Barbie, Witches, and Braiding Sweetgrass
A year for outrage, a year for love on Matriarchy Report
We are deeply nesting in our home, getting ready for a New Year’s celebration that involves loads of carbs, lots of sweets, and a smattering of green vegetables to make us feel righteous. We’ve been craving this time with family, and drawing close with circles of friends.
It’s a good instinct – to pull others in when times are hard.
I was just gifted The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. It covers 85 years worth of research and interviews with three generations of families – trying to identify the keys to happiness.
The takeaway: Close relationships are the essential ingredient for a lifetime of happiness.
The cheesiest thing happens to be the truest thing: It’s the people we are close to and the support we feel that makes the difference in whether we experience our lives as basically happy ones; whether we feel content, satisfied and able to address whatever comes our way.
Matriarchy Report is built on relationships: Lane’s and mine, and our relationship with you. Our friends, families and colleagues are woven through our writing and through the comments. We’re grateful to you, and for the web of feminist writers we are doing this work alongside of.
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The end-of-year, best of the best
2023 was a banner year for feminist outrage.
We wrote about the end of Roe, rising book bans, and horrific school shootings. We reflected on the joy, and the grief, of being a mother in America, and of being a Black mother, in particular.
We wrote about the tragedy of our child welfare system.
Way back in January, Lane wrote one of our most popular pieces, an essay inspired by her takeaways from seeing Tina, the musical about Tina Turner, and Madama Butterfly, the Puccini opera: We’ve long been accustomed to stories of women’s suffering, she wrote.
It’s part of a collective cultural agreement, confirmed with a shrug and a sigh.
“They’re women. Of course they suffer.”
But it shouldn’t have to be that way:
When I watched these two shows last weekend, I couldn’t help but think: You know what both these women need for these tragedies to be avoided? They need their own damn money.
The pathos in these stories wouldn’t exist if these women had the resources to just go their own way. An entire genre of tragedy could perhaps be eliminated with this one deus ex machina.
And this got me thinking again about the real life examples of societies and communities that actually have tried this tactic to head off suffering: giving women money when they have children to make sure those children have enough.
Read the full essay: Women Need Their Own Damn Money
Another of our top items, a guest essay from the writer Kat Savino, that asks: Why have children at all?
Women and girls around the U.S. are now forced to have children they don’t want or can’t take care of. Many others are deciding to skip parenthood altogether: the cost of having children is just too high.
What kind of choice is it then, if all of the systems are stacked against you?
Kat writes:
I’m asked by multiple doctors while planning a fibroid embolization, which may cause early menopause, if I’ve “completed my family.”
The question irritates me, as it makes me imagine the family I think they have imagined for me, which is one with children. But what if my family is just us, just our pets?
The question makes me feel like it doesn’t count. “What is a family anyway?” I want to hurl back.
Read the full piece: 18 Reasons Why I Don't Have Children
But 2023 wasn’t all despair.
We got so many texts, emails and comments from Lane’s essay about embracing summertime joie de vivre, re-writing her to-do list to focus on the experiences she could have with “the one precious summer that I would have a three-year old.”
It included things like:
Go swimming
Picnics at the botanical garden
Ride carousels
Visit cousins
Take car trips to the beach while listening to Harry Styles
Guess what? It was great. And I was supremely “productive.”
The goals I made in service of my relationships and embracing enjoyment of life got ticked off easily. And I felt this strange sensation creep back into my life that I later recognized as HAVING FUN.
Read the full essay: How do you set up a summer of joie de vivre?
Another hit: our reflection on Braiding Sweetgrass, a beautiful book by the scientist and indigenous researcher, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her book is all about connections: between people and the Earth, people and each other.
Here is guidance of the Honorable Harvest:
Never take the first one
Ask permission
Listen for the answer
Share what you’ve taken
Take only what you need
Use everything you take
Minimize harm
Be grateful
Read the full essay: Raise a Garden. Raise Good Kids. Raise a Ruckus
But I will remember 2023 as the year that was awash in hot pink, when Dua Lipa and Lizzo dominated our road trips, because Barbie charged back into our world.
Lane wrote:
It was bizarrely refreshing and powerful to hear the word “patriarchy” dropped so candidly and so often in a blockbuster film.
Like somehow this was something that we needed, and now that it’s out there it just feels so—freeing? Why were we being so subtle before with feminist themes when we could have just gotten “patriarchy” off our chests so much sooner?
Read the full essay: Come on Barbie, dismantle patriarchy
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
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