Pamela Haag

Pamela Haag

Essayist

Pamela Haag’s work spans a wide, and unusual, spectrum, all the way from academic scholarship to memoir. Thematically, it has consistently focused on women's issues, feminism, and American culture, but she’s also written on topics as eclectic as the effort to rebuild the lower Manhattan subway lines after 9/11, 24-hour sports radio talk shows, and the experience of class mobility.

Haag earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1995, after graduating with Highest Honors from Swarthmore College. She’s held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and post-doctoral fellowships at both Brown and Rutgers University. As an academic she published scholarly articles and a first book, based on dissertation work, with Cornell University Press in 1999.

She became the Director of Research for the AAUW Educational Foundation, a nationalnonprofit based in Washington, DC, that advocates for girls and women. In that capacity she wrote and edited several pieces of research and was the media spokesperson for the research.
In 2002, Haag became a speechwriter on issues of public transit and transit-oriented development for the secretary of the Federal Transit Administration and, occasionally, the Secretary of Transportation.

Since 2004, she has been publishing personal and opinion essays in a variety of venues, including National Public Radio, the American Scholar, the Christian Science Monitor, Ms. magazine, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Michigan Quarterly Review, New Haven Review, the Antioch Review and carte blanche. Haag earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2008, where she won the Chris White award for best essay, and was also a prizewinner in the Atlantic’s 2008 national nonfiction contest.

Haag's latest book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, released by HarperCollins in May of 2011, draws on all of these strands of Haag’s unique professional biography to create almost a new genre, a weave of academic expertise, cultural history, creativenonfiction, memoir, storytelling, interviews, and commentary.

Love is an epiphany. Maybe that’s the sweetest romantic dream of all. By the big bang theory of mate selection, our soul mate is out there somewhere, and they’re going […]
I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They’re moving so that the mom can take a better […]
One of the themes in my book that elicited attention was my “new monogamy” section, where I explore ethically non-monogamous marriages, and the gray zone of don’t ask, don’t tell […]
These words describe love, desire, and relationships that have no real English translation but they capture subtle realities that even English speakers have felt once or twice.
“Life,” my brother-in-law tells me, “is 90 percent maintenance.” I’ve no complaints about my husband’s chore contribution in our marriage. Our “dreariness index” as I call it seems fair enough. […]
The multi-million dollar estates of the stars in Beverly Hills and the “abandominiums” of impoverished neighborhoods in rustbelt cities such as my own of Baltimore have something in common: they’re […]
You’ve probably had this experience thousands of times. You’re Googling, and you start typing in a question.  Google, like a jittery, over-zealous waiter, fills in the blank for you. Google […]
I devote a chapter of my book to “Workhorse Wives.” To be perfectly clear about my definition: a Workhorse Wife marriage doesnot mean one with a stay-at-home dad who pulls […]
Friends sometimes ask me about the signs of marriages on the brink. Can mere mortals, without credentials even!, predict which marriages are likely to divorce? It makes for a fascinating […]
Paula always thought that infidelity should be “a deal breaker” in marriage—until two good friends confided in her about their unfaithful husbands. “I had a hard time wrapping my head […]
Reuters reports that “leftists” in Mexico City’s assembly are contemplating a two-year, term-limited marriage.  They argue that it would spare the city’s married residents—half of whom split, and most within […]
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic […]
To be sure, our incompatible ideas of “work” and the workplace are a huge part of the problem. But so is the informal, perfectionist view that parenthood is something that swallows you up whole.
A 40-something acquaintance is married, with two children. She’s been going through a job transition, so she and her husband are both working out of the home, and it’s not […]
“Women are conflicted in ten different directions today,” “Shirin” tells me. She’s an accomplished, unmarried woman in her 40s, living in Los Angeles.  She continues, “They know you cannot have […]
This blog was published in 2011 at www.pamelahaag.com Few institutions invite—perhaps require?–cognitive dissonance like marriage. It’s remarkable, a marriage’s capacity to say one thing and do another, while all the […]
This was originally posted at www.pamelahaag.com One of the more important facets of our post-romantic age is that for perhaps the first time in history, you stand a good chance […]
This was originally published in 2010 at www.pamelahaag.com I was browsing through Amazon’s directory of book reviewers to find someone, and I ended up lost in the weeds for hours. […]