friends from elementary and middle school and the Jersey shore vacations I took with each of them during the one week my father had off each year.

One I lost touch with when we went to different high schools, and the other I just saw at her father’s funeral. When I hugged her, I remembered that our sons are the same age. Then I was 12 again and we were cutting through yards to get to pools we shouldn’t have been in. Those were sacred times, and I was glad we shared our childhood. “It was fun while it lasted,” I thought.

And on it went. As my eyes fell on varying groups of people, I saw myself in them, joined by people who were important to me at different stages of my life.

But instead of longing for how things were back then, I felt grateful that I had those friendships and that I walked through my life with those people. “It was good while it lasted,” I thought as each memory surfaced.

The sun was just about down, and as I watched each of the teenagers dunk under approaching waves, screaming from the shock of the cold, a thought came into my mind: “I’m happy.” For someone who has the life I have, happiness should be a given, but I don’t always feel that way. But I’m realizing now that I am happy. Not because everything is sorted and the world is right, but because I have people to do life with. Not everybody has that.

I felt content in an unfamiliar but welcomed way.

My daughter was waiting for me back at our Airbnb; fifty of my neighbors had just been in our home to wish a moving family well, even though they were just going two miles down the road. I was set to end the week celebrating my 23rd anniversary with my husband, and next week we visit our son to toast his 21st birthday.

Life is good.

The world is on fire, but I know I’m doing my part to help, and I get up each day committed to using my energy to make people’s lives better, not worse. I enjoy an hour to myself each morning to drink my coffee on the porch and watch the hummingbirds as I read, and I love my neighbors and my town and my family.

Things are good. I feel content. It’s a strange feeling and one I’m going to try to hang onto for a while.

One more thing happened on that beach. It’s a little morbid, but I am going to tell you anyway. As I sat all bundled up, absorbing how my life was playing out in my mind as selected clips, I thought, “What if I am about to die and God is presenting me with this experience so I can die grateful and happy and realizing how good my life has been, even when it wasn’t?” And I thought, “Well, if this is it, it was good. I did my best. I loved and was loved. And I have very few regrets that I haven’t already made peace with.” Not a bad way to go out.

And then I got in my car on that warm summer night, rolled down the windows, and listened to the Indigo Girls as I drove to my daughter.

People will come and go and things will ebb and flow, but on balance, life has been very good — and I hope I continue to remember that.

I signed up again this year.

It seemed prudent to take a few lessons before this next attempt, and one of those took place yesterday at an urban golf course one town over from where I live. I expected to learn how to putt, chip, and swing. I didn’t expect to learn how to direct a 911 operator to a course I barely knew.

“Something doesn’t look right about those two,” I said to the woman steering our cart toward the driving range. “I don’t think that girl is okay.”

When we saw her get pushed, it was clear. She wasn’t okay. She was one of two teenagers in what looked like an argument about to take a concerning turn toward violence. “Drive down there,” I said.

Allison drove right up to them, interrupting the young man, who couldn’t have been more than 16, as his hand rose toward the scared girl before him. He spun around without making eye contact and stormed off. The girl spun quickly the other way, walking off along the wood line that ran down the edge of the course.

“Are you okay? Do you want to get in our cart? We can help you,” we said. She walked off quickly, telling us she was headed toward her house. The way she avoided us and hurried off was a heartbreaking, familiar signal to anyone who’s done social-service work: she knew better than to talk to us. Whatever situation she was in, talking to us would make it worse. We watched her walk on.

The rest of the women in the lesson were gathered at the driving range when we returned to meet them, but I couldn’t join. I couldn’t take my eyes off that girl. I watched her as if she were my own daughter. She was somebody’s daughter, and something told me this situation wasn’t over. I watched her get smaller as she got farther and farther away, moving toward the back corner of the course, where she would presumably cut through the woods to whatever street would take her home.

“He’s pushing her. He’s blocking her. She’s trying to get around him and he won’t let her by.”

The police were on their way, and I could see three pairs of men playing near where this girl was headed. I felt a wave of relief, knowing any minute they would step in. I have a lot of men in my life, as we all do, and I know without a shadow of doubt that any of the men in my day-to-day orbit would have recognized the danger this girl was in and moved in to protect her.

These men didn’t. They played on.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. Maybe they weren’t registering what they were looking at. But they had seen it. They were aware of what was happening just a few hundred yards away. I stood there in disbelief. Even from a quarter mile back, I could see exactly what was happening to this girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and yet these men played on. They played on, while she was shoved and blocked by whoever this person was in her life. Those men, in their separate groups, just stood there considering their next shots.

That young woman was somebody’s daughter. What if that was my daughter being forced into the woods? It is every mother’s prayer that if her child is in harm’s way, the adults nearby will act. Every child is someone else’s child. When did we lose sight of that?

I drove as fast as that cart would let me, unsure whether I was cutting across places I shouldn’t, and I couldn’t have cared less. There was a young girl being assaulted in the woods, and six grown men, perfectly positioned to help her, were choosing golf instead.

And then there she was. I could see her as I approached. She was being shoved and grabbed within sight of these men.

“Are you bringing us drinks?” they laughed as I drove by, apparently hoping I was the “drink girl” coming to service them.

“THAT GIRL IS NOT OK. SHE NEEDS HELP,” I shouted, pointing at what was plainly visible to all of us. And there they stood, still lining up their next shot. Still choosing golf over a young girl’s safety. I was astonished by their lack of care and sense of duty as the adults in this situation.

And here is the saddest moment: I knew what I was doing was dangerous. Because of legislative failure, and communities that keep failing to act, and because our culture has decided that not acting on gun violence is an acceptable choice, the odds that this kid had a gun were high. Our society is bursting with guns, and many young people, especially those surviving in urban areas, have been neglected to the point that they feel they need guns to protect themselves. The failure of so many people in positions of power to build a safer society has created a situation where protecting a young girl means putting yourself in harm’s way.

I jumped out of that cart knowing that was the sad truth, because so many people—illustrated perfectly by the selfish, cowardly men behind me—have largely decided it’s fine to ignore the needs of their fellow citizens.

The police still weren’t there, but thankfully when I yelled for him to get away from her and that the police were on their way, he ran to his car and sped off. She left quickly too, likely knowing that things would be worse for her the next time she saw him. Only one person did anything: a young man driving by in a beat-up white car. He rolled down his dark, tinted window to say that he’d taken pictures and gotten the license plate. He was the only person who went out of his way to help. Everyone else stood by.

As I emerged from the woods, high-stepping my way through tall grass and poison ivy, the men glanced over at me. “She was NOT OK. She needed help,” I stated coldly as I stared into them.

“Yeah, he even took her purse and phone from her,” one of them said.

That’s what I’d seen him carrying as he ran, I thought to myself. The things he needed to control her. Those men had stood there in their pressed khaki shorts and collared shirts, watching this situation unfold, and they chose golf. Cowards. They were self-centered, heartless cowards.

I drove back up the hill to rejoin my group at the driving range, only then realizing I’d left with Allison’s clubs in the back of our cart. I knew she wouldn’t care though. Unlike the men I had just seen, she had her priorities straight and was a woman of action. She’d already proven that earlier when she drove toward those kids instead of away from them.

About ten minutes later, as the men played on and the police lights became visible through the trees, I watched from afar and thought about the first lesson I’d learned that evening: that our society is losing its sense of duty. We haven’t lost our capacity for good—I’ve seen enough of that over the last several months as I’ve traveled for my Women’s Work project—but our collective sense of responsibility to the person next to us is dormant. If we want change, that’s the first thing we need to shake loose.

The second lesson I learned yesterday is that golf carts have GPS systems that stop the cart from moving when you drive over a tee box.

I’ve been taking a certificate course in data analytics, and we’ve spent a great deal of time on questions. Which questions do we ask? Of whom do we ask them? Is there space for qualitative response? Are the questions put in context? Political pollsters consider questions and ask them, but I no longer pay them much attention. The poll I have been watching is the one being answered in attendance.

The past month has given us ample opportunity to see the choices Americans are making, and they bode well for our future. 🇺🇸

Consider what we have seen.

People of all cultures flocked to World Cup matches in American cities. And they didn’t just celebrate and enjoy each other’s cultures; they comforted each other after losses and lifted up each other’s wins. As a former Bostonian, I watched my old city trust the throngs of Scottish fans who brought joy and philanthropy with them, letting them be playful with the city’s statues and party in the streets past the last-call hours that have always fallen earlier than in other American cities. They crowned our statues with traffic cones, a Glasgow tradition, and the city laughed with them. The Scottish demonstrated social responsibility, cleaned up their spaces, and celebrated with joy, not violence. They modeled how to bring people together.

When given the choice between DC and Chicago’s South Side, where the Obama Presidential Center opened in Jackson Park, the crowds made the answer clear. People wanted to be where the unity was, where the bipartisan experience was, where an investment in the public good was being created with a museum, a public library, gardens, and a playground. 🛝

People continued their hometown parades in dangerous heat, hosted cookouts on porches with their neighbors, and invested in celebrations that unified rather than divided.

And people have flocked to the actual polls, voting for the candidates who will help change our tide through policy.

The American people are speaking with their feet.

