| |  | | | | October 31, 2017 | Letter No. 110 | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys!
I'm Tahirah, the newest member of Team Lenny, and I'm so excited to be bringing you all things fashion and beauty (seriously, ask about my extensive skin-care routine or DM me for skin-product recs. I am obsessed with chemical exfoliating, and when my friends tell me they don't exfoliate at least two times a week, I yell at them). I'm thrilled to explore these topics through the lens of routines, bodies, and culture.
Even though I'm obsessed with beauty products and dressing up, ironically, I hate Halloween. My relationship with the holiday has been a little complicated. When I was really little, I'd go trick-or-treating with my cousins. Then, in fifth grade, my mom and stepfather sent me to a Catholic school and got super-religious, and I was taught Halloween wasn't a "holy" holiday. So, of course, I snuck costumes (I was a schoolgirl, Aaliyah, and a Greek goddess) to school in my backpack until the eighth grade. I guess this is finally telling my mom?
I'll concede that high school (which involved my renting a limo with friends to go trick-or-treating; don't judge me) and college (I dressed up as a one-night stand: I wore an oversize plaid button-down, slept-in makeup, and the kind of heels you'd wear to a party in college. I was visibly uncomfortable and doing the most) were enjoyable. But then I moved to New York, and the drunken people on the train, yelling and dressed obnoxiously, solidified my hatred. That's why this year, I'm going as a member of the Guilty Remnant from The Leftovers; all I'll have to do is wear all white, smoke cigarettes, and not speak to anyone, the perfect anti-Halloween costume.
When I'm not having an existential crisis about Halloween, I watch sooo much television; try not to kill my plants, Young Thug (a peace lily) and Remy Ma (a monstera); and plot my next surf trip.
In this week's Lenny, we have:
—Legendary rock star, poet, and artist Patti Smith tells us who she thinks is going to change the world and talks about her new exhibit in Mexico City.
—Writer Alyssa Shelasky tells her story of being a single mom and having a sex life.
—Author Lidia Yuknavitch writes about why Lady Liberty is the perfect heroine.
—Journalist Elva Ramirez talks about the dispiriting pay gap she experienced working at The Wall Street Journal (just in time for Latina Equal Pay Day on November 2).
—And, finally, our resident historian Alexis Coe investigates that time the ghost of Charlotte Brontë haunted Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Xoxo, Gossip Girl (I've always wanted to do this)
Tahirah Hairston, associate editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | "The Real Revolution Will Be a Global One" | | | | By Benoît Loiseau | | |
| (Patti Smith, Auto Portrait, Alexandria, Egypt, 2010.) |
Patti Smith apologizes as she sits down at a table within the tall, concrete walls of Kurimanzutto. The Mexico City gallery has organized several projects with the artist across the capital, including a display of photographs in the vitrines of the iconic Café La Habana, a billboard installation in the Condesa district, and a series of performances accompanied by her longtime musical partner, Lenny Kaye. The night before our meeting at the gallery, Patti had performed to an intimate audience at Café La Habana, where her glass of water had turned out to be tequila. "It was so good, so I kept drinking it," she jokes. "And now I can't remember anything!"
The project is titled "Café La Habana Sessions" and evokes Patti's fascination with the café as a social space, as well as her admiration for some of Mexico's greatest artists and writers: When she turned 16, in 1962 in New Jersey, her mother gave her a copy of The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, a biography of the celebrated early-20th-century Mexican muralist. It changed her world. The then-factory-worker (this experience inspired the song "Piss Factory") knew she wanted to be an artist, though she didn't exactly know what that meant.
| (Installation views of Patti Smith, Café La Habana Sessions, 2017. Images courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City. Photos by PJ Rountree) |
Patti found in the characters of Rivera and his wife, the surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, an appealing dynamic: one of artistic collaboration, passion, and revolutionary spirit. "I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker," she wrote in Just Kids, her memoir that documents her romance-turned-friendship with queer photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in gritty 1970s New York.
