What a year it was for women, amirite?
The most-read MR posts of last year, and what comes next
I’m sending you this post while I’m on vacation, and it’s a vacation that I really need. I mean, 2024 was a year, right? And now we are diving headlong into the new year and…whatever this new reality will be. Whatever lies ahead, I have never been more grateful for women, and women’s voices, and having you all here. I don’t take it for granted.
2024 was a huge year for MR and for me, too. After years of posting and plugging along, this last year our readership grew by the thousands, and became a Substack bestseller. I have to say, this is incredibly meaningful to me because part of what moved the needle was being bold and writing some of the things that are closest to me and my own experience. We started this Substack to write about the things that our editors at legacy and mainstream media were not always interested in publishing—mostly issues that impacted women and girls. And we wanted to write about them in the way that was meaningful to us and other women, not through a traditional media, male-dominated lens. It means so much to me that there are now thousands of us here having this conversation together.
Thank you so much for being here.
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What we read: The MR most-read posts of the year
Here’s what we read and talked about the most here on MR last year: These were the most opened, commented on, and shared pieces.
“Ballerina Farm and the weird Christian Nationalist Dream” This piece got, like, six times more traffic than anything I had posted up to that point. It was really meaningful for me because writing this epic took a lot out of me (it’s not short!). For about a week, I lost sleep working on it and thinking about it 24-7. I wrote about material from my upbringing that I have been thinking about for a really long time and finally put on the page. Thank you to all of you who read it, or shared it!
I still get comments and DMs on this one, and full disclosure, not everyone was pleased! But I got many more comments from readers saying that it resonated with them. I said what I said, and I’m glad I put it all into words.
“In these times of J.D. “women belong at home having babies” Vance, what does it mean that America can’t get enough of a rich, beautiful young woman who sacrificed her ballet career to live on a farm where she’s perpetually in the kitchen and pregnant?
Maybe it’s because I was also raised Mormon, but it seems to me that a brand featuring a woman churning butter and breastfeeding and homeschooling her children for 10 million viewers is not NOT connected to female subordination and patriarchy.”
“An epidemic of never being alone” This one resonated with a lot of you—either because you also felt desperate for alone time, or were in a phase of life where you were living alone and LOVING it. Or both. Read it just for the comments from fellow readers testifying to the sheer joy of living by themselves. You love to see it! I think this year I’ll do a follow-up on the untold glory of women living alone. If this is you, I would love to hear about it!
“After I had a baby, I went almost three years without being alone in my house.
That first year after I gave birth I was either at home with the baby caring for her, or at work. “Alone time” consisted of sweaty subway rides and FB scrolling while pumping at the office. And then— just when the baby was old enough to go to daycare, the pandemic descended and we were all in lockdown, sheltering in place together in the house, all of us—all the time.
Being home alone may seem inconsequential, but it’s not. Being alone at home is the only way to have privacy—the state of being unobserved and undisturbed. Being deprived of privacy is so corrosive to mental well-being that prisons that deprived people of privacy have been outlawed as inhumane.1 According to science, there are debilitating effects to being deprived of alone time and privacy in everyday life as well.”
”Patriarchy is bad for men and boys, too” This one didn’t get as many page views, but it got lots of likes and comments (read it if you missed it!). Many of you chimed in to say that it aligned with your experience, and that we don’t talk enough about how a lack of connection and caregiving really sucks for men and boys, actually. For more on this see
‘s work and her great book, “Boymom.” It could be on our reading list this year!“Men hold so, so much power in our patriarchal culture. And yet they are not thriving within patriarchy. Why should this be? When I think about the toll that patriarchy takes on men, I often think of sociologist Michael Kimmel’s work on the corrosive effects of American masculinity. One easy answer could be, “wealth and power are not everything!” but they are not nothing, either and Kimmel argues that it’s a lot deeper than that.
Kimmel writes that the modern American construction of masculinity is one that is impossible for the vast majority of men to live up to,1 much like beauty standards are constructed for women so that everyone is set up to fail and feel inadequate. “We have constructed the rules of manhood so that only the tiniest fraction of men can meet them,” he writes, and the result is that men feel constantly insecure. “It’s a tragic tale of striving to live up to impossible ideals of success, leading to chronic terrors of emasculation and emotional emptiness.”
”Sending a woman to keep women in their place” and “Ballerina Farm and the agony of nice women: MAGA, but make it pretty” are two popular posts that I’m pairing together—the first one came out before a lot of you joined us, and the second came out recently. Both generated a lot of discussion on the role that women can play in upholding patriarchy.
“It’s worth remembering, as we go into the next four years, that women have always been key to softening the image of the alt-right. Especially women who are pretty, pleasing, well-dressed, conventionally feminine, and most often white and wealthy.”
“They force-fed us stories about men. Now we listen to Taylor Swift” and “My Mormon explainer on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” tied with “The ‘Get Married’ guys want you to believe that patriarchy will save you” for the highest open rates. Shout out to some good trashy T.V. and Taylor Swift discourse in 2024.
Who we met: most-read MR interviews
Allison gave us interviews with some of the most fierce and interesting people thinking about gender equality, social justice, and generally how to make the world more joyful and calm and less sucky, including:
, aka DesignMom, in “You don’t need to make nice with Trump voters” in “Women prove they can hold it all together. We thank them by giving them more to hold.” in “Sexism and Sensibility”: It’s Time to Move Beyond ‘Girl Power’” in “How to transform how America cares”
What we discussed: The MR Book Club “All Fours” Group Chat
This year we gathered for our first MR Book Club, reading
‘s “All Fours.” Our first book discussion was absolutely wonderful and surpassed my wildest expectations. You all are fantastic readers and conversationalists. Your smart, thoughtful, relatable and inspiring comments made this my favorite book club convo I’ve had (and I’m v picky about what makes a good book club discush, tbh!) If you haven’t already, you can check out our first discussion here. And subsequent discussions here and here.
Personally I think we should do book club again in 2025; we could all use the joy and something to focus on! A subscriber poll will go out as soon as I’m back from vacation next week.
What comes next
In the year ahead, I would love to continue to nurture and connect with this community in these same ways, but also I’m open to experiments. What would you like to see on MR? Discussion groups live on zoom where we can see each other face-to-face, with little time delays? Recorded videos or audio with our interviews? More chats? Essays or researched pieces on anything in particular?Links roundups of anything in particular? (Less of anything in particular?) I’m open to any and all feedback.
Who else should be part of this group?
If MR has resonated with you this last year, please send it to a friend or two. We would love to have them!
MR is taking a break and will return Jan.12th.
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Matriarchy Report is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at one of those universities for coastal elites. She has won fellowships and many SPJ 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 associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor at New York Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
So amazing to see all this great writing from the year — and so glad to be a part of it! Grateful to you Lane and to all our MR readers!
What a wonderful round up and thank you so much for the shoutout for Boymom!