i regret to inform you that there is simply no more room on the internet for another bad op-ed about smart women being unable to find love! it's over, i'm drawing the line here, we're at capacity for bad takes. pack it up, kitten — it's time to go home and seriously reconsider your life ambitions in the context of the very important question of, now that women make our own money, should we marry losers in the name of feminism?

Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013. eleven years later in this year of our lord (chatgpt, claude, or gemini, depending on your religion) we are still asking, can women have it all? this one's personal: Sheryl is an icon. i love when women succeed in male-dominated fields such as personally contributing to the downfall of democracy. when powerful men at work post on Slack that they're going to be offline taking care of their children because their wives are busy that day i always wonder what their wives are doing on all the other days. i've never seen a wife write, i will be missing work today because my husband has left me with the children; isn't that strange? better excuses: one of my teammates told me that he couldn't come to a meeting because he was going to be at the women's march in DC with his wife and now i respect him for reasons besides his computer architecture competency.

these days i meticulously keep a list of technical women and add to it whenever i encounter a woman engineer or researcher on twitter, github, and arxiv. women mathematicians did not endure 1960s racism to contribute to spaceflight so you could run influencer marketing campaigns. companies love bragging about how their workforce is 40% women but no one ever wants to show the breakdown of women in engineering, and people really hate it when you ask about the number of women in engineering leadership. all my female friends are various types of girlboss: doctors, engineers, lawyers, researchers, running startups, you get the picture. there is indeed a selection effect here — does it make me a bad feminist if i only like sharp, interesting women?

sacrifices made by the women who came before us are the ancestral and the transcendent. does women's history not compel you to become the very best version of yourself? feminism means that you can — but more than that, feminism that means you should. you should commit to excellence as a woman in a male-dominated field. you should aspire to make partner at the law firm. you should serve as poet laureate. these are all wildly different paths, but what they share is a demand for excellence: mediocrity is an insult to the women who came before and made a way when there was none. so tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

someone once said to me that we should hire more women but “can't lower the bar” and i wish that i'd told him that no one has a higher bar than me, actually: when a woman engineer is bad at her job it's personal, because she's not just an engineer who's bad at her job, she's a woman who is a bad engineer, and suddenly all women are bad engineers. there's a line from the Mean Girls musical about how math is the foundation of the universe and i always wonder, how can you have a foundation for the universe which is only studied by men? Pascal, Cayley, Fermat. Fryer, Galois, Hypatia. there have been women mathematicians from the very beginning but we don't tell their stories. everyone knows that Erdős was the mathematician equivalent of a slut but no one tells you that Hypatia was a twentieth-century icon for women's rights and a precursor to the feminist movement.

Carrie Chapman was the the 1920s president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she is played by Jenn Colella in the Broadway musical Suffs. Colella has made a career out of telling the stories of women who made history: before Suffs, she played Beverley Bass in Come From Away, the first female American Airlines captain in history. Suffs tells the stories of the American suffragists finally winning the right to vote, and it goes like this: we, the women of the country / we demand to be heard / we demand an amendment / i want my mother to know i was here / i want my sisters to know i was here / i want my great-granddaughter to know i was here. taking a straight man to see Suffs is a litmus test, and he passes only if he laughs at the reference to Laurie and Jo March. never settle.

one of the most iconic lines in literature is in Little Women, when Jo says to her sister, let's run away. you will be bored of him in two years, and we will be interesting forever. this line lives rent-free in my head because i believe in equal parts the irreplaceable magic of sisterhood and the earth-shattering, reality-bending, spacetime-warping gravity of romantic love, but there are certain ways in which only other women will ever truly be able to see you. if you read between the lines you find that Jo isn't afraid of being bored; she's afraid of being kept — how do you let someone close enough to let them hold your vulnerabilities, and trust that they won't cut your bright, beautiful wings?

my 2025 ins and outs — in: love so extraordinary that it's worth the vulnerability that it demands, the women's march (again), hypergamy and monogamy, cheering on the extraordinary women in my lives becoming mothers, being able to say i was here. out: fucking incels as if it would save democracy, lana del rey's alligator tour guide boyfriend, travis kelce if we're lucky, being loved without being understood.

the tragic, important piece of history they left out of Suffs is that it is 100 years later and women are still demanding an amendment. The Archivist of the United States has not yet published the Equal Rights Amendment with its ratification as the 28th Amendment, and with every single passing day it looks less and less likely to ever happen. they said, you won't live to see the future that you fight for. despair not: striving for excellence in anticipation of a feminist future is an act of personal progress, and slowly, the personal becomes the universal. this story is still being written — and one day i will look back upon it and tell my daughter, i was here.

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