Yet the Mexican duo didn't exactly boast the kind of compassionate relationship many would aspire to have. The imposing Rivera, standing over six feet tall, is generally portrayed as an abusive, misogynistic womanizer. Frida had many documented affairs of her own, including with the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the Costa Rican singer Chavela Vargas. Their tumultuous relationship drove the couple to a grueling divorce (still, they would remarry a year later).
| (Patti Smith, Coverlet, Diego Rivera Bed, Casa Azul, Coyoacán, 2012.) |
"What I was most interested in," Patti tells us, readjusting her black vest (moments later, she realized it was inside out), "was how, through the betrayals, through the anger — whatever they went through as a man and a woman, their understanding and respect for each other as artists was never shaken. And that was a good template for my relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe."
Patti's photographs, which were on display at Café Habana throughout the month of September (one will remain permanently in the shop's bathroom), were taken on her many travels, including those through Mexico. Roberto Bolaño's chair, Frida Kahlo's corset, Diego Rivera's bed — the black-and-white, ghostly pictures are an homage to the personalities who influenced her and the spaces they inhabited.
Patti's images complement the café's storied past: Founded in the early 1950s, Café la Habana is known to Chilangos (residents of Mexico City) as a humble yet significant meeting point for Latin America's artistic and literary communities. Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño were regulars, and an urban legend claims that in 1955 Fidel Castro and Che Guevara planned the Cuban Revolution in this very café. It's a fitting exhibition space for Patti, whose romantic idea of the café is fueled by the stories of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle at the Café Central and of Verlaine and Rimbaud at the Parisian Café François 1er; and her own memories of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other beat poets across Greenwich Village's finest establishments, like Caffe Reggio and San Remo.
| (Patti Smith, Room, Detail, Casa Azul, Coyoacán, 2012.) |
"I have had pictures in museums, in palaces, in galleries," Patti recounts. "But to have my pictures in a café is awesome." It's the absolute bohemian fantasy, but in the era of globalization, digital communication, and unsparing gentrification, are we still celebrating the café, or rather mourning it? These days, in New York's coffee shops, the 71-year-old rock star admits to regularly shouting at suits who sit on Skype negotiating deals: "Don't you have an office?"she'd yell. "This is my office! This is the office of the poets!" But after a moment of reflection, she suggests that there's still space for the romance: "It's something you have to reinvent."
At her opening performance for the series, before an audience of 3,000 at Casa Del Lago in Chapultepec Park, Patti reflected on the state of social injustice in Mexico and the world at large. She sang an a capella version of U2's "Mothers of the Disappeared," dedicating the cover to the mothers of the43 Mexican students who were kidnapped in the city of Iguala in 2014. "I'm well aware that everything isn't wonderful here," explained the singer. "I'm well aware that many children, students, people have been lost, that women and journalists are killed," she continued. "And these things are all over the world. And wherever these things happen, I feel anger, I feel remorse, I feel sorrow. And we speak out. Sometimes I speak through a poem, through a song, through simply remembering people that are lost. We all have to do what we can."
"I felt so ashamed," Patti admits back at the gallery. She's speaking of the large billboard she's designed, which displays one of her photographs and a poem. It watches over the intersection of Sonora and Nuevo León, which has become a meeting point for the rescue brigades working to repair the capital after September's 7.1-magnitude earthquake (this interview took place a few weeks prior). "I searched myself to try to find the right words," says Patti, reflecting on why she — an American — should be granted this platform in the public space, when it could have been given to a Mexican poet. "Because even though I'm ashamed, I am not [Donald Trump]. He does not represent me; he is not my president. And all I can say is that I'm sorry on behalf of my country, and that we'll continue to fight."
The billboard, which will be on display through November 30, is a call for unity ("I believe everything we dream can come to pass through our union," itreads in Spanish), the kind of unity we need if we want to achieve change. "For me, the real revolution will be a global one," affirms Patti. "And I believe it is going to be the young who are going to save our world. I pin my faith on them. We must guide them, join them, and unite as people: city to city, country to country, around the world."
Benoît Loiseau is a writer based in London and Mexico City. His collection of short stories We Can't Make You Younger is available via Antenne Books. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @benoitploiseau. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | Sex and the Single Mom | | | | By Alyssa Shelasky | | | | | | |
Food writer and single mom Alyssa Shelasky is raising a two-year-old – and dating at the same time. Just like Bridgette Bird, the star of SMILF, the new comedy series from Showtime, Alyssa is enjoying the high-highs and low-lows of being a new mom, solo. Based on a Sundance-award-winning short film, SMILF takes a hilarious and unabashedly honest look at Bridgette Bird, a twentysomething single mom from South Boston, as she navigates dating, sex, and a career while raising a tiny human. SMILF is loosely based on the life of series creator Frankie Shaw.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes [insert artsy fourth grader/earthy camp crush] in the baby carriage …
Even when I was seven, I knew that shit was stupid.
