A Year of My Own Women’s Work
And what we shall weave here in 2025…(plus, an inquiry!)
Happy latest year in the Gregorian Calendar to all of my readers and friends!
My project which I call “Women’s Work” is teetering on the edge of 2,000 subscribers and I am so thrilled. As my emails get sent to more and more people, I want to continue to be sincere and true to my vision but also more organized and consistent in the year going forward. Here are a few things I envision for this publication for 2025:
•As I am currently gestating a new baby, my brain is heavily attuned to this particular, distinct life experience. In the months leading up to birth, I will be doing a series on historical customs, rituals and traditions around childbirth, with a focus on America and Europe (my own heritage). With this being my 4th child, and having birthed both in the hospital and at home alone and having been a labor and delivery nurse as well, I do not feel compelled to explore childbirth and pregnancy from a “how to” perspective. I don’t have any desire to re-read Ina May or pick up a “What to Expect” book. You will not find me giving tips for how to pack a hospital bag or how to choose a doula. I am feeling deeply the pull to feel into history and into the stories and practices of women before me as a source of strength and knowledge at this time, and I feel compelled to share what I find as it comes up.
•Along with this, I do plan on collecting some historical wisdom in addition to a few modern practices and products that I find helpful and comforting during pregnancy and turning it into a little guide of sorts, which will be my first available resource for paid subscribers.
•As I plan to take a break from my work as a nurse after this baby and want to lean more into working as a writer, you hopefully will see me linking to pieces I am writing for pay at other publications, and I will be either occasionally paywalling some pieces and/or paywalling some of my archives. I will always put things out initially as free though, as ultimately all I truly want is for people to read what I write!
•I’m keeping with my original intentions for this publication, I am going to be pivoting back to an exploration of women’s work. I am going to be doing a series of written interviews with women whose work I find interesting. I am particularly interested in women whose work is in the home or which aligns well with mothering. If you are interested in being interviewed, you can reply to this query:
WOMEN’S WORK INTERVIEW INQUIRY
•I plan to also start sharing more of my own work rather than just cultural commentary, which has been a lot of my previous focus. Cultural commentary will always be a part of Women’s Work but I would like to start sharing what I am reading and what projects I am working on. I find it enjoyable to read things like this when others do the same, and I also would like to provide a little window into what life looks like as I bring another baby into the world, as we get milk sheep this spring, as I knit my way through the year and as I turn back to reading books rather than scrolling—which really are the things I am most interested in pursuing in the new year. If you read to the end of this, I will be sharing the craft projects I have queued up for the year….
I started the first draft of this out with an essay from each month and realized I wanted to pair it down a bit to what I feel best represents what I aim to do here and what I am most proud of, not just whatever got the most comments. I also realized that what I choose to put out is either completely impassioned and righteous or completely introspective and tender. I suppose that is a good combination for what I call “Women’s Work”, as what I conceive to be feminine is equally feral and sweet, it is the matter of knowing where and how to direct those energies that I am interested in exploring here.
So here are my suggestions for reading for the past year with select passages, if you missed any and are so inclined:
1.
The Sororal Order of Feral Domesticity and Habitual Femininity 002
I keep thinking about the things we ignore. The little blue wooden bowl that has been sitting under my kitchen cabinet for weeks that I see, that bothers me, that I choose to walk away from over and over. The bag of random items I took out of my car before Christmas that I need to sort through and put away that sits on my porch, almost mocking me every…
“The dreaded great sorting of children’s clothing- this is like the Emotional Olympics of mother-tasks in my opinion, and this is why this task gets out on the back burner time and time again. The layers of questions and doubts and second-guessing that accompany this task are heavy with the weight of life and time.
Time marches on, children grow bigger in limb and mind, that cute vintage Holly Hobbie crew neck with the gingham bows gets too small for your toddler and makes you feel weepy, that expensive woven baby wrap you never learned how to wrap stares you in your face unused, those silly Halloween jammies with Snoopy on them don’t have any use anymore, your own fertility and the potential of your womb demands witnessing. It’s a lot.”
2.
In March, I put out what would be the single edition of my failed book club, based on Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. The failing, by the way, was all mine, as many of you participated enthusiastically and this particular piece got a lot of meaningful engagement. I simply found the amount of time that it took to write such things and maintain a book club wasn’t sustainable for me in this season of life. So I am sorry, maybe in a few years!
Of Brothels and Babies
Thank you all for your patience and grace as it took me quite a while to pull this together. All passages in bold are the questions for the book club, to be answered and discussed in the comments. I decided against a podcast format as it felt forced and silly for me. I may try again in a different context in the future! Enjoy!