And where didn’t they go? They didn’t flood DC’s official stage. The open lawns and empty seats at the made-for-TV celebration filled me with hope. And the white supremacists marching? They were the minority. They will always be there, but as we marked the 250th anniversary of America, they were the minority, and the spaces meant to convey our national values sat sparse while people created love and energy elsewhere.

America wasn’t in the physical spaces we thought it would be. It was spread out in stadiums, parks, and playgrounds from sea to shining sea, and that was the America I have been longing for.

I’ve also discovered that it’s often on the days when I want to cancel that I reap the most benefit.

Three weeks ago, I had one of those days.

It felt ordinary.

Others were home, so I went to the park to walk and talk. Had there been cell service, that would have been a grand idea, but apparently only the bench near the pollinator garden receives a signal to power a call, so I sat on it and began to talk. She actually knew “the bench.” Covid had taught many of her clients where to find a steady signal.

I’m not sure why or how it happened, but I started enumerating my annoyances, my frustrations, my anger that so and so was such and such. And as day campers moved among activities and sheep stared at me from afar, I just kept talking. A comment led to a frustration, which led to a judgement and on and on I went.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what is happening. I actually feel fine. I’m not sure where this is coming from.”

“It’s ok. You are emptying. Keep going.”

Emptying. That felt much more elegant than whining or talking irrationally without accountability, so I kept going. Every frustration. Every judgement. Every single thing that was stuck inside me just came tumbling out. I was brutal and nasty and honest. I talked for 47 of our 50-minute session, and I’m not sure why. The entire town likely knows my business now, or at the very least, I was referred to by the little campers as “the lady on the bench,” but anything overheard that could be deemed embarrassing was worth it.

I had so much to say. So many things I was angry about. So many things I wished I’d handled differently. So many resentments toward other people for not handling their business and then burdening me with the fallout. The one-sided nature of the conversation was bliss. I could complain all I wanted. Exaggerate. Judge. Be irrational. Say things I didn’t actually mean…and she just listened. For all I know, she put me on speaker and left to make a sandwich, but it didn’t matter. She gave me permission to empty out everything inside me that needed expulsion…and it was exactly what I needed.

When I was done, I felt lighter. I felt mentally and physically unburdened. It was an astonishing difference.

Over the last three weeks, I’ve noticed that “emptying” creates space.

I have room for compassion where anger had been. I have perspective on what’s working because I identified what’s not. I have gratitude for what I have instead of longing for what I don’t. I can see the direction my work is headed because I stated what I don’t want to do. And I understand what is fair to say to the people I love the most and what is best left unsaid. In other words, what is productive and what I should save for the bench. 😊

Over the years, I have seen many women get to midlife and feel the need to blow things up. They were hanging on to too much, burdened by this or that, and I watched them grow depressed and angry. They felt like the only option they had was to dismantle the first half of their lives to build something better. Some took too much apart and were left with regret. Others lit the metaphorical dynamite, blew it all up, then walked into the best part of their life and never looked back.

But for people who feel fine for the most part but just unsettled, I think there’s a third option. The choices don’t have to be just “stay on the current path” or “start a new one.” We can empty out what needs to go to make room for what we want to invite in.

My therapist gave me 47 minutes of uninterrupted time to clear my heart, mind, and soul. She helped me expel the sludge so I have room for more, and it was the best money I ever spent.

Curious?

Find an ear then find a bench. But heads-up: camp starts at nine.

I heard from more women about that piece than any other I’ve written, because beyond our worth and whether it’s recognized, The Corporate Wife acknowledged what we as women already know: we are working HARD, and we are collectively done with that going unnoticed.

But there is more to consider, and I’m just now realizing it.

Here in the U.S., there’s a narrative American women are inundated with. We are encouraged to think about what we want. What’s right for us? We’ve been supporting everyone else, so what about us? I understand it. I think about this a lot myself.

I know that’s where my head has been for quite a while, and quite frankly, it’s been refreshing and valuable. From what I can tell from where I sit, that encouragement has been helpful to many other women, too. For some, that shift to self has helped them get out of stagnant or even dangerous situations. For others, it has launched them into new and more satisfying territory.

But over the last eight months, I have been around thousands of women for my Women’s Work research, and it just occurred to me that I didn’t hear that narrative as I traveled. Not once. I was away from it for so long that it was almost a shock to the system when I came home and felt it reintroduced.

The women I met don’t go through their days thinking about what they need. They go about their days thinking about how to support their families and strengthen their communities. They would absolutely like more rest and more help, because they are bone tired, but they aren’t chasing personal alignment the way we encourage it here. They are focused on something bigger.

I think the reason The Corporate Wife resonated with so many of us is because what we want isn’t recognition as individuals; that’s surface level. We want our contributions recognized, because the work we do is IMPORTANT. For most women, that work is care work, or care work plus — caregiving alongside whatever else we carry. And for too long, that has gone unacknowledged. Not just undervalued, but unseen. It’s infuriating. Because if the work women do is recognized and valued, decision-making changes and things get better for everyone.

Women don’t need recognition. Women need change. Take the women I’ve been studying, for example:

In Maine, Abby Barrows is building the first plastic-free commercial oyster and seaweed farm in the world. She’s a marine scientist who saw what microplastics were doing to the ocean (and our bodies) and decided she wasn’t going to wait for someone else to fix it.

“The oyster doesn’t wait for someone else to clean up the water,” she says. “It just gets to work.”

She’s a farmer, a scientist, a mother. She built something that didn’t exist because she could see that it needed to.

In Nashville, women who survived trauma, trafficking, and exploitation built Thistle Farms. They make products, run a cafe, offer housing, training, and community. And the women who came through the doors for help didn’t leave when they were healed. They stayed to expand what healed them. “They loved me back to life,” one woman told me. And then she turned around and offered that same thing to the woman behind her.

In Kerala, India, millions of women have spent three decades building economic independence through neighborhood collectives, one small business at a time. What they built, collectively, is the largest program in the world dedicated to eradicating extreme poverty among women. They don’t do what they do for recognition. They do it for their children, so they can grow up educated and contribute to our shared future. They are building businesses and political power, because where they live it’s needed, and they are positioned well to do it.

In Peru, many Quechua women in the Andes are weavers. But with support from Awamaki to learn new skills and access new markets, they are also business owners and Sustainable Tourism hosts, building new paths from the same threads they always had. If you ask them why they do it, they will tell you it’s for their children, for their education. But when you step back and see where else they focus their work, you will see them adding support to build a stronger community.

In Barcelona, women’s collectives are redesigning cities around care rather than commerce. They see that the path to a city where everyone can thrive begins with helping women thrive, and they are working one neighborhood at a time, one Superblock at a time, one bus route at a time, because they know that the work they are doing is necessary, and they are the ones with the skills to do it.

The Corporate Wife forced us to see what gets overlooked: not just women, but what women do. The important part of that is in recognizing the women, the work we do is recognized. That is where the nuance lies. Our contributions are valuable.

What I’ve come to understand, after eight months and thousands of miles, is that recognizing women is only the first step. The next step is seeing women’s work. Because the work women are doing is part of the work we need to move our world in a healthier direction.

So when we talk about being unseen, it’s not personal recognition we’re after. We need the world to see our work — because when the work is seen and valued, things actually change.

We don’t need recognition. We need change.

*To read more about the women and organizations featured in this article, visit my Women’s Work Field Notes.

Yesterday, my husband and I went to a funeral for the father of a friend. It was a beautiful service, and ample time was dedicated to his values, how he lived, and the company he had built that has not only been a quiet contributor to the health and safety of many people, it’s been an employer, a charitable donor, and its success created generational wealth that will secure the lives of many beyond him. Anyone who has built a business knows what a significant undertaking that is and how much a part of the owner’s life story it will always be. We enjoyed hearing about it and how his work was recognized.

And then, after a brief pause, the minister directed his gaze at John’s* wife.

You could have knocked me over with the feather.

He went on to enumerate some of the ways Jane’s* time and talent contributed to the success of the company. He didn’t say, “And there was Jane quietly by his side.” He credited her as part of the company’s success. He gave examples. He was right.

He also shared that during the early years, when John* had been on the corporate track, his boss handed him a brochure entitled The Corporate Wife. It described how “the wife” was supposed to behave, and what she was expected to do and be so he could be successful. I wanted to be astonished, but I doubt anyone in that church was. There is an understanding of the role, and certainly what the role was back then. The knowing laughter that followed the story confirmed that.

I liked John* even more when the minister recounted John telling him that when he read The Corporate Wife brochure and envisioned his protest-sign carrying wife in that role, he knew that track was not going to work. They high-tailed it back up to New England and the work to grow the company began.

This part of the service struck a chord in me, because just a few days prior I had been listening to a friend talk about how she was changing in midlife. How she was finding her voice, owning the way she had chosen to shape her work in her industry, and how she had begun taking the credit she deserved for the role she played in her husband’s success. I could see her spine straightening as she spoke, and we spent the rest of our walk talking about how we are just now beginning to understand our own value. We are so conditioned to overlook the basics that we don’t even value ourselves the way we should.

My husband built a company, too. A special one. One that has also been a quiet contributor to the health and safety of many people, an employer, a charitable donor. And even though it’s now absorbed into one much larger, the impact on people remains and the building of that company will undoubtably be part of his legacy and how his impact is remembered. He and his two partners worked hard, and so did their wives. We were part of the growth. We were part of the story.