Which is fortunate, because my story played out differently from any fairy-tale rhyme. Mine goes something like this: failed engagement, forbidden love, wrote a book, Italy, heartbreak, fibroids, sperm donor, miracles, salt bagels, magnificent baby, sold a TV show, Tinder, hot guy who could fix things, love, closeness, co-parenting, Eames chairs, cohabitation, frozen pizza, intimacy, tutus, everything.
I know. It's a lot. And that's exactly what I wanted out of life — a lot. I had a reckless heart, a wild soul, and an infinite passion for art and humanity and any boy with long hair, divorced parents, and inner depth. On my seventeenth birthday, I lost my virginity on a kibbutz with a complicated kid I had been madly in love with for years. It went on all night long, and I enjoyed every second of the experience. I've always attributed my healthy relationship with sex to that cosmic night.
And so it went. Off-the-charts chemistry with on-the-fringe men basically defined all my long-term relationships. I was comfortable with this construction. I savored the challenge of seducing, then taming, these artists and outlaws. And I loved the way they kissed.
Until I didn't.
Three years ago, I was in New York, recovering from what I swore would be my last bad breakup. This one was with a gritty Roman who had swept me away to Italy with the promise of, among other things, little Brooklyn-Roman bambinos. A year later, he decided his true calling was to ride motorcycles and live in India and not be with me. He wanted yurts and skirts and I wanted labor pains and lullabies, and suddenly our burning love was burned to the ground.
That's how it always ended.
Because despite my taste in such difficult men, I always wanted to be a mother. This has been my most defining truth in life. After the Roman, I was overwhelmingly ready. It felt dead wrong to wait for a man's permission to get pregnant. I was done with it all.
So I decided to pursue motherhood with every bone in my body and every buck in my bank account. I met with the most beautiful and affirming Single Moms by Choice; I read every book and blog on the donor decision.It felt thrilling and joyful and profoundly right.
The day I officially decided to move forward with the process — locked in the IUI appointment, narrowed down the donor — the Sexiest Man Alive (literally, People Magazine once named him this) flirted with me at a party. This was after I told him I'd been browsing sperm all day and that my "shop was closed" for a while. He asked for my number. I asked if he knew Colin Farrell.
Forgive the star-fuckery. I'm just trying to illustrate how the universe took care of me once I took control of my own destiny.
Famous Guy was the first of many lovely men to ask me out despite the fact that I was about to be, and then became, fully pregnant. Dating was hardly at the top of my priority list, but the dalliances were easy, fun, and feather-light, which was so refreshing after years of intense relationships.
While pregnant, I went out with a sweet single dad who delighted in talking freely about raising children and got me even more psyched about the creature kicking inside. I dated a super-open, super-primal musician who wanted to know every detail of my sweaty and robust parts. I dated a brainy trust-funder who took me on epic knish taste-tests and chocolate-cake crawls and whom I now realize was an obsessive-compulsive overeater.
I didn't sleep with any of these guys because I just wasn't horny in the traditional sense. However, I did have outrageous sex dreams that made me orgasm in my sleep — the most vivid one entailed some uncontrollable lovemaking to Michael Keaton, whom I'd never thought twice about in any conscious state.
Back in real life, though the furthest I got was a messy make-out with a fascinating Jesus freak, I definitely felt desired and admired by all these gentlemen callers. And hey, great.
On October 3, 2015, I had my daughter, Hazel Delilah Shelasky. My dad was the first to hold her. I was exhausted but never scared. She is poetry and religion and the moon and the stars, and my life is beautiful forever because I have her.
(Now is a good time to mention that I am a privileged single mom. My parents and sister helped me every single day. They were my babysitters, my emotional support system, and the source of Hazel's swagger. I had consistent work that always paid the bills and successful friends who gave us cashmere onesies and weekend escapes. Also, don't forget, I wanted to be a single mom. It was a lifestyle I was prepared and excited for.)
