The Resolute Woman

Category: work

  • How Georgia O’Keefe worked

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    Georgia O’Keefe drove her Model A across the desert and back, and up and down over the hills, says Jeanette Winter in her children’s book My Name Is Georgia. Even in winter, she “went far out into the faraway and painted in the bitter cold.” She painted when the wind was so strong it nearly…

  • “Be not afraid to work”

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    Alma Whittaker, whose mother prayed that she would grow up healthy, sensible and intelligent when she was born in 1800, was devastated when her marriage failed. “One must bear what cannot be escaped,” Hanneke, Alma’s nursemaid, advises in Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel The Signature of All Things. “ “You will not die of your grief—no more…

  • Don’t hire me to type

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    Elizabeth Warren, United States senator, once was a law school student applying for an internship with a Wall Street law firm. During an interview, one of the firm’s partners leaned back in his chair, scowled at her resume and looked up at her with barely concealed contempt. “There’s a typographical error on your resume,” he…

  • The exhausting everydayathon

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    I’ve been busy this week. Of course, I’m not the only one who is too busy. Most people today are too busy, writes Brigid Schulte in the March 14, 2014, issue of The Washington Post. Schulte is the author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time. “Somewhere around the end…

  • Hard work at Oak Ridge

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    Thousands of civilians—many of them women from across the South—came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II to work on a secret project. They were offered good wages and promised that their labor could help end the war. Inspired by Rosie the Riveter, they “left farms for factories willingly, wrote letters hopefully, waited patiently…

  • Good work doesn’t come easy

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    “I hate to write,” Anna Quindlen told the audience at a recent Arts & Letters Live appearance in Dallas. “That’s what I always tell students first. They think that, if you’re good at something, it comes to you easy.” Good work doesn’t come easy, stressed Quindlen, the author of seven bestselling novels, four nonfiction titles…

  • Do what you love?

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    “Do what you love, love what you do” has become the unofficial work mantra for our time, writes Esther Cepeda in the January 27, 2014, issue of The Dallas Morning News. But there are problems with this love-and-passion philosophy, Cepeda says. “It substitutes easy, positive emotions for the physical acts of courage, determination, discipline and…

  • The ledger of daily work

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    How do we define success? Am I successful if perform an act of courage? If I climb to the top of my profession? If I have collected things that money can buy? Beryl Markham, in her autobiography West with the Night, has another definition. I like it even though I’ve edited her words, written decades…

  • Extraordinary perseverance

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    Teddy Roosevelt, who served as president and also wrote 40 books, once described himself as an ordinary man with extraordinary perseverance. That’s what Doris Kearns Goodwin said recently in an interview on National Public Radio. Kearns was talking about her new book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of…

  • Bringing Home the Meat

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    During the 1890s, Charles M. Russell painted a Blackfoot on horseback. Recently, while visiting the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, I admired the painting titled “Bringing Home the Meat” and the Blackfoot woman who is the focus of Russell’s art. Unnamed, she rides with an infant on her back and the carcass of a…