I understand the role a partner plays in a company success story — and how even with the best intentions — that role is undervalued. An insurance meeting made that crystal clear for me years ago.

We had been in the process of doing our wills and other administrative things. Power of attorney, healthcare proxy, who would care for the kids if we died, etc. We were getting organized. And when we got around to the life insurance, the value of my husband’s life was determined fairly easily. He was the owner of a company. His value was quantifiable.

Then it was my turn. “Ok, what about Amanda?” We all laughed. 🤷🏻‍♀️

None of us knew what to put. I was a Master’s-educated professional who had come into the marriage working full time, but financially offering nothing more than the debt of my school loans. And when the early-stage growth of my husband’s company coincided with the birth of our first child, I had quit my teaching job to focus on raising our family.

When we had done the math, my private-school teaching salary was going to be just slightly more than the cost of daycare, and I was confident it would be slow to rise, since a woman nearing retirement made sure to tell me what she was earning after a lifetime in the classroom, calling my attention to the fact that there was no salary chart. She knew her salary was significantly less than her male counterparts, because some of the women and men had compared them during a tense administrative period when decisions were being made about salaries vs. facilities and everyone was pissed. That made the decision even easier.

The decision was made. I would freelance. That would allow me to keep control of a flexible schedule to accommodate my husband’s significant travel, still have the professional stimulation I required, and we would raise our kids the way we wanted. Done.

I was in control of my own choice. No one forced me. When we talked about how we wanted to raise our kids, and I thought about what I longed for and would have benefitted from in my childhood, I put more value on what being present consistently could do for our children than working an outside job could do for my sense of self. That was more important to me at the time than any work I could have been doing.

My professional dream had always been to be an anthropologist. I wanted to work for National Geographic, travel the world to photograph, write, and create support for people in different cultures. But I had missed that boat, or so I thought. I had been paying my way through school, didn’t understand that Ph.D. work was funded, and I had 6 months to start paying off my loans after graduation. The clock was ticking, so my dream path became a dream deferred.

When I took on the role of mother, the more flexible path made sense. We had the financial security to put that choice on the menu. I chose it. My husband supported it, and I have never once regretted it.

But back to the meeting. How would my worth be quantified?

“Well, I suppose we should start with how much Scott would have to pay in daycare if Amanda were no longer with us.” We all laughed. And after a short, slightly uncomfortable conversation, it was clear that there really wasn’t any other way to value me. That number, rounded up to something even, was what went in the box. I was worth the cost of daycare. That made sense to me at the time, and I am just now realizing how much I internalized that and have continued to equate my value with something quantifiable.

If any of you have watched the Gilded Age on HBO, it’s essentially the Downton Abbey of America sharing the infrastructure of the years when families like the Rockefellers and others were building the dynastic companies of American life. Women weren’t allowed to work for wages at the time, so they needed to marry for security.

But if you look closely, the women in those mansions were part of that dynastic creation. They were designing the cottages in Newport where ostentatious parties were held and men mingled with each other forming relationships that launched business partnerships. They were forming the arts institutions that in addition to their obvious cultural contributions, created communities for the economic and political leaders of the time. This allowed personal relationships to strengthen and for men to stay close to the peers who could help them grow their companies—and wealth.

Women created part of the infrastructure that allowed that system to flourish, and that was just at the “top” of the financial funnel. If we look closely at the “bottom,” we would find the women and men whose labor truly allowed that wealth to flourish in the employer/employee value loop that keeps societies going, but that’s an article for another time.

All of this is in no way to diminish the work of men who build companies nor devalue the significance of their efforts. I’ve had a front-row seat to what it takes to grow companies. It’s hard, hard work, and it takes a silent toll of its own on men that is universally overlooked. It might not be financial, but it’s significant in its own way. However, when it comes to assigning credit where credit is due, it’s time to include women in the conversation.

For us, much of our work continues to be invisible when the success of something is discussed. Whether it’s the success of a company or the success of a country. Women are rarely credited for the roles we play in generalized success stories.

That minister did more than honor the life and work of a man yesterday. For those of us present, we witnessed his wife get acknowledged for the role she played in the formation of a successful and important legacy business.

She did become a sort of corporate wife, as it turned out. And while I don’t know if she followed a playbook from an unspoken cultural “brochure,” or more likely, wrote and modeled a new version of her own, I walked away from that church with the hope that maybe times are changing. Maybe the roles women play in the stories we hear will start to be made visible—even if they aren’t yet valued.

*Names changed for privacy.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I returned from Peru, the final international stop of my Women’s Work research schedule and the culmination of intense travel. I was on four continents in five months.

I’ve been reflecting on what made this enormous professional and personal lift possible, and the answer is clear: my sobriety.

For those of you just meeting me, I don’t use that word to encompass all things. If I get cancer, I’m taking the medicinal marijuana for sure, but I no longer drink. When I made that decision, my life changed. I began to thrive and my capacity grew.

My sobriety anniversary is May 8, which intentionally sits just before Mother’s Day each year. It’s always a day of immense pride, and I was particularly excited to mark the 10-year date when it rolled around. I like things even.

For the first ten years, I continued to think of myself as “a woman in recovery.” Language is key when you talk to yourself and about yourself. But after 10 years, I no longer felt connected to that language. I no longer felt the need to mark May 8 when year 11 rolled around, and the feeling was the same this year as I hit year 12.

The date came. My husband called. He reminded our kids. I cleared my day in Peru and intentionally scheduled a hike, a beautiful meal, time to myself to write, a massage, and I attended an event in the community to get a little social time. My day was exactly what I wanted and needed it to be and it filled my cup in important ways. It hit the mark, but I noticed I didn’t need it to.

I no longer identify as a “woman in recovery.” That language doesn’t resonate anymore. I just…don’t drink.

The evolution of American drinking culture has helped. Restaurants now have satisfying non-alcoholic options, overall interest in drinking has decreased, and for midlife women, we now know that avoiding alcohol is a serious game changer for how we feel (and look) as we age.

It’s not hard for me not to drink.

I have learned how to manage my emotions so I don’t feel the need to reach for alcohol to cope with stress or boredom, and I choose people to be with who are stimulating enough that we don’t need to drink to make things interesting. I do miss the culinary aspect of wine pairings and drinking as part of the cultural experience of food as art. That was fabulous! But when I have one drink my body craves another, so for me, it has to be a no-go zone.

At least I got to Napa before May 8, 2014.

What’s happening now is I have returned from my travels, examined my to-do list, tried to get caught up on appointments and what other people need from me, and I’ve started planning for the significant work ahead to make Women’s Work the project I know it can be.

And I’m realizing something.

For the first time in my life, I’m giving myself permission to take things slowly. To stretch my timelines out a bit. To spend time in my garden and with our kids while they are home for fleeting weeks. To read and write on my porch in the early morning. Sometimes I need to be still and hide from the world a little bit to catch my breath.

Four continents in five months surrounded by thousands of people and immersed in study, filming, and interviewing was draining. My nervous system needs to re-set.

This is what people in recovery do.

We prioritize our health needs—because we have to. We don’t apologize for that, and we don’t explain ourselves unless absolutely necessary. We go through the mental inventory of what we are managing, what we need, what we are doing that risks breaking our health habits. We remember the “First Things First” list we made at the beginning of our journeys and prioritize it above all else. We evaluate if we are on track and we choose our next steps accordingly.

Even if the “woman in recovery” language doesn’t resonate for me anymore, it’s clear that the practices that make it possible are engrained in how I live.

My “First Things First” list has always been about the basics, because in our society, they are hard to keep consistent. They are, in this order: Sleep, Eat, Exercise.

When I do these things well, life goes well. When I don’t, I have to recalibrate and get things back in order.

There is no way I would have been able to do this Women’s Work project successfully and safely had I not made the decision 12 years go to focus on my health.

Solo travel isn’t something I hesitate to do, because I have always done it. But I do realize that it’s not for the faint of heart to travel alone as a woman across four continents managing details I planned myself, conducting research in languages I may or may not understand, lugging film equipment through airports, and walking through jungles, mountains, rice paddies, and cities relying only on my own instincts and resources. I do realize that it requires clarity, discipline, situational awareness, and confidence to manage myself alone in the situations and landscapes I have been in over the past five months.

My ability to move through this time with a clear head has not only kept me safe, it has kept me focused. I see the path I want to take with my work.

I want it to be bigger. To dig deeper. To have more impact. I want to do more monitoring, research, and evaluation. More program design. To consult off of research I’ve designed and executed with others. I want to do keynotes, workshops, and trainings to support leaders and teams doing work that moves the needle for women and children. I want to share what I’m learning through a Women’s Work documentary, and perhaps a memoir, to invite others into what I am seeing, and I want a full and stimulating professional life.

I know what I want, and while I’ve picked a non-traditional path to get there, it will be worth it.

At its core, Women’s Work is about the collective models of support that create conditions for women to experience their full capacity. It’s about understanding how infrastructure enables women to thrive.

I’ve spent five months analyzing what intentional support looks like for women around the world and how it changed their stories.

I’m just glad I didn’t miss that intentional support also changed mine.

This dishtowel has been hanging on the side of our kitchen island for years; it’s among my favorite things in our home.

It annoys me to no end when the kids use it to wipe their hands and then leave it crumpled, because they know the hand-drying towel is ON THE OTHER SIDE. And now there’s a little tear in it that is slowly getting bigger. Sigh…

My family pays no attention when I remind them that this towel is for DECORATION ONLY, and they seem to enjoy watching me fix it every time I see it askew. They assume it’s my Type A side coming out—and since no one else in my family is Type A (maybe our son, at times)—they take pleasure in messing with me.

They have learned this from my husband. He loves to wait until he knows I am in a meeting or an appointment of some kind to bulk-like my Strava activities, so they come flying in as a barrage of Kudos and take over my phone screen. He knows it drives me crazy when notifications clutter the screen and block the photo. And his new favorite activity is gathering throw pillows from around our home, piling them onto our bed as towers, then waiting for me to notice. Hearing me yell, “SCOTT!” and listening as I shuffle around putting everything back has become something he enjoys. When I was in Peru, he upped his game by sending me photos of his creations, knowing it would be weeks before I could fix them.

The little things…❤️

If you’ve been following me for the last several months, you know that I’ve just completed the first half of my Women’s Work research and that I front-loaded the international portion while our kids were at college so as not to miss time with them. It’s been intense and physically tiring, but more rewarding and clarifying than I could have anticipated. And I’m glad I prioritized our kids as I considered my work. That’s been a priority since they were born, and I’ve never regretted it. Prioritizing them has meant that I haven’t always felt satisfied with my work, which has been unsettling at times, but the trade off has been worth it. We only get one shot to raise our kids, and I am using my time now to shift things where I want them to be.

For instance, this week life has been shaped by the extreme changes in weather we have had in New England. I’ve done long early-morning walks with our dog to beat the heat, timed the planting of my garden for post-heat/pre-rain pockets of time, savored reading on the porch as the neighborhood children raced around on their bikes, and enjoyed every moment I watched our kids pull in and out of the driveway knowing they are home and safe. The sound of their friends coming in and out of the house after months away, and the sight of their shoes in our mudroom has been a beautiful welcome home and makes me feel like all is well in the world, because in these ways, it is.

But I’ve also noticed the air and the light. On the days when our temperatures have soared into the 90s, storms came to break the heat just before sunset, and I loved feeling the air change as that happened. The air got heavier as the sky darkened, and watching the rain water everything I had just planted gave me a deep sense of pleasure that can only be understood by a midlife woman who timed her planting to the weather and watched it work.

I added lilacs to our garden beds this year, and I thought of my dad while I planted them. Lilacs lined our driveway growing up, and I loved their scent as a child. I think my dad is the one who taught me to notice the little things. I spent most of my childhood watching him observe the saltwater fish he had in 500-gallon tanks, which he always sat in front of after his time in the garden. He created magical little worlds in those tanks, and he loved watching the tropical varieties of fish duck in and out of the stacks of coral. I have to admit, it was mesmerizing. He loved it as much as he loved being outside.

Our first home together (he came into my life when I was 3-years-old) had a vegetable garden, a strawberry patch, a rhubarb patch, a peach tree, a driveway lined with lilacs, and a variety of flowering trees. My favorite was the dogwood. These spaces connected the yard we shared as a two-family home and made what could have been a dreary area bountiful. My dad created gardens wherever he moved, and HE always seemed to be moving; yet, I somehow I still associate him with stillness. He could sit for hours and watch what he created and still his mind. I never considered this juxtaposition until now, but am realizing that many of my hobbies, i.e. gardening and photography, were also his and all involve a kind of active stillness.

But back to the light. I want to tell you about the light.

In our area, the evening light softens. If you drive a country road in the hour or so before the sun sets, you can see it hit the grasses and the taller crops on the farms. If you allow yourself, you can be overcome by that childhood feeling of never-ending summer, especially if you listen to dreamy music while you drive. It’s exquisite, and I intentionally drive certain roads each spring and summer to absorb that feeling. For local friends, the road by Sub-Edge Farm is one of them, if you head north before sunset.

My daughter has been home for less than a week and is already sick of me asking her if she, “enjoyed the light” as she returns from swimming or getting ice cream with her friends, since I KNOW she had to take certain roads to get to those places and MUST HAVE noticed. But as she smiles like I’m just a little off my rocker, forgetting that I will always have a touch of hippie in me no matter how many business clothes she sees me in, I know that when she’s old and I’m gone, she will notice that evening light each summer and remember me.

This is a week that I’m noticing the little things, and I’m not taking them for granted. There’s a lot I have to do and a lot people are asking of me, but I’m taking the time I need to transition from an intense few months and to enjoy this fleeting time with our kids.

Next week, everything changes. They start leaving. Work for them begins in earnest, and I dive back into the tasks that all have checkmarks next to them. But for now, I’m enjoying the little things in life, because I know they are the big things.

This is one of the narratives I hear most often when motherhood is discussed.

The depleted part has proven to be a universal truth as I’ve traveled for my Women’s Work research through parts of India, Spain, and Peru. The loneliness part has not.

Because I have been studying how collective efforts help women build economic independence within vastly different cultural and economic systems, I came looking for answers about labor, opportunity, and what is fueling the future of women’s work. What I have found myself considering along the way is something much deeper:

I’ve started wondering whether modern motherhood itself operates inside a kind of linear economy.

As an American woman, I was raised inside a culture that taught me to seek financial autonomy, professional achievement, and self-sufficiency. American women have long been told that women’s progress depended on gaining access to systems historically reserved for men: careers, income, mobility, and ownership.

And that evolution has been necessary. Women’s safety often depends on financial independence, and that can only be gained when there’s a clear path toward it. But to date, that path has been linear. The assumption has been that if women can access the same education, legal rights, economic agency, and ability to support themselves and their children without dependence on patriarchal systems that can easily become sites of control or violence, we will be fulfilled. Content.

But do safety and fulfillment come from a linear path? I’m not so sure they do. Safety maybe, but fulfillment? I’m not seeing it around me.

In western economies, many women possess hard-won freedoms and opportunities, but quietly grieve the erosion of a communal fabric of support. Somewhere along the way, particularly in America, liberation became entangled with isolation. We succeeded in proving women could do everything, but we also created a culture in which women are expected to do everything—largely alone.

We have been encouraged to build lives optimized for individual achievement, while dismantling many of the interdependent structures that historically helped women manage caregiving, childrearing, illness, and aging. The result is a kind of invisible depletion that many women feel but struggle to articulate.

Mothers are often overwhelmed not simply because parenting is hard, but because motherhood in modern America has become linear.

In economic terms, a linear economy extracts resources, consumes them, and discards what remains. Now compare that to modern American motherhood. We extract caregiving from women without building adequate infrastructures of support around them. What’s left is exhaustion and isolation. Care flows from them with very little flowing to them.

In modern American society, nearly everything surrounding care has evolved into a privatized infrastructure: childcare, domestic management, elder care, scheduling, educational logistics, even psychological support. Mothers are expected to function as the central operating system for entire households while simultaneously remaining professionally productive, emotionally regulated, physically attractive, socially engaged, financially stable, and personally fulfilled.

In many of the communities I’ve visited in Kerala, India and the Sacred Valley of Peru, women are fighting for opportunity. They need to. Economic empowerment is directly tied to survival and protection. A consistent income can mean the difference between staying in an abusive relationship or leaving. It can determine whether children receive an education. Economic empowerment can change the trajectory of an entire family in a single generation.

And yet, as more areas create the infrastructure needed to support women’s economic evolution, many still retain forms of collective living and interdependence that much of modern American culture has lost.

Grandparents are present. Children move fluidly among community households. Meals are shared, and caregiving is distributed. Women work collectively, and motherhood is organized more communally than individually.

In the Sacred Valley, I’ve spent time with women’s cooperatives creating economic opportunity through artisan enterprises and sustainable tourism. Their work matters because it is providing women with dependable income, while also building dignity, enhancing mobility, and generating bargaining power inside homes and communities.

What has stayed with me, however, is not just the work itself, but also the social fabric surrounding it. Care feels visible. Families maintain multi-generational support systems. Villages parent communally. Children are integrated into work and communal life rather than treated as interruptions to it.

The overall structure feels closer to what environmental economists would describe as a circular economy: a system designed to replenish and regenerate resources continually rather than extract and discard them.

What if we applied this concept to caregiving?

In the Andean highlands of Peru, daily life is significantly harder than what most American families experience materially; yet, I have seen a deeper fabric of human connection here than I have ever encountered in the United States. And I must say, the children are noticeably calmer and more content.

I saw similar dynamics in Kerala, India, where women’s neighborhood groups are creating pathways toward economic independence while still existing within relational social structures. The women there are pushing toward greater autonomy without fully severing themselves from communal forms of living.

Many women’s cooperatives in Barcelona are exploring how urban life can be designed to encourage social cohesion, proximity, and mutual support rather than isolation. They are trying to redesign modern life in ways that make care more sustainable.

QUESTIONS:

• What if women’s progress was never supposed to mean severing ourselves from interdependence entirely?

• What if the next evolution is not a rejection of ambition or opportunity, but a redesign of the systems surrounding them?

• What would a society look like if caregiving labor was not endlessly extracted from women until depletion, but continuously supported, redistributed, replenished, and socially valued?