“I quite like the idea of a re-enchantment of sex. I look back on my life and can see where the comparison Perry draws lies-I can see the way the narrative of “it’s just sex” has been shoved down my throat and how I swallowed it to my own detriment, this idea sitting in the pit of my stomach twisting and churning and rotting. It made me uneasy, it made me unsure. Yet I bought it and I walked that road. Also though…I always knew it was wrong. I always knew there was a lot deeper of a well there. I felt it and I experienced it despite my many mistakes, my many willingly-taken-advantage-of moments. I imagine this is a story many other women and men could reflect back to me.
Sex isn’t just sex, it is a reminder of our humanity, our vitality, our potentiality, our fragility, our vulnerability, our beauty. It already feels enchanted to me, and perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I assume others feel the same. Is this one of those things we all know on an individual level but allow to play out differently on a macro level? Pretending sex is meaningless feels like just another The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes-ism we seem to love to engage in for show. Any concept which requires us to collectively play pretend is a concept based on greed and power hunger on the part of the small few of us who seek to benefit- this is no different.”
3.
Vindicating the Female Body
What if fertility was of great interest? Not only at the precise moment when one makes the thoughtful and careful choice to procreate after the perfect amount of life lived has gone by and the right places and people have been traveled to and met. Not only when that precise choice meets failure head on. Not only when a life erupts inside us at the worst…
“The management of fertility is big, booming business. Whether it is taming to render it either permanently or temporarily sterile or taming it in the opposite sense, beating it into submission when it fails us (often after years of neglect-behaving as living nature neglected does). Egg donation, surrogacy, IUI, IVF, sperm donation, birth control, Plan B pills, apps to track our most intimate information (such as the popular Natural Cycles-who revealed last week that they are perfectly willing to disrespect the female physiology they directly profit from by using language that indulges the gender-above-all crowd-see below), ultrasounds and lab tests and exogenous hormonal injections of all manner.
These are the tools of a culture where fertility is an afterthought. Our culture is a sterility culture addicted to dopamine and instant gratification-which these tools at least attempt to cater to, albeit not always so successfully.
What culture has forgotten, what the machine that is building culture has (I would be so bold to say) purposefully ignored-is that fertility is the underlying essence of womanhood. The potential for life making and all that come with it- both the tangibles and the non- is the threat, the blessing, the factual reality of female existence. In making fertility something we don’t discuss until it is too late, we are inviting a sharp and resounding dissonance between the actual deep truth of half of the population and the proposed falsity that this half is supposed to play along with.”
4.
Materialism vs. the Material of Life
Just over a year ago I started this Substack on a whim by fleshing out a single impassioned Instagram comment raging against surrogacy. Here I am, a year later, still mad and hopefully slightly more articulate. Thank you for being here, I truly appreciate you all.
“A sex buyer or a baby buyer is not in a reciprocal relationship with the whole female being. They are a consumer of a raw product they pay to get access to. They are the epitome of reductive consumerism. The industries they support view the female body as mere human capital and the baby as the profit cash cow-it’s depraved economics. When we shift from the good being the labor of humans to the humans themselves, we shift from the realm of economics to a sort of veneration of bondage of the human body, and along with it, the human spirit.
Consider a dress. It is made of effort, of thought and design and skill. It requires time and consideration. One part cannot exist without the other, the seams attach equally essential sections to create the whole. The material the dress is made from is vastly less valuable than the dress itself, due to the input that material needs to become a useful and beautiful creation. We, as women, are not mere material, we are the entire garment. As such-we are valuable, but often not truly valued in our culture. We must move toward a notion of inherent feminine value-both as females and as a society and nation. It isn’t enough to be material or garment, we must be recognized as valued souls which express and experience the material of life.
This is the fabric from which human experience is cyclically fashioned. Sex. Conception. Pregnancy. Birth. Nursing. Parenthood and Childhood (Motherhood and Girlhood). Illness and Healing. Growth and Aging. Death.
The human person is not made to be parted out like a junkyard Buick. The effort and skill and consideration that culminates in our design makes us whole. We live in a materialistic society that makes the reduction of people into parts mentally easy yet we cannot acquiesce to this subverted version of normality. In the rich woven heritage-tapestry of humanity, the materials are abundant and assorted, and they are not be trivialized and exchanged without courtesy.”
5.
In June, I had a miscarriage. This is my grappling, complete with historical accounts of the same and questions about pregnancy tests and fertility marketing.