With all that said, plus the scientific fact that babies bring love and luck, it wasn't too surprising that dating with an infant was actually kind of a blast. A glass of Pinot Noir, a splash of sexual tension — it was just enough to balance the diapers and sleep-deprivation. What's more, I didn't necessarily want or need a man — which, of course, meant they were everywhere.
The first guy I went out with, now that I was somebody's mother, knew we were on a tight schedule. In other words, that we had two and a half hours before my mammaries would explode with milk. We laughed about that. Then he gave me a small present for Hazel, which I found so touching that it made me cry. He wasn't my soul mate, but I felt more vulnerable on that date than I ever had. And I liked it.
After that, I dated a few more funny, sweet, and handsome men in various pursuits of family. Obviously, not everyone was amazing, but my situation weeded out the bigger jerks and helped me refine my romantic qualifications too.
In the past, dating was a purely visceral experience. Either I desired them, or I didn't. Within seconds, my body always knew, and from that point on, I would be insatiable. Now that I had a baby, there was a slight change in the system. Though it still reigned queen, lust was not enough. I also required stability, maturity, and dependability. There was zero time or energy for anything less.
I met S when my daughter was seven months old. I brought her on our third date, and the three of us have stuck together ever since. He's a filmmaker and an adult and the real Sexiest Man Alive as far as I'm concerned. This spring, it will be two years. We live together. I never want to get engaged or married, but I love sharing a life so much that it's embarrassing.
I often ask S two ridiculous questions. The first is: Who do you love more, me or Hazel? He won't answer. But I'm pretty sure it's her — and I kinda live for that. The other is: Why did you like me on our first date? He says it's because he walked into the restaurant and saw rays of sunshine glimmering around my being.
And he's right. I felt radiant that day. But it had nothing to do with me. It was all because of her.
Alyssa Shelasky is a writer for New York, InStyle, Bon Appétit, Travel & Leisure, and more. She is the author of Apron Anxiety, My Messy Affairs In and Out of the Kitchen. She is currently developing a scripted television show about her life with Hazel. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | A Woman Standing Up | | | | By Lidia Yuknavitch | | |
I've been thinking about heroines lately. Having lost my faith in old stories about heroes in our present tense, I've been casting around in my imagination for symbols, images, anything that might reignite a flicker of home in my hurting heart. Did you see that? I meant to say hope, but I typed home. I think we may be experiencing a crisis between those two words right now in America.
That old story, the Hero's Journey, it's a terrific archetype — that mono-myth in which a lone hero embarks on a journey, encounters crisis and difficulty, and returns home transformed, changed, glowing. But when you can be attacked and raped because you deigned to walk outside of your door for a run; when you can be shot for reaching to retrieve your book or your license from a wallet or for a pack of Skittles; when your sanity or economic status is viewed through the lens of mental instability, whether you are mentally unstable or not — these lives and bodies will not jam comfortably into the Hero's Journey.
And yet, what I'm saying is, there's a myth slightly to the side or underneath the Hero's Journey worth unearthing just now. It's the misfit's myth. It goes like this: Even at the moment of your epic failures, you are beautiful. Because you have risen from mud or trauma or despair or jail or grief or abuse or alcohol or drugs, you have the ability to endlessly make yourself from your own ruins. That's your beauty.
I know. It's a weird image.
So while I was desperately casting about for an image of hope or home or heroism in my imagination, I remembered my favorite statue of a woman, the Statue of Liberty, lodged in my childhood imagination from my first trip to New York City. As a kid, I was arrested. Stunned and frozen in front of her. Which, as I remember it now, immediately gives me pause.
I have held that moment in my mind's eye since I was five, the first time I saw it. What I saw most when I visited the statue was what I could see at kid level, the poem at the base, underneath her feet. My sister, who is eight years older than me, read it aloud. I didn't understand it at the time, but I loved my sister's voice, her body, everything about her standing there. In case you don't remember it, here is "New Colossus":
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus wrote this poem for a fund-raiser auction to raise money for the pedestal upon which Lady Liberty sits. Read the poem again.
It's actually a clear critique of the tradition of the male hero's journey, with his "conquering limbs astride from land to land," and, in its place, at the bottom of things, sits a different story, one in which Liberty turns into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world. You can keep your storied pomp. She wants the outcasts, the downtrodden, the immigrants — us misfits.