A circular economy of motherhood would not ask women to choose between autonomy and connection. It would recognize both as essential.

Women need economic independence. The ability to support oneself changes the power dynamics of nearly every aspect of life. The women I’ve met across Peru and India, especially, have reinforced this truth repeatedly.

But economic freedom alone will not solve loneliness, nor will it automatically create emotionally healthy families and communities. A circular model might. It would ask communities to consider how we can build systems where care circulates rather than isolates. Where caregiving becomes visible infrastructure rather than invisible private sacrifice.

In practical terms, this could look like multigenerational housing becoming normalized again. Cooperative childcare systems. Community kitchens. (PLEASE! What woman doesn’t want help with dinner?)

It could mean designing cities less around consumption and more around relationships, proximity, and mutual support and measuring societal success not only through GDP and productivity metrics, but through loneliness rates, maternal wellbeing, child flourishing, social trust, and community resilience.

Many of the strongest women I’ve encountered globally are not isolated individuals managing impossible loads alone. They are embedded inside reciprocal systems of support, and they are stronger for it.

Strength, in many cultures outside the United States, is collective.

As I sit here in Peru reflecting on my recent international journeys, I keep thinking about our future as women. And I’m thinking a lot about motherhood, because in our society’s encouragement to pursue independence, many of us have become untethered from one another. Despite unprecedented convenience, mobility, and opportunity, many women I encounter in the United States are quietly lonely.

The answer is not moving backward.

Women should not have to sacrifice autonomy, safety, nor ambition in exchange for connection—but we do need to get off the linear path and onto a circular one.

Maybe the strongest future for women isn’t one that stops encouraging women to do everything alone, it’s one where they no longer need to.

It’s the time before the tourists rise, before the trains start running, before the shops open, and when the real community is visible. It feels like a secret time in a town that runs on tourism.

Women move quickly out of their homes and rush through the streets. Children hitch rides to school on the backs of motorcycles or walk in small groups, their uniforms marking where they’re headed. Small dogs follow just behind their owners, off leash but confident of the route and somehow spared by whizzing vans.

And every morning it’s the same thing…day after day after day. It’s a finely tuned symphony of action—and the town depends on it.

On the corners of major streets and quiet back alleys near homes, women stand behind breakfast stations that have been set up since dawn. Their stands are different, but their offerings are the same. Each one has pitchers of warm quinoa apple drink and sandwiches stacked in clear containers. Adults and children alike stop, say “Hola, Buenos Dias,” and line up to buy plastic bags filled with liquid love, the straws tucked inside the centers, secured by rubber bands.

Pancha’s station is my favorite.

We greet each other by name as I begin my walk, and upon my return, she welcomes me to sit on her wall and watch as people come and go. Sometimes I order; sometimes I just observe, but I always love to sit by her.

I am cheered by her table. It has plastic stick-on wallpaper around three sides, and underneath it she stows extra toppings for sandwiches and sauces that she only pulls out for the children who like a little something different. There’s always a knowing smile when the sandwich exchanges hands. She knows all their orders by heart and sends them off to school with a smile. I don’t know her, but I love her.

As I leave to make my way home, I greet the woman stacking fresh yellowish chickens that she’s already been chopping in preparation for early pick ups. Every piece gets bagged…feet and all, which appear on a regular basis in the soups we are served at lunch. Apparently, they have flavor.

On my final turn before the house I’m in, I see the market women hard at work. Their backs are likely sore and many are adorned with babies wrapped in brightly colored fabric. Multiple generations of women are moving about unpacking oranges and avocados and wrapping bunches of greens—small ones for aromatics and large ones for animal feed.

Activity flows and women are the center of it. They get people off to work as they simultaneously do their own.

And then it’s done. The breakfast stations are packed up and gone by 8. The children are at school. The men have left for work, and the market stands are ready to go.

The town flips. It becomes the version designed to be seen. Doors to shops open. Stoops are swept. Lights come on. Stall doors slide up and reveal textiles and miniature llamas, and Ollatantambo is ready to host the nearly 1M people who come through the town each year en route to Machu Picchu.

Women are the backbone of this community. They watch every child so their husbands can work. They feed every mouth so people stay standing, and they collectively watch over a town that sustains itself on tourism.

Few people notice.

Women’s labor is invisible—here and everywhere. But I see it. Each time I leave the house and round the corner to walk by the markets, it’s as if I’m walking through a portal. All I see is women working and holding up the community they love. They are infrastructure in human form.

I came here to observe the collective efforts supporting women’s economic independence. I structured my time around visits with organizations and trips to villages to interview weavers. But I’ve unexpectedly noticed another collective effort hiding in plain sight: the women who start the day and hold up a town.

Women are not only organizing here to pursue their own economic independence, they are organizing to help others pursue theirs too. I cannot wait to get up tomorrow and quietly pay my respects as I slip through the streets of the town they run.

This Sunday, I am in Peru to begin a three-week study on women in remote Andean villages. I will wear wool base layers to bed and adjust when the water shuts down. None of that will bother me, because now my mind is on others. I’m thinking about THEIR lives.

Yesterday, my husband and I stayed at the TWA Hotel in NY and were immersed in the 1960s “Golden Age of Travel.” We enjoyed a peek into a time of glamour, elegance, and privilege, as people boarded jets and crossed oceans in style.

Today, I watched The Butler on the plane and was reminded that the 1960s were not a “Golden Age” for everyone. While some people were flying across oceans, others were being killed simply for walking or sitting at lunch counters. Not everyone had the freedom to travel.

A few weeks ago, I shared stories about the incredible men I met in India who are working to improve the lives of women. They are creating infrastructure to make women safer and doing so alongside them.

This week, I absorbed stories about men organizing to learn how to abuse their wives as they sleep and doing so on top of them.

What do we do with all that? I’m not sure.

All I know is that noticing parallel lives motivates me to stay in motion, to keep seeking out ways to experience lives beyond my own and to keep learning how to help make things better where I can.

Enjoy your week, everyone. 💕 Keep noticing…

He stopped listening at 1786.

I pictured myself drinking coffee on the screened-in porch listening to the birds, and he pictured a crumbling foundation and weekends spent on repairs.

This has been our monthly pattern for the last several years as I have tried to envision life with grown children.

Now that our kids are actually grown, and I absorb the headlines wondering why we still live in this country, when half of congress is content destroying the world while destroying our country—and our region is 100% car dependent—I seek solace in real estate listings. I try to envision different lifestyles, stretching my neck to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.

It’s probably not a coincidence that I have also just returned from countries like India, where communal living is entrenched, and Spain, where walkable cities paired with social lifestyles are the norm. It felt so good to be in Barcelona and Granada! I just walked out the door each day to life bustling around me. I dressed up. Groceries were easy. Errands were easy. Exercise was part of the day. Send me back!

I’m not going to move to India; Aronsons don’t like heat. And I couldn’t possibly convince my husband to relocate to Europe. Sigh. So as my anxiety reveals itself by pondering what life will be like in the future,

It’s the driving concern behind my real estate obsession.

At 56 and almost 50, my husband and I are watching people age. Some are staying put. Some are moving. Some are thriving in suburban life and enjoying the social-support system that comes with years spent developing relationships. Others are isolated, depressed, and growing less active by the minute, requiring care and only seeing the world through screens. I fear I will be in category two.

When I travel, I feel my energy rise. I love to visit walkable areas, and my mind responds well to the ease of striding out the door with access to things.

Then I come home—to what is arguably one of the best suburbs one could live in—and it’s a struggle for me to stay active and take care of myself consistently. The car-dependent nature of a suburb is hard for me.

But I’m not a big-city girl either. I love to pop into NYC, which is part of the appeal of where I live in central CT, but too much time there and I have sensory overload. We already lived in Boston, and I would return in a heartbeat, but after years of work travel my husband is scarred by traffic. Non-starter.

We raised our kids in a country setting not far from where we live now. Everyone thought we were crazy to take a 1 and 3 year old away from an ideal neighborhood, but in many ways it was heaven, and our children tell us how grateful they are for that childhood. It made sense then, but it was A LOT of work.

When our oldest approached middle school, we relocated back to where they were born and where we live now. It was the right decision. Thank God for carpooling! Our children tell us how grateful they are for having their adolescent years here. They created roots, relationships, a communal identity, were protected by good civic leadership, had access to open space and high-school jobs, and they returned home each day to neighbors who waved and truly loved them. They experience those waves and that love when they come during college breaks. ❤️ We have amazing neighbors.

The benefits of where we live now are not lost on me. It’s the best of the best and we are lucky, but it’s the suburban part that worries me. I long for the half-and-half lifestyle, where we can live half the time in a rural area and half the time in an urban one. Where we can calm down and re-energize. Some places do offer both.

I can feel the change in myself when I return home from trips now. It’s a heavier lift to stay active. Not for many people, I know, but for me. I lean a little “homebody,” so when I’m home and cozy, I like it…too much.

My husband is a touch the same—so we travel. It works. But what lifestyle will make sense as we age?

Time will tell. But for now, the struggle feels real. I blame perimenopause.

Here’s What I’m Going to Do

I’m going to start by trying a new routine (again) to help me get out the door first thing and get myself to more of the wonderful things my community has to offer. There’s something every day, if I’m being honest.