Of Magnolias and Miscarriage
Two little vertical pink lines. If you turn them on their side, they make an equals sign. Equals what, exactly? Something, someone. Somehow barely perceptible and vividly accessible (maybe only in dreams) all at once, filling the void all women carry around with them. A void that exists for a purpose, the purpose on our shoulders at all times for many …
“In trying to look into the history of these tests, I came across an abstract for a chapter in Lara Friedenfeld’s book “The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy” on Oxford Academic, which stated the following:
“In the nineteenth century, physicians developed new ways to detect pregnancy, as they sought visible and palpable pregnancy signs that allowed a physician to make a diagnosis independent of a woman’s testimony about her symptoms. In the twentieth century demand for pregnancy diagnosis increased as more women sought formal prenatal care and took on new responsibilities for self-care during pregnancy. The first pregnancy lab test was introduced in 1927 and improved over the decades, and a home pregnancy test reached the American market in 1978. Since then, the tests, which measure human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) in maternal urine, have become a ubiquitous part of planned pregnancies, and have gotten increasingly sensitive. This means that women increasingly use them to detect very early pregnancies, many of which are not viable.”
The first sentence really caught my eye, because it speaks to my questioning of my own participation in the cult of the commercially confirmed pregnancy. I am not a man. I am not a doctor seeking some sort of dominion over the female body. I am the inhabitant of that female body. I am a woman who can give that bodily testimony. Not only this, but in cases such as that which I am experiencing now as I write these words, what comfort do those positive tests of the last few weeks bring me? Did they change the outcome? Or do they just serve to prove to myself, or to others, that I wasn’t crazy, that what I assumed I was experiencing was real? In a non-viable pregnancy, what purpose does the pregnancy test serve for us?
I’m not suggesting we all protest First Response and ClearBlue or that all women everywhere must shun this particular pregnancy ritual. I understand this is a topic that is experienced in a very different way amongst us all. I am only speaking personally when I say I am convinced it is better for myself to embrace the precarity of pregnancy without the chemical confirmation, without apps, without AI, without Reddit forums, without the internet in general. I know what is real, and I can learn how to let that be good enough, even in a world where it never is.”
6.
*This is my favorite piece I wrote this year*
Femina Machina
“I’m so much more than a lactation machine”. Words I read and had a reaction to recently. The woman who posted them assumed my reaction was offense, when really it was curiosity about how women have come to equate normal female function with machines, as the whole “I’m not a milk machine” is commonly uttered and this was not the first I have heard this …
“Why are all the cultural tools of “female empowerment” about misalignment with nature? Birth control, access to reproductive technology via employment benefits and insurance coverage, the ability to access sterilization as a healthy young woman, abortion rights and free/low cost childcare are the some of the most discussed talking points in the realm of modern feminism. Here’s the thing though: mass-prescribed birth control and free childcare and free breast pumps and corporate egg freezing programs function to keep women in the workforce for as much as possible for long as possible. Machines indeed.
There is a hyper focus on supercharging the commercial utility of women rather than the personal and familial utility within this framework. To be aligned with nature, the creative utility of the female mind, soul and body needs to be focused more on the inner rather than outer realm. This doesn’t mean no women should work. This means that when money-earning work is an endeavor a woman chooses for herself, especially in the reproductive and child-bearing continuum, the work itself should bend to the will of the holistic needs of the woman and her children. The woman should not be contorted into a commercial appliance, rather the work should be contorted into a form that resembles a vehicle of means which shape-shifts and ebbs and flows with the ever evolving needs of the woman and the family. Work for women needs to be equally as flexible and fluid as the nature of the feminine soul is.
Why the need to disparage the most natural acts (birth, lactation, copulation) of womanhood using language that renders us nothing more than bitter and mechanistic reproductive proletarians? These are the acts of life, and we DO own the means of production of that life.”
Note:
I didn’t write anything in September nor October because I was busy gestating a new little life and vomiting, and I chose to honor my discomfort, so here shall lie a few extra favorites from close by months….(also, thank you to my patient readers and friends who stick with me in all of my sporadic writing glory….)
7.
The Lost Feminine Sphere
Last week, Amelia Buzzard published a very smart, very thoughtful piece on how women work, how society works, how men work, and how these things don’t all work well together. My favorite line was “In other words, feminists haven’t demanded a woman-centric career path because they loathe their woman-ness and decide to try becoming pseudo-men.
“So I suppose my answer is that optimization for all aspects of life in the childbearing years shouldn’t be the goal post. I think we have to come to terms with the fact that should we become mothers, much is asked of us. We have to understand that many of the requests of motherhood aren’t actually optional. When we make them optional, there are consequences, and no amount validation from those who also make requisite parts of motherhood optional can actually change those consequences.