My life is filled with flaws and mistakes. Some of the obstacles I encountered were of my own making, some came from the outside and were out of my control. I started out in hell, like so many other people on the planet: I was born into an abusive household. I had to find and invent escape hatches just to keep from killing myself. I numbed my body in waves of drugs and sex just to ease the pain of failing at ordinary social paths: college, marriage, motherhood, employment. Flunked out, twice divorced, dead child, fired twice. Up against the magnitude of history, I felt like a fallen woman.
I can admire the Hero's Journey, but it has never taken shape in my life. Instead, I'm left asking: Where are the stories, symbols, and images that might welcome us home in our imperfections?
Statues have been in the news, of course, particularly Southern statues dedicated to memorializing the Civil War. Although, for the most part, the statues in question mark a blight in American history — that piece of us that tried to bury our racism by memorializing "men of war" on the same soil where African Americans were beaten, tortured, and killed. The battle to have these kinds of statues taken down sometimes turns violent, as it did in Charlottesville.
Even inside that chaos, part of me is hopeful; it's like a crack in the system has finally emerged, one large enough to actually, maybe engender change and a shift in national values. Because even though the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are emboldened by our current president's idiotic refusal to condemn bigotry, hate, violence, and anti-Semitism, I can see the light in the eyes of people who will not take it. People who will use their bodies to stand up in the face of hate.
It's like the light of liberty, you might say.
I think about her a lot, Lady Liberty. I've had an alarming number of dreams about her. I'm writing a novel about her. When I think about how many statues of male war heroes and racists and bigots and sexists are stitched across the United States, I am reminded of how different the Statue of Liberty is: a large, lone woman with a torch, a tiny poem against the tyranny of male power at her feet.
You heard me.
There's a bit from the poem by Emma that rings in a lot of American psyches. "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Yeah, that bit. I'm no history or genetics expert, but unless you are a Native American, every single one of us can only track back to immigrant origins.
Mother of Exiles.
That doesn't really say "only some exiles — others of you need to watch your asses" to me.
Worldwide welcome.
That's the bit about which current White House senior adviser Stephen Miller had a brief dust-up with CNN reporter Jim Acosta. When asked if the Trump administration's immigration-policy reform bill is consistent with the Statue of Liberty's historic symbolism, Miller's response was that the original statue symbolized liberty lighting the world. No, wait. American liberty lighting the world. Because we don't want to suggest that liberty has light that is not American. He said the poem is a kind of add-on, not really part of the statue, a not very important missive. Kind of like a tweet.
Maybe there's a reason the poem is lodged under her feet.
America is built from the raw material of people made invisible or buried by history. Emma Lazarus, for example, studied British and American literature, as well as German, French, and Italian. She wrote poetry, a novel, and two plays. One of the plays, The Dance to Death, was based on a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death. To recap, there is a poem written by a Jewish woman activist at the base of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of light and freedom, image of worldwide welcome to immigrants.
I don't think that was Miller's objection to the poem, nor our current administration's, nor, you know, the neo-Nazi pack's. I think their objections are something about nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants, which they've somehow magically untethered themselves from. Apparently, they were all delivered to the New World from weirdly white, male spaceships.
I'm thinking a lot about American statues, about commemorations of whom, of what, and why. I'm thinking of all those voices and bodies — women, immigrants, people of color — buried beneath them.
What if we — a "we" made from all of our differences — are just now emerging as a possible American story? What if we unburied the dead. The bodies of Native Americans and African Americans. The bodies of Jews and Muslims and immigrants from everywhere. The bodies of women and children. The bodies of the poor and the mentally ill and the homeless and the worker bodies who died mid-labor with no statue or poem to name them, the weight of an entire country on their backs.
All the bodies used as the raw material in the building of an America where individual, merciless male power is celebrated.
I wish I could whisper in her ear, her giant, weird, misfit, green ear: Re-mother the exiles. Bring us back to life.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of The Misfit's Manifesto, The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and The Chronology of Water; she founded and runs Corporeal Writing workshops in Portland, Oregon. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | The Gender Pay Gap Happened to Me. Now What? | | | | By Elva Ramirez | | | |
Last August, I celebrated working ten years at The Wall Street Journal. I also quit, because I was making about $13,000 less than some of my male colleagues.