I’m going to try harder to stop thinking the grass is always greener. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t. I know we have a good thing going here. There were many days growing up when I wanted what I have now.

If I am following my own advice to others, I should think less and do more. Change comes from action, not planning action.

I live in a community that offers the same opportunities the 1786 house offers, if I cross a few streets, and we can easily vacation to places that have the things we don’t find here. I just need to take better advantage of what we already have rather than trying to find the perfect blend somewhere else.

There won’t be a pool here, and the outdoor shower we had at our country home won’t likely be repeated here without some serious landscaping. And the wide-planked floors? I’ll join every other woman I know and just swoon over them in magazines. The lifestyle blend, however? That’s here. I just need to walk out the door to enjoy it.

Scott, you are off the hook for the 1786 house. I’m going for a walk. 🚶🏻‍♀️

But as women have entered the urban workforce, we have become more aware of how urban design affects a woman’s daily life. By most accounts, women are still the primary caretakers of the young and old, so an examination of how a city works for women must also consider how it works for caretaking.

How DO cities work for women? Whose needs are prioritized? Who feels safest?

These are the kinds of questions Urban Feminists consider. They take feminist theories and apply them to how women experience cities.

What I have discovered through my recent Women’s Work research is that there are highly engaged collectives of women working as urban planners, sociologists, and architects, who are taking feminist theories and applying them to their planning and design. They call this approach Feminist Urbanism, and what they are doing isn’t just helping cities work better for women, it’s helping them work better for everyone.

From March 16 to March 20, I was in Barcelona to learn more about these women’s collectives, and here are six observations:

1. URBAN DESIGN AFFECTS A WOMAN’S TIME—SIGNIFICANTLY

I was in Barcelona alone. And because of the nature of my research, I was hyper aware of my own experience in the city.

What I noticed, sadly, is that I spend a significant amount of time each day thinking about my safety and hadn’t even realized it. From the moment I got up until the moment I got into bed, most of my decisions involved safety in some capacity. Now, this doesn’t mean I was a nervous wreck, it just means that as a woman I have been conditioned to consider my daily choices with safety in mind.

Here’s an example of an average day during my trip:

I woke up and considered what I would be wearing, mostly for practical purposes, but also how I would be presenting myself and what kind of attention I would attract in different environments. Then I left the apartment and took the stairs, noticing if anyone else was in the hallway. If I took the elevator, I assessed whether I felt safe with any people already in it. When I closed the main front door, I made sure it locked before I left, so no one could slip in behind me. I walked on the street aware of how close men were to me, and if I checked my phone for directions, I did so with my back to a wall so I could see in both directions. When I took the metro, I did so only when it was crowded and stood with the women while waiting. On the day I walked down from the Montjuïc Castle over to the next place I was conducting interviews, I changed my mind about which road I would take when I noticed I would be the only woman walking down a narrow tree-lined path with only young men in front of and behind me. I couldn’t see around the bend, and it was siesta, so it was quiet. And after a long day of work, I chose not to go out at night, since I wasn’t sure how I would feel returning home after dark without anyone waiting for me.

You get the point. I didn’t mean to think of any of these things; they were just subliminal considerations, quick course corrections, and heightened levels of awareness that consumed a large part of my mental energy as I moved as a woman throughout my day.

At one point I timed how long it took me to walk from one bus stop to the next, and at a rapid pace without any obstructions, it was 3 minutes and 25 seconds. That didn’t seem long during the day, but when I doubled back to examine the route, I noticed that there were no stores; just walls and openings to alleys for residential garages. That walk would have felt different at night.

When we go about our days as women, we run errands, pick up kids, attend appointments, and that all adds up to time spent moving among different places. That takes time. Time we could be doing things to improve our lives, enhancing our wellbeing, or simply RESTING. It’s no wonder when we hear discussions about Time Poverty, it’s often in reference to women.

2. WOMEN EXPERIENCE CITIES DIFFERENTLY FROM MEN

One of the collectives I spent time with was Col lectiu Punt 6. This group of sociologists, urban planners, and architects gathers data in many ways, some of which is participatory. They offer walking and biking tours designed as safety audits, and some of their workshops include body mapping. They ask women to tune in to how they feel (using all their senses) as they move throughout the city. During those experiences, it becomes obvious that women notice different things from men.

The first thing women notice will often be whether there are washrooms open to the public that do not require the purchase of something to access. And if there are washrooms, do they have changing tables and can they accommodate a stroller? Are there lights in the tunnels and parks they need to walk through at night?

Women are often seen at playgrounds for extended periods of time. Are there sunshades and places to sit? Are there washrooms close by in case they have to use them to manage heavy bleeding when menstruating, or simply to relieve themselves?

Can they easily get a stroller or bike up over a curb? Do they have to cross the street two or three times to get where they need to go, or is there a plaza that allows them to cross on the diagonal? Does the metro stop have an elevator for a stroller on both the front end of the trip and the back end?

Most cities are not designed with women and caretaking in mind. When they are, women notice. When they aren’t, women feel it.

3. VISIBILITY MAKES WOMEN FEEL SAFER

Visibility is a huge issue for women, and if you have read this far, you have already absorbed references to well-lit pathways, staircases, metro stops, and whether bushes and trees block a woman’s ability to see around a corner. Feminist Urbanists are designing with visibility in mind, because it relates so heavily to safety.

The next time you are in a city, notice the bus shelters. See if there are lights around and if you can see through them clearly, or if a poster covers one of the sides. If you were a woman leaving for work early in the morning or returning late at night, would you feel safe waiting in those shelters?

The next time you are running or walking during dawn or dusk, notice if you take certain routes because they are better lit, have longer lines of visibility, or have cafes lining the streets that allow more people to keep an eye on you. These are the kinds of things women’s collectives in Barcelona are keeping in mind as they design municipal spaces and recommend improvements to existing ones. They understand that thoughtful urban design can support a woman’s ability to move freely and safely, giving her equal access to the city.

4. URBAN EXPERIMENTS BENEFIT SOME, NOT ALL

Over the years, Barcelona has experimented with Superblocks. Superblocks group a number of streets together and create common public spaces within them. I toured all of them with a female architect involved in the design of some of the more recent ones. We examined historical plans and discussed the evolution and design goals of each one. Then we walked them. Fascinating!

When you experience Superblocks with the environment in mind, it’s wonderful to notice the areas free from car traffic and the subsequent reduction in noise and exhaust fumes. It’s relaxing to sit under the trees that have been added and observe people gathering on boulders, playing on playgrounds, and talking at cafes. And it’s impossible to miss the sense of community the spaces encourage and how at ease people seem as they move around.

But when you look at the prices of the condos that can be fetched due to the improvement in lifestyle, you begin to consider who isn’t there. Which socioeconomic groups can now afford to have daily access to these areas?

And when you leave the quiet streets that have been prioritized for pedestrians, it’s impossible not to notice the change in noise level and air quality due to traffic being concentrated on fewer streets.

As we moved through each of the Superblocks, the time of day was changing, and I grew more aware of my own commute home and what my experience in those spaces would be once I parted from the architect. We had reviewed the designs, talked about the highlights and processes behind their implementation, and enjoyed the peace and sense of community they created within the city. It was lovely.

However, when I met with women from different collectives the next day, we examined the spaces through a feminist lens, and I began to notice who wasn’t invited into the planning process. They helped raise my awareness to aspects of urban design I hadn’t considered.

Here’s a few examples:

That transportation hub that put the highway underground and concentrated the busses, trams, and metros into one area with wide open spaces for people to bike and walk? Excellent in theory, but without signs directing tourists and speed-calming measures placed strategically throughout the sidewalks, women walking with young children were often getting hit by speeding bikes. They became reliably dangerous areas for pedestrians at certain times of day.

That gorgeous all-white playground with the enclosed, yet-still-transparent tubes for children to run through with protection from the sun? Fantastic in theory, but made of metal. Children get burned in the summer when they touch it, and the white often reflects so much light that it’s hard to see when the sun is high.

The outdoor cafe that included outdoor public washrooms? Excellent, but they are only open when the cafe is open, so not everyone can linger as comfortably at the nearby park when the cafe is closed.

These are the kinds of conversations that Feminist Urbanists can help foster if engaged during the design phase. Urban experiments often offer exciting benefits and are additive to a city, but it’s important to notice who isn’t benefitting and how those experiments change conditions for people not often considered.

5. FEMINIST COLLECTIVES ARE DRIVING REAL CHANGE

One of the things I did during my time in Barcelona was observe Col lectiu Punt 6 as they hosted women from collectives in Spain, France, and Belgium. We took a two-hour bike tour of some recent community-informed projects, and the group graciously allowed me to listen to their multi-lingual debrief. Shockingly, I followed along even though the languages flowed from Catalan and Spanish to French and English!

As I listened, what became crystal clear was that these women are driving real change. One group was creating recommendations for their municipal area aimed at reducing the harassment women experience while utilizing bike lanes throughout urban areas. The harassment is both vocal and physical, with women often being cat-called, intimidated, and nudged off paths and streets.

In Barcelona, Col lectieu Punt 6 recommended that municipal buses allow women to request mid-route stops when traveling at night to shorten the distance they needed to walk when stops were far apart. These recommendations were accepted in the areas outside downtown, and women’s lives were made safer.

