Rachel Shteir Journalist Profile

Articles

The Best Biographies of 2024: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist

Jan 10, 2025 | fivebooks.com | Jonathan Eig |Gregg Hecimovich |Yunte Huang |Rachel Shteir

It’s brilliant to have you back on the site—for the fourth time—to talk about the books that made the National Book Critics Circle shortlist for the best recent biography. Did you notice any trends among the submissions for the 2024 biography prize? Biographies rarely break news, but two of our finalists did so months or years before publication.
‘Finding the Way to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”’: Eugene O’Neill’s Dark Triumph

Jan 10, 2025 | wsj.com | Rachel Shteir

The playwright headed west and settled in the home in which he would write his tormented, autobiographical masterpiece. Tao House, in Danville, Calif., a short drive east of San Francisco, is a four-bedroom Spanish colonial that the playwright Eugene O’Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, had built and moved into in 1937. Today, the national historic site boasts stunning views, a pool and a garden.
Acting Out - The American Scholar

May 27, 2024 | theamericanscholar.org | Rachel Shteir

Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter; Bloomsbury, 368 pp., $32In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act Three of his production of The Cherry Orchard.
How a Theory about Climate Change Led to The Feminine Mystique

Apr 10, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Rachel Shteir

Almost a year before the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique—the zeitgeist-shattering book that would launch second-wave feminism and change the life of millions of women—author Betty Friedan wrote a confession in the pages of the Writer, a craft magazine for literary people:My most successful article concerned an act of intellectual discovery—the discovery of “The Coming Ice Age.” I am not a science writer.
All About Eves: A Conversation with Cat Bohannon

Dec 11, 2023 | lit.newcity.com | Rachel Shteir

On a Friday evening, Cat Bohannon and I met in the lobby of the Loews Chicago Hotel to discuss her book, “Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution,” a New York Times bestseller as well as an international hit. It was loud in the lobby with its cavernous ceiling, oversized fireplace and sports bar, so we moved to a quieter space nearby. We sat by a window in two gigantic gray plush chairs facing each other.
America’s Nonprofit Theaters Are Finding Ways to Thrive

Nov 22, 2023 | livemint.com | Rachel Shteir

The reasons for the crisis are numerous: competition for audiences from streaming and phones; corporate philanthropy’s pivot away from the arts; crime driving audiences away from downtown districts; didactic plays that alienate audiences. Even at the best of times, making theater is a financial challenge. In their 1966 study “Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma," William J. Baumol and William G.
Essay | America’s Nonprofit Theaters Are Finding Ways to Thrive

Nov 22, 2023 | wsj.com | Rachel Shteir

Stripped-down productions, nontraditional performance spaces and ‘hyper local’ programming are helping companies weather hard times. By “The Fabulous Invalid” is the title of a 1938 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy about a theater’s struggles to survive. The phrase, which outlasted the show, refers to the resilience of theater in the face of insane odds. In the past six months, it has been an apt image for the demise of not-for-profit companies across America.
Opinion | The Abandonment of Betty Friedan

Sep 11, 2023 | chronicle.com | Rachel Shteir

Today, Betty Friedan is recognized for two enormous accomplishments: her 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique, which helped push the women’s movement into the national conversation, and cofounding the National Organization for Women three years later.
Another View: 50 years after first ERA debate, women still don’t have equal rights

Jun 12, 2023 | marinij.com | Rachel Shteir

Betty Friedan was just a fiery radical with a bad temper. It’s convenient to believe this. But at a moment when many of the rights for women she gained are being overturned, it’s time to reconsider common wisdom about her character. Friedan, a towering figure in the women’s movement who died in 2006, wrote the 1963 groundbreaking book “The Feminine Mystique” and co-founded the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
The long struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment | Op-Ed

Jun 9, 2023 | seattletimes.com | Rachel Shteir

Betty Friedan was just a fiery radical with a bad temper. It’s convenient to believe this. But at a moment when many of the rights for women she gained are being overturned, it’s time to reconsider common wisdom about her character. Friedan, a towering figure in the women’s movement who died in 2006, wrote the 1963 groundbreaking book “The Feminine Mystique” and co-founded the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus.