Best Young Woman Job Book

Wry, inventive, and relentlessly honest, a memoir of trying to make a living without compromising your truth. Emma Healey just wants to be a writer, but that’s more a journey than a job, and the journey isn’t free. As a teenager, she begins her adventures in precarious employment when introduced by her actor/playwright mother to the role of “standardized patient,” performing illness as a living training dummy for medical students. In university, she joins a creative writing program, cultivating a poet’s interest in language while learning lessons about the literary world that have more to do with survival than art. Through her twenties, she writes software manuals for the world’s leading producer of online pornography, masters search engine optimization for a marketing firm run out of a bedroom by two Phish-loving brothers, narrowly escapes death as a research assistant for a television drama, and works the night shift captioning daytime TV. Along the way, as she navigates dating apps, tumultuous relationships, and the evolution of a voice that she is slowly learning to trust, she begins writing personal essays for money—and finds herself embroiled in a content economy that blurs the boundaries between day job and making art even further. Through the stories of several very odd jobs, each related to—but also achingly far from—the job she really wants, poet and essayist Emma Healey creates a unique snapshot of the gig economy that is also a timeless meditation on identity, value, and language. For a writer trying to pay the bills, life can be a work in progress.

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging. Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century. At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem. Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them. Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.

In this book you will find profiles of 100 ordinary women who have found fulfilling careers that fit their personalities and lifestyles. These women share with you what their jobs are like and how they got where they are. As you read the profiles, think about which careers excite you. Then make a plan to find out more and start your own fire!

For use in schools and libraries only. Collects profiles of one hundred women who found fulfilling careers, describing their jobs and explaining how they got them.

The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.

From the first edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook to the latest works by today's celebrity chefs, cookbooks reflect more than just passing culinary fads. As historical artifacts, they offer a unique perspective on the cultures that produced them. In Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers a perceptive and piquant analysis of the tone and content of American cookbooks published between the 1790s and the 1960s, adroitly uncovering the cultural assumptions and anxieties—particularly about women and domesticity—they contain. Neuhaus's in-depth survey of these cookbooks questions the supposedly straightforward lessons about food preparation they imparted. While she finds that cookbooks aimed to make readers—mainly white, middle-class women—into effective, modern-age homemakers who saw joy, not drudgery, in their domestic tasks, she notes that the phenomenal popularity of Peg Bracken's 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cook Book, attests to the limitations of this kind of indoctrination. At the same time, she explores the proliferation of bachelor cookbooks aimed at "the man in the kitchen" and the biases they display about male and female abilities, tastes, and responsibilities. Neuhaus also addresses the impact of World War II rationing on homefront cuisine; the introduction of new culinary technologies, gourmet sensibilities, and ethnic foods into American kitchens; and developments in the cookbook industry since the 1960s. More than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America.

For much of the 20th century, books for children encouraged girls to be weak, submissive, and fearful. This book discusses such traits, both blatantly and subtly reinforced, in many of the most popular works of the period. Quoting a wide variety of passages, O'Keefe illustrates the typical behaviour of fictional girls – many of whom were passive and immobile while others were actually invalids. They all engaged in approved girlish activities: deferred to elders, observed the priorities, and, in the end, accepted conventional suitors. Even feisty tomboys, like Jo in Little Women, eventually gave up on their dreams and their independence. The discussion is interlaced with moments from the author's own childhood that suggest how her developing self-interacted with these stories. She and her contemporaries, trying to reconcile their conservative reading with the changing world around them, learned ambivalence rather than confidence. Good Girl Messages also includes a discussion of books read by boys, who were depicted as purposeful, daring, and dominating.