They have also worked with communities to advocate for certain plazas in the city to be preserved for community use in a more affordable fashion, as gentrification and short-term rentals have pushed long-time residents out. During the design phase, they hosted participatory workshops and incorporated feedback from the community to enrich the plazas with better lighting, more permanent seating, public washrooms, water fountains, community gardens, and shared community centers to gather and host events and meetings. I toured these, as well, with my lens focused on who could access the spaces and who couldn’t. The ones designed by the collectives had more inclusive features.

6. DESIGNING FOR WOMEN BENEFITS EVERYONE

Feminist Urbanism is focused on designing cities that center the sustainability of life for all. They strive for cities designed around care not capitalism. Their lens may be a feminist one, but when you design for women and consider how women differ in age, physical ability, interest, identity, etc., you end up designing for children, elders, people in wheelchairs, men and women of different socio-economic statuses, people who have to use a washroom sitting down, or who simply don’t want to be arrested for urinating in public. You get the point.

Women’s Work is researching collective efforts that support a women’s economic independence, and that looks different in cities like Barcelona, where women live and work in an urban environment, than it does in Maine and India, where the women I studied live in rural environments. It’s important to look at landscape when considering how women are set up to live and earn and to ask them if they feel safe as they move throughout their days.

When an urban environment is made more accessible, easier to navigate, and safer, it benefits women, but it also makes a city more comfortable and connected for all.

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Learn more about my field research in Barcelona, Tennessee, Maine, and India.

Looking for a speaker for your next event? Reach out to discuss how the topics I am covering through the Women’s Work project can support your needs. Workshop compliments available.

“Just gather these forms!”

“Ditch the car!”

“You’ll have an actual social life AND FREE HEALTHCARE!”

🤔 Tempting, I have to admit. But something else has also snuck in: videos of older women living their best lives.

I’m a sucker for internet wisdom and was already committed to watching anything featuring Maya Angelou—or really any other older Black woman—since they have so much wisdom to share.

Then that triggered some Gloria Steinem and a daily dose of Gramma and Ginga swearing at each other; I spent way too long on their videos. Not only were they funny, they had what felt like the purest form of love on the internet second to anything about golden retrievers saving toddlers or greeting their returning soldiers. 🦮

And last year I spent an inordinate amount of time watching Sister Golden pick up natural items in parking lots to make art, some of which my book-club bestie and I bought and now have in our homes. Love!

But now I’m seeing how much more is out there in the elder universe, and it’s been calming … and life altering.

It all started with Yvonne LaFleur. She owns a clothing shop in New Orleans, dresses to the nines every day, and speaks with a low, slow drawl as she takes viewers through fashion tips. 👗 I got sucked in around Valentine’s Day, when she offered advice on how to be an engaged partner. “Play a little footsie under the table with your special Valentine. Put on something special. Maybe something in red.”

Some might hear that and think it sounds like a throwback to the pressure put on 1950s women to “dress up for your man,” but as someone who has been married for 23 years and been inundated by athleisure marketing, she almost convinced me to put in some effort and stay in my day clothes just a touch longer before changing into sweatpants after I get home. Almost.

Now I see her daily dress offerings and examples of how to style clothes I’ll never buy, but something about her voice just calms me down and takes me to another environment when the news gets to be too much. And I do love how much effort she puts into her self presentation. She isn’t preachy. She just models what dignity feels like for her.

Like many women who are part of the peri-menopause algorithm, you’ve probably seen Joan, too. You know, the 70-something-year-old lady whose daughter taught her to strength train a few years back? 🏋 She snuck in my feed for a while, but now she’s stronger than I am and has better lifestyle routines, so I’ve moved on because I felt a little sad that I wasn’t as motivated as she was. Sorry, Joan. Keep up the good work!

Then there were the two Black grandmas on Facebook known as Cooking Old Ladies, who invited me to cook with them, if I was, “the kind of person who treats Black folks with kindness and respect.” They said I could, “pull up a chair because there’s plenty of food and plenty of love.” Yes, please. I admired how they snuck in some psychology for people who might have scrolled by because they didn’t want to watch Black women do anything. The world changes with love, and they offer it up over a pot of soup. 🥘People who hate are really missing out.

But while I enjoy their approach, I don’t have the energy to cook right now, though my favorite thing continues to be buying cookbooks with a plan to change my family’s life forever, so I moved on so as not to feel pressured to cook more.

Now I’ve met Vivienne Truran, known on Insta as Vivthecarer. I had to Google what a carer was, and in the UK it’s “someone who provides unpaid, informal care and support to a family member, partner, friend, or neighbor who cannot manage without help due to illness, frailty, disability, or mental health issue.” Oh, Viv. This makes me love you more. 💕

I thought she was a retired fashion person or something, since I initially got pulled in by videos of her jumping around in her daily outfit and loved that she looked like she just popped out of an Anthropologie ad with her wide-leg jeans, patterned tops, and bold eyewear.

“Good for you,” I thought.

“Do your thing!”

“Wear what you want!”

But then I heard her talking about how she used ChatGPT to understand the anatomy of a fingernail and how to keep them from splitting. Useful. Her feed makes sense now, and she does fundraisers for hospice. We need more Vivs in the world.

By the time I got to her posts, though, I noticed that something about her content—layered upon content from women before her—was changing my view of what my elder years could be.

For those of you just getting to know me, (and try not to feel bad for my husband as you read this next part), I got trained to be a docent at an art museum when I was in my early forties, and I love to garden, read, write, take photos, and do volunteer work. Sexy, right? I’m pretty sure I will love being a senior, but something about Vivienne changed HOW I might do that.

She made me want to exercise like Joan, take more time to put myself together like Yvonne, (I do love a dress), lean into hobbies I enjoy like Sister Golden, and wear my wide-leg jeans to do volunteer work. Watching her jump around in her cheery outfits made it seem like much more fun to aim for an energized, engaged, spirited life in my elder years than my current routine is tacking toward.

I’m going to try to put in a little more effort. My 18-year-old daughter just asked me to make a Two Bad Bitches dance reel when I see her tomorrow, so maybe I’ll start with that. We’ll see.

Watching these women, and others like them, has not only been a balm for the burning reality of our times, but somehow they have started to impart a, “live now, live well, and get up, get out there, and do your thing” mentality—and I’m here for it.

REST. See you next week. ❤️

You never know what’s going to happen when you travel—especially internationally—but I think I was prepared for most of what I experienced during my 17 days in India.

I was prepared when immigration put me through the ringer in Mumbai and dumped out my film bag three times unsure why I had all that equipment. I was prepared when I set out for 12-hour days in rice paddies and villages knowing I was not only managing “feminine” things without reliable access to a washroom, but also trying desperately to avoid the dehydration, vomiting, and diarrhea everyone seemed to be warning me about ad nauseam. And I was prepared to learn how to eat with my hands and manage intense spice, while dining with local people in local places.

However, there were things I wasn’t prepared for. Like the bee sting I got. I packed every medicine except Benadryl, but thankfully I was surrounded by Indian women and a garden of herbs, which meant I was in good hands had a problem occurred. I also wasn’t prepared for the open tiger reserve we found ourselves in when visiting tribal settlements, but I’m alive to tell this story. And I definitely wasn’t prepared for the political strike that shut down the entire state of Kerala on February 12 as a show of anger against the Trump tariffs. Those things caught me off guard.

But I was prepared for naked James. I’m good in an emergency.

Just before midnight on night three of my trip, which was the first night after my first full day in the field, I was up later than expected writing my field notes and uploading my footage and hadn’t yet turned on the wave machine my husband has gotten me acclimated to sleeping with for the past 25 years.

So I heard the THUMP when it happened. Nothing followed, so I didn’t think much of it, until I heard a woman yelling in the hallway. I assumed it was a drunken partygoer returning from the bar and reflected with a smile on my twenties and late nights in Boston with my friends. But as her words became more clear, I realized she was yelling “HELP” and I bolted into the hallway.

She was in a panic, and when I turned into her room, I understood why. Her 6 ‘4” husband was naked on the marble floor of the bathroom face down in a pool of blood. She couldn’t get the phone by her bed to work to call for help, and we were at the end of the hallway far from the front desk.

“Go into my bathroom and use that phone to call for help. It works,” I said. I had had the same trouble with the phone near my bed days earlier, so her trouble using hers made sense, and I had propped my door open before I went into the hall. Off she went.

And there I was with naked James. He was awake—thank God—and after yanking a towel off the shelf to cover him up and keep him warm, we worked together to assess what to do next.

Another towel to his head…pressure.

But as the minutes passed, a small crowd started to gather. The guests on our floor who had heard the screams started to trickle in, and I turned to find that an unexpected team of strangers had formed to meet the moment. ❤️

And there we all were: James, alert but still donning his hotel towel. Me, thankfully in a full pajama set with a tank-top underneath. His wife, running through the room in a pajama set with tigers on it. A British man in his 70s now standing near the bathroom door wearing only his underwear and gold cross chain. His wife, standing by him in a silver lingerie top and shorts calmly asking James what he ate at the last hotel. And soon a very young, very confused, and once he saw the blood everywhere, very concerned hotel staff member holding onto a wheelchair unsure what to do with the moment he now found himself in.

