Suchergebnisse

Intro -- About the Author -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Epigraph -- Introduction -- 1 Free Your Mind -- 2 Women Who Love Sex Too Much -- 3 How Free Are We? -- 4 Ploughs, Property, Propriety -- 5 Being Himba -- 6 Bonobos in Paradise -- 7 Significant Otherness -- 8 Loving the Woman Who's Untrue -- 9 Life Is Short. Should You Be Untrue? -- Afterword -- Author's Note -- Acknowledgments -- Notes

"Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected. Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want--safety, happiness, and success--and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are. Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world--the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood"--

A groundbreaking and truly stepmother-centered way of understanding the tensions that seem to define relations between women and their stepchildren Half of all women in the United States will live with or marry a man with children. And what woman with stepchildren has not-in order to defuse the often overwhelming challenges of the role-referred to herself as a "stepmonster"? As Hope Edelman does in her book for motherless daughters, Wednesday Martin's empowering and original Stepmonster unlocks the emotional mysteries of why stepmothers think and feel and act the way they do. Martin draws upon her own experience as a stepmother, interviews with other stepmothers and stepchildren, and fascinating insights from literature, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology to reveal the little-understood realities of this most demanding role. Stepmonster illuminates the harrowing process of becoming a stepmother, considers the myths and realities of being married to a man with children, counteracts the cultural notion that stepmothers are solely responsible for the challenges they encounter, identifies the "Five Step-Dilemmas That Create Conflict," and considers the emotional and social challenges men with children face when they remarry. Finally, in an unexpected twist, Martin shows why the myth of the Wicked Stepmother is our single best tool for understanding who real stepmothers are and how they feel. [BACK FLAP] [INSERT AUTHOR PHOTO] Wednesday Martin holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. She was a regular contributor to New York Post's parenting page for more than five years, and her work has appeared in a number of national magazines. Martin, a stepmother for nine years, lives in New York City with her husband and their two sons

The narratives around women at midlife and older are more than just sexist and ageist; they're damaging to women's physical, emotional, financial, romantic, and sexual health. This book will help women break through those tired and hurtful stereotypes to better reflect who they are, how they live, and what they want as they age.