I was one of three live show producers on the WSJ video team. We did everything. We booked guests and wrote scripts. We worked with editors and the control room. We picked up guests and escorted them to makeup. We commissioned graphics and sourced photos. We wrote banners, bios, and on-screen titles. We wrote the headlines and copy for the video clips. We didn't have daily deadlines — in live TV, your deadlines come in minutes.
We all worked really hard, every single day, to deliver world-class WSJ video. While we all had different career backgrounds, no one outranked anyone else.
We were all equal when it came to having the same workflows, the same deadlines, and the same expectations from the bosses.
We were also all paid wildly different salaries.
My appeals to human resources yielded nothing. The union reps said they would look into it, and they noted that other WSJ women were asking about pay gaps. Soon after I met with them, the union published a survey showing that, from 2000 to 2016, WSJ's female employees were paid 24 percent less on average than their malecounterparts. On the lowest rung: black and Latina women. Shortly after the union released its findings, in March 2016, executives at WSJ said that they were going to look into reducing the gender pay gap.
The pay gap I experienced jibes with what's going on outside the Journal building: A 2017 Joint Economic Committee report found that a woman makes an average of $10,500 less per year than her male counterparts; this disparity adds up to nearly a half-million dollars over the course of a career. A 2016 report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that women's median hourly wages relative to men's have stalled since 1979. Even when accounting for education, women earn less than men at every wage level, and that gap is larger for women of color.
The gender pay gap doesn't just impact your bank account, however. In my case, knowing I was worth less than someone else had a direct impact on my self-esteem and my work. I felt trapped. Each time I delivered excellent work, the satisfaction of a job well done was undermined by the knowledge that my extra efforts came with a priced-in discount. Conversely, when I made mistakes, I'd catch myself being resentful, because why try if the playing field wasn't even?
One day in August, I had a particularly bad day, and I thought: Why am I trying so hard? I still hadn't been contacted about any pay raises, and the WSJ's investigation into pay gaps was over. They'd found no significant issues, company executives said.
I'll never forget that month, when I left work each day, just broken. This time, I wondered if I might be depressed because I'd feel angry and sad for an entire work shift. When I stepped back, I saw that while I was miserable for hours on end, that feeling would instantly lift as soon as I left work. I guess I just got tired of being unhappy. It was not unlike finally admitting that a relationship you've invested everything into just isn't working, despite your hardest efforts.
So.
Fuck it.
I quit as the biggest political election in history was ramping up and news was going into overdrive. (Within two weeks of my leaving, the other female producer also quit.)
I left with no new job in place, not much in terms of savings, and no actual plan. I just couldn't come into work every day, knowing that no matter how hard I worked, I was literally valued less than others who did the same things.
When I left, I wrote a public post on Facebook about my reasons for leaving. The post went semi-viral among the New York media circles.
Still, I was surprised when several women messaged me with similar stories.
One ex-WSJer, who quit in the months before me, said a guy in her former department held her same title but had made $30,000 more. Two young staffers confided that their efforts to talk to their bosses about pay disparity were deflected or trivialized.
Pay disparity is not limited to The Wall Street Journal, of course. An ex-editor told me she quit her lifestyle-magazine gig when she accidentally found out that one of her junior male staffers made more than her, his boss.
It's been a year since I quit.
In that time, WSJ has conducted an investigation into the pay gap and found that only a few employees (less than 3 percent) were underpaid. This July, the union updated their 2016 data with a new set of pay figures, showing that WSJ female employees continue to lag behind their male counterparts in terms of pay. In response to the union, Dow Jones CEO William Lewis sent a company-wide memo detailing efforts to improve diversity across the company. The initiative includes company-wide directives to increase the number of women in executive-level roles by 40 percent. "To be clear, diversity and inclusion will be fundamental to our future success," Lewis writes.
A Dow Jones spokesperson also notes that the company completed a second annual salary review this summer and adjusted the salaries for 2 percent of the men and women across departments.
In my first year post-WSJ, I have freelanced for a range of lifestyle publications. I've written copy for big brands and small businesses alike. I've hustled for jobs, from marketing text to social-media posts to executive résumés. Also, let's be upfront about the big irony here: By leaving a job in protest over a pay gap, my income took a steep dive. I'm not earning anywhere near what I used to. Not even close.