“Do you have an ambulance waiting?” I asked. No. Apparently James was doing this journey by hotel shuttle, so there was no time for questions about why that was the choice when a woman called down to say her husband was face down in a pool of blood and needed help. All I had now were questions for the tiger wife. “Do you have his passport…his travel insurance…your hotel key?” She was in prep-mode now and doing well.

Then our work became collective. We needed to get him into the wheelchair. “I have a towel on you, so you are covered, and I’ll hold it as you get up.” I said. “That’s the least of my problems,” he giggled. Oh good. He’s funny, I thought. That’s helpful in this situation. I began to consider which stance to take to absorb his weight with mine should he fall backwards, because he was trying to stand, but thankfully he wasn’t just funny, he took instruction well. He listened as I told him to get on all fours, crawl backwards, and allow us to help him into the wheelchair, so he didn’t get dizzy. His wife worked on clothes and shoes.

“You need to go to the hospital, because you are going to need stitches, but I think it looks worse than it is,” I said. And then the color drained from his face. “Are you going to be sick?”

“No, no,” he said as more color disappeared. I grabbed the flip-top trash can next to the toilet, grateful that they had just checked in and it was empty, and put it under his chin in time for him to vomit for the next minute.

“You feel better now, don’t you?” I said.

“Yes, actually I do.”

And with some instructions to the young man to get him a bowl for the shuttle and a double check with his wife that she had what she needed for now-dressed James, off they went to the hospital and the rest of us returned to our rooms.

Unexpected times form unexpected teams, and what we all did together that evening was true human nature in action. When faced with difficult situations, people band together and help each other.

I saw evidence of this again when I returned home this week to a personal tragedy from the death of a friend, a community tragedy from the death of a child, and a global tragedy as our country started a war.

Through all of this, people have been coming together to absorb the shock of these situations and trying to help any way they can.

We cannot change the situations we are faced with, but we can show up to help.

For those of you wondering about James. He’s ok. I saw him at breakfast a couple of days later, and save for a black eye, a few stitches between his eyes, and a shortage of electrolytes, he was ok. He and his wife came to say thank you, and then James, his beautiful tiger-wife, and I posed for photos so they could show their kids the woman who helped him, and he thanked me for what I did for him. “All I remember is waking up to ‘Hi, My name is Amanda, and I’m going to help you,’” he said.

And in that moment, I flashed back to all of us gathered round in our pajamas ready to help and reflecting on how quickly strangers united in someone’s time of need.

The world is on fire this week 🌎 , but as we take it all in, I hope we all remember to look around and notice how people are helping. It is human nature to help, and however we do it, it makes a difference. ❤️

What happens when you organize 4.8 million women? You change a state.

The individual lives of the women improve. The lives of their families improve. And because it’s well documented that when we strengthen the well-being of women, we strengthen communities, Kerala, India 🇮🇳 exists as a global example of how changing the lives of women changes the economic, social, and political culture of an entire state.

I just returned home from an intense, multi-region Field Visit with Kudumbashree Mission, a state institution in Kerala that relies on national and state funding to empower women and eradicate extreme poverty among them. It was a life-altering trip, and as an American woman researcher, I was often in shock as I observed the conditions of the women.

For those unfamiliar with Indian geography, the country of India is comprised of states, and Kerala is a state on the southwest coast. It is known as “God’s Own Country,” for its breathtaking landscapes and harmonious cultural heritage. Though comparable in land area to Maryland, Kerala is home to over four times as many people as New York City. It was here, in the late 1980s, in a democratically-run state with an historically-unique matriarchal structure, that the government invested in an effort to increase the literacy rate of its population. It was called the Total Literacy Campaign, and it worked. I began my Field Visits in Ernakulam, which as it turned out, was the first district in Kerala to reach complete literacy in 1990.

Because this literacy campaign was so effective, when a task force began trying to improve the lives of women, their efforts layered upon a literate population, so their efforts “took.” A population of literate people is key to what I’m about to explain, and it’s what keeps Kerala’s progress for women advancing as programs for women in other countries trying their model stall.

In 1998, the work of that task force was formalized into what is now known as Kudumbashree (coo-doom-ba-stree). In the local language of Malayalam, Kudumbashree means prosperity of the family. Administrations have changed over the years, but they have all funded Kudumbashree, so it has continued uninterrupted for nearly 30 years. You can make a lot of progress in 30 years. You can’t achieve perfection, but you can move things forward.

So what is Kudumbashree, and how did it organize 4.8 million women?

Practically speaking, it’s an infrastructure of support that is in place throughout the entire state of Kerala. Women opt in and it has three tiers:

• Neighborhood Groups, which have between 10-20 women living in close proximity to one another;

• Area Development Societies, which have between 50 and 200 women in them (relative to the number of Neighborhood Groups in a ward), each of whom has been democratically elected to represent their respective Neighborhood Group;

• Community Development Societies, which have between 150 and 500 women (relative to the number of Area Development Societies in an area), each of whom has been democratically elected to represent their respective Area Development Society.

Women join Neighborhood groups, and then they elect representatives from those to move into the higher tiers. The highest level of leadership is the Community Development Society, and you can literally see the power and leadership in these women. By the end of my Field Visits, I could have told you from afar which group I was looking at, even if they were all dressed the same.

It makes sense then that as women have assumed a stronger presence in the state’s political landscape, that the leaders come mostly from this group. One third of the local-government seats are reserved for women—pause for reaction—so women’s leadership is rising steadily. Many of the elders in Kerala’s communities remember a time before Kudumbashree, and they have seen this evolution, but for the younger women, women in political leadership is normal. Hallelujah!

To give you a sense of scale, the three-tier structure is implemented throughout the entire state, so there are 317,000 Neighborhood Groups, 9,470 Area Development Societies, and 1,070 Community Development Societies. Together, they represent 4.8 million women. Not all women in Kerala are part of a Neighborhood Group, but most are.

Beyond the groups, there are systems of support for business development, training, health support, etc. but the design of the group-based infrastructure is what allows all the other work to be developed and maintained.

This structure was built by the government of Kerala and in some ways (e.g. percentages for political representation) are maintained by law. I keep clarifying Kerala as I write, because this is unique in India. Women in Kerala have a vastly different level of well-being than any other state in India. They are more literate. They have more earning potential. They have more respect from men, and most importantly, they are safer. While the safety of women in Kerala is far from perfect and ebbs and flows as broader conditions fluctuate, it is significantly better than anywhere else in India. Kerala also reports its incidents of harm against women, which is another difference, and one that has allowed Kudumbashree leadership to use data to expand support.

You can see and feel the difference between the lives of women here and the lives of women elsewhere as you move around the state.

I just returned from field visits throughout the Ernakulam, Thrissur, and Palakkad districts and have spent time among nearly 1000 people. I interviewed women individually and collectively with Kudumbashree staff, and I also interviewed men and women independent from my time with Kudumbashree.

I’ve been in cities, rice paddies, forested tribal settlements, rocky outcroppings adjacent to farms, food kiosks, government buildings, schools, supermarkets, public parks, temples, and in the private homes of farmers whose residences range from small shacks to three-story structures with satellite dishes.

I returned to my hotel late every night sweaty and dirty and inspired. Everywhere I went and everyone I talked with confirmed that Kudumbashree created a structure to support women that is working, and women are using it to rise in every way a person can.

For those of you following my Women’s Work project closely, you may remember that Thistle Farms in Nashville, TN reminded us that women do not need to be empowered. We already have power in us and are the heroes of our own stories. However, we can’t often use our power, because the infrastructure of our societies blocks us from doing so. Kudumbashree uses empowerment phrasing, but what I see is that they have done for women in Kerala what Thistle Farms has done for the most vulnerable women in American society: provided infrastructure, resources, and support, and then watched women rise.

As an American woman 🇺🇸, I have been downright shocked by the women’s culture here. In most places I have been, nothing changes about a woman’s presence when a man enters the space. If she is speaking confidently, she keeps on speaking. If she is explaining something, she does it proudly. If she is the leader of somewhere we have been, the men under her charge appear to view a woman leader as normal. They sit behind the women in meetings if that is how their roles are ranked. They don’t interrupt, and they speak only when it seems like their input is invited. The women run the home finances and make the decisions about their businesses. They still do not own most of the land they work on, so there is a long way to go, but progress is being made.

What touched me the most was that store owners, rickshaw drivers, uber drivers, hotel staff, people next to me on ferries, husbands in households, and woman after woman told me individually and collectively that they feel women are equal to men in Kerala.

And most importantly, when I have asked groups of women collectively if they feel safer since being involved with Kudumbashree, there is an immediate, simultaneous, and resounding YES, and their entire bodies move as they say so.

Men in Kerala receive gender-sensitivity training in many workplaces and homes. And if there is a safety concern, men are counseled on why they cannot hurt a woman. It is reinforced that it is illegal, and if they do hurt a woman, there are immediate judicial consequences. Things are still far from perfect, and increasing prices of dowries are affecting the steady rate of forward progress regarding safety, but women are vastly safer here than in most places in the world.

Kudumbashree is an infrastructure designed to maximize the power of the collective—and it is unique in the world. It has developed a roadmap many scholars and countries are trying to learn from, and I hope more will, because the change we want is possible, and Kudumbashree proves that it starts by changing conditions for women.