I think optimization is really quite a masculine endeavor. Rather than seeking total efficiency and high performance and optimal outcomes with ultimate consistency (how I conceive of “optimization”), we could instead turn ourselves in the more feminine orientation of cultivation.
When we are cultivating, we are refining, we are learning, we are developing. The fertile female spirit can cultivate a home, a family and also skills that will lend themselves to a future or even current part time career (with potential to be more full time in the future). To cultivate requires a sense of contentment and competency in the home alongside the passion and endurance need to grow towards some future career if desired. In this time of raising up our children, we can simultaneously be gaining experiences and skills needed for our future iterations of self.”
8.
This was both an exploration of cultural coercion and abortion, and a pregnancy announcement for my fourth baby.
The Quickening and the Song of Continuance
In my work as a nurse I am a fly on the wall in the realm of clinical obstetrics, and in this realm, we speak of women in the language of fecundity. We refer to the patients by their “G&Ps”, or gravidity and parity. Gravidity meaning the amount of times a woman has been pregnant, and parity referring to how many times she has delivered a viable baby. …
“You've heard of internalized misogyny, but have you considered an internalized anti-animal? There is no word for this, the best I can summon is misanthropic biophobia, and it is the bedrock of sterility culture. Humans are more than animals, of course, but without an understanding and reverence for the mammalian self, it is easy to forget that we need one another, and that we need our babies as much as they need us. Our mammalian selves thrive in an environment of interdependence, best illustrated in the mother-baby bond. Reproduction is the fertile ground upon which connection grows. Every form of human connection has a foundation in the fact that we were born. Our female ancestors sang a song of human continuance in their birthing cries, and it is our task to keep singing.”
9.
Occasionally I like to play investigative journalist and this was a little deep dive into the story surrounding the downfall of what was once a commendable grassroots mother to mother organization.
La Leche League Doesn't Care About Real Women*
* said in my Kanye voice (also, yes, many women involved in LLL care about real women, but the organization itself does not)
“When indulgent concepts become the priority over material reality, there is an element of disease at play. Things are not in balance, overgrowth of distractions is allowed, waste builds up. Things do not get done, people talk in circles, nothing actually means anything. When this happens in the realm of women’s health, women and babies suffer and languish while the higher-ups play their activism games. La Leche League doesn’t care about real women, the women who actually grow and birth babies, not the pretend ones who don’t have the physiological blueprint to do so. The women who actually breastfeed, not chest feed. The women who are actually mothering, not just parenting, they’re children. Real women need words and ideas to actually mean something, otherwise their existence is trivialized, mocked and erased as collateral in the culture wars.“
And now, the fun part. Here are all of the craft projects I have been saving for the new year:
Practicing cross stitch, I have this kit from Avlea Folk Embroidery that I want to dig into while I am postpartum:
More honing of my corn dolly skills! I have a big box of heirloom wheat in my storage room that needs to be plaited. Here is some inspo:
I bought a kit to hand sew and embroider a traditional Vyshyvanka from Folkwear Patterns last year and I would like to actually make it! Something in this style:
Toying with the idea of a log-cabin quilted pillow (because I’m not quite up for a whole quilt yet):
This sweater I have had on my Ravelry list for years:
This brilliant goose-themed hood:
A hat for little Elora:
Some selfish cardigans, including this medieval Unicorn inspired one that I think is brilliant:
Your writing is luminously beautiful Emily, and you are a true warrior for women. I love what you have to say!
I have been cross stitching for a very long time and recently discovered this very clever woman who comes up with some very simple, but very direct sayings that bring great joy to my heart: https://subversivecrossstitch.com/
My personal wish for 2025 would be that magical thinking is put back in the fiction section where it belongs, so that Lucy Leader could retire gracefully and not have to write any more posts like this one that has just been published: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/men-breastfeeding-again
Thank you for your work and blessings on you, your new baby and your family.
I really enjoyed reviewing your posts from this year-a great deal of wisdom to take in. I love the cross stitch pattern you posted! I’m going to be continuing with cross stitch and crochet, while adding in some weaving projects (I got a peg loom to do bigger things like rugs). Reading wise I’m excited to dig into some women/gender related books I got for Christmas-Abigail Favale’s “The Genesis of Gender” and Erika Bachiochi’s book “Reclaiming the Rights of Women.” A piece I was really proud of was my reflection on filling out my first commonplacing notebook and what that habit has meant to me.