I'm still learning what it's like to be an entrepreneur. The biggest lessons have to do, ironically enough, with figuring out how to price my work — sometimes I aim too high, sometimes I bid too low. It's a work in progress.
Look, I still don't have health insurance. Every single day, I fret about paying bills. But my current anxiety is never worse than the deep unhappiness I felt each time I walked into 1211 Avenue of the Americas and took the elevator up to the sixth floor.
Since September 2016, I've traveled every single month, and this wanderlust inspired me to launch Ambianceuse, a new travel and lifestyle website and Instagram account. This is a new platform for the kinds of photos and stories I want to share. Ambianceuse will feature intimate photo essays and interviews showcasing artists, experiences, and moments from all over the world.
I'm grateful for the time I spent at the Journal, because I wouldn't be where I am now without it. It delivers, on a daily basis, the very best in journalism. For many years, I worked alongside world-class journalists, men and women, editors and reporters, who were often charming as well as brilliant. No one works harder than Journal reporters on deadline. The Journal taught me so much, and that training will forever serve me. For that, thank you, WSJ.
Less than two weeks into my new, post-WSJ life, I was somewhere in the woods near Aspen, staring into a river. The enormity of what I'd just done hit me like a punch. I cried intensely for a very long time.
That was the only time I ever mourned my past life.
I can honestly say that I've never felt that sad since. Also gone: the long-simmering resentment that colored so much of my final months at work.
This new life is scrappy and unpredictable. I'll confess to enduring sleepless nights over paying bills, but I solve that by getting up early and pitching for new work. There's also a different kind of payoff. After spending the entirety of my career sitting at a desk in a midtown high-rise, my new office is wherever I want it to be.
I've seen Edinburgh in the fall and Dubrovnik in the summer. I've made friends in Dublin, downed whisky cocktails in Hong Kong, and sipped 100-year-old Cognac straight out of the cask in France. I enjoyed a cocktail experience in Tokyo that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. I don't know what the future holds for me. I just know that whatever happens, from now on, I'm setting the terms.
Elva Ramirez is a freelance lifestyle and spirits journalist based in Brooklyn. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | That Time Charlotte Brontë's Ghost Haunted Harriet Beecher Stowe | | | | By Alexis Coe | | |
In this column, Alexis Coe, Lenny's historian at large, will conduct Q&As with specialists in archives across the country, focusing on one primary source. For this post, Alexis spoke with Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, authors of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, about the time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to George Eliot about a visit with Charlotte Brontë's ghost. Seriously. (Read Alexis's previous columns here.)
Alexis Coe: The bonds of literary men are mythologized to eye-roll-inducing degrees, so I was so excited to learn about lesser-known friendships between women authors in your book! I hate to delay ghost talk, but I need to know a little bit more about the unlikely transatlantic connection between Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author of the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and English novelist George Eliot (the pen name used by Mary Anne Evans), author of Middlemarch, published in 1872?
Emily Midorikawa: By the time 57-year-old Harriet Beecher Stowe and 49-year-old George Eliot began to write to each other, in early 1869, they were arguably the most famous living female writers on either side of the Atlantic. Uncle Tom's Cabin had been the whirlwind best seller of the age, and Eliot had been earning extraordinary fees for her work.
Emma Claire Sweeney: Eliot — now sometimes thought of as so lofty that she couldn't have needed the support of a female friend — actually initiated the friendship. She had long been an admirer of Stowe's writing, and the esteem turned out to be mutual, but both women also felt able to voice outspoken criticism. And, having each borne the brunt of public scandal, they were uniquely well placed to offer each other sympathy. Eliot, who had caused outrage when she made the controversial decision to "live in sin" with a married man, offered comfort to Stowe during a time when the American author had come under attack for having written an article in which she accused the late Lord Byron of incest. Eliot's letter had to function like "a kiss and a pressure of the hand" — as Eliot put it to Stowe — since the ill health of their partners ruled out transatlantic travel.
