I’m more excited about my birthday than I normally am, perhaps because I’m still around to celebrate it. No, nothing is wrong with me. I don’t have a terminal disease (unless you consider life to be a terminal disease, which in a way, it is). But I am getting older, and I’m aware of the [...]

I just finished reading Alice Eve Cohen’s What I Thought I Knew which is a memoir about her late-in-life, unexpected pregnancy. Sprinkled throughout the book are lists that Cohen titles “What I Know.” The items change over time to the point where Cohen apparently decides that she never really knew what she thought she knew.
Using [...]

I started coloring my hair when I was 15 by using Summer Blonde. It gave my hair that “sun-kissed” look which was de rigueur among teens in the ’60s. But the main reason I used it was because the blonde hair I was born with was darkening and I just didn’t feel like myself with brown [...]

Abstract of “What Do These Women Want?” Feminist Responses to Feminine Forever, 1963-1980, by Judith Anne Houck. Bulletin of the History of Medicine – Volume 77, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 103-132

In 1963, Brooklyn gynecologist Robert A. Wilson and his wife, Thelma, published a paper in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society arguing that [...]

Naomi Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991 about “how images of beauty are used against women.” Almost 20 years later, Michelle Goldberg wonders if anything has changed. In her December 22nd article on The American Prospect website, she asks the question: “Are impossible beauty standards a subconscious cultural reaction against women’s growing political power?”
I’ve [...]