AC: The letter Stowe sent Eliot on May 11, 1872, starts out innocently enough, with talk of work, health, and home, and then Stowe divulges her spectral flirtations. It all began with a "toy planchette," the Ouija board of the Victorian era, but things had gotten pretty serious since: she'd gotten visits from Charlotte Brontë! Why Charlotte, who had been dead for more than fifteen years, of all the Brontës?
ECS: It's perhaps hard nowadays to understand the commotion caused by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre when it was first published in 1847. As a devout Christian, married to a biblical scholar, Stowe may well have been interested in the British parson's daughter's controversial depiction of religious life. And, of course, Stowe was no stranger to literary scandal, Uncle Tom's Cabin having even been cited by some as a cause of the American Civil War.
AC: When writers get together, they often talk about writing, and Beecher's conversation with Brontë was no exception. Charlotte's ghost was still smarting over critics who'd called her work "coarse"; Beecher had described it as "peculiar." I'm wondering if this was something Brontë expressed when she was alive, and about Beecher's relationship to critics, too.
EM: Brontë was undoubtedly affected by those who disparaged her. She added a defiant preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre in 1848, in which she took to task those critics whom she regarded as "timorous or carping." An appraisal of her second novel, Shirley, wounded her deeply. The reviewer was George Henry Lewes — George Eliot's future partner. Following his enthusiasm for Brontë's previous novel, and the letters the two had exchanged, she regarded this as a betrayal, and one that made her feel "cold and sick."
ECS: Stowe wasn't afraid to court controversy. Detractors had accused her of fabricating the worst excesses of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and so she had responded with a nonfiction book, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, supporting her claims. She did something similar after receiving vitriolic reviews on an article in which she had accused Lord Byron of incest. Eliot let Stowe know that she sympathized with her predicament but not her strategy.
AC: The whole time I was reading the letter, I kept wondering, Does Stowe believe in all this??? And then, toward the end, she answered me: "That spirits unseen have communicated with me I cannot doubt." She was really open to their existence, which was fashionable, right?
EM: She did indeed believe, although Stowe was keen to "make a really philosophic experiment" before coming to her conclusions. Considering Eliot never gave much sign of her being convinced by Stowe's claims, it's perhaps surprising how many of Stowe's missives talk of otherworldly experiences such as these. You're right that there was something of a vogue for these beliefs in Victorian times, though Eliot had wondered if the popularity of these ideas in her friend's home country — so recently ravaged by the Civil War — could be regarded as a kind of collective outpouring of grief "towards the invisible existence of the loved ones."
AC: Stowe basically accuses ghosts of identity theft, and not only that, but she questions the veracity of the claims ghosts make. Let's imagine that's true. Why would this fake ghost visit Stowe?
ECS: It's interesting that you bring this up, because this short paragraph appears to contradict much of the rest of the letter, during which it seems that Stowe really does believe she has been visited by Brontë's ghost and seems intent on convincing Eliot of this too. The moment when Stowe suddenly begins to wonder about these things comes toward the end of the missive, just before she addresses Eliot directly.
Was there perhaps a momentary loss of confidence here as she wondered how the famously rational Eliot might react? If this were the case, any such wavering seems to have passed fairly quickly because, only a few lines later, Stowe appears to be professing wholehearted belief again when she says "I must hope much in this hereafter Charlotte speaks of."
AC: Your book mines primary sources and relationships that have been understudied, meaning you had a good deal of lesser-known sources to choose from. Why this friendship, and this letter? What do you hope readers take away?
ECS: We did initially consider choosing papers that we discovered inside the tiny pockets of Jane Austen's niece's unpublished diaries, where they had been hidden for more than 200 years. These documents shed light on Austen's unlikely literary friend the Austen-family governess and amateur playwright Anne Sharp. Or we could have shared an unpublished letter from Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield that has been quoted out of context to convey a misleading impression of their relationship.
EM: But ultimately, we agreed on this letter between Stowe and Eliot because it deals with such a fascinating and recurring element of their correspondence. Amazingly, despite the fame of both women, a significant portion of Stowe's letters to Eliot never made it into print. As for this particular letter, when Stowe's son included it in his biography of his mother, he made the apparently tactful decision to do away with the long section in which Stowe discussed her experiences with the spirit world and her strange encounter with Brontë's ghost.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alexis Coe is the author of Alice+Freda Forever and is at work on You Never Forget Your First, a biography of George Washington. Follow her. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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