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.

A Slate piece on education starts off by declaring, if you send your kids to private school you’re “a bad person.”  Not “bad like Hitler,” but bad. I don’t want […]
Not too long ago I found myself in a red—a very deep red—state, for a research trip. It’s the sort of place where they feel compelled to post on the […]
One article talks about the declining rates of procreation. Another contemplates job mobility. When I pull the fragments together into one tableau I’m left with the question: How it attachment […]
Time magazine covers seem custom-designed to annoy me. The latest example is their “The Childfree Life” cover. Stories of the childfree lifestyle are always illustrated this way. They feature a […]
Looking over the summer blockbuster movies I see that “The Lone Ranger” flopped. The western, that iconic American genre, seems to be on the wane.  Post-modern treatments, or westerns with […]
How many forms does it take to put a kid on a bus to summer camp? I’m a fan of civil juries as informal vehicles for wealth redistribution and justice, […]
Is abortion the most futile policy debate ever? Sometimes I wish the entire country would enter collective, premature menopause just to end it, already. The anti-abortion initiatives and state laws […]
“I’ll never look like the women with beautiful bodies in the glossy magazines.” Right. You won’t. Because they don’t. This wonderful photo compilation by a model generously and compassionately reveals […]
This week in 1848, 68 women and 32 men signed a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments for women’s equality. This document, and the convention at Seneca Falls, New York, out […]
The first two words that came to my mind about the Rolling Stone cover of The Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were “craven” and “disingenuous,” but they were followed by other words. […]
It’s interesting but apt that the prostitute, the stripper, and the porn actor—the real professionals!—are sometimes embraced and emulated as role models in this sexual rat race of ours. You’d […]
Here is a brilliant column by 11-year old Olympia Nelson on provocative selfie shots on social media. It’s valuable to hear this world described from the vantage point of someone […]
Elisabeth Badinter’s important and arousing polemic, The Conflict: How Overzealous Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, is now out in paperback in the U.S.  Prospective mothers (as well as those […]
A month or two ago I wrote about the rampant proliferation of “hotness” ratings for women where they have no business or place. Even the most accomplished women, ranging from […]
I’ve read the claims that young Americans in their 20s are selfish, self-absorbed, lazy, and a cultural and moral declension of their predecessors. This generational bleat is as old as […]
George Will used an apt phrase to describe the policy options toward Syria. When faced with universally bad choices, he opined, “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Better to do […]
In a charming essay on envy, A.S. Byatt observes that it “works inwardly; concealment is part of its nature.” Envy is a festering kind of sin. It’s also the Deadly […]
Inequality in income and wealth in America has worsened in the last decades. The 15 items here, some monumental and some small, speak to the everyday texture of that inequality, […]
If you live long enough everything can happen. Cloning, Honey Boo Boo, a feature movie based on “The Brady Bunch,” Twitter… “I miss the 1970s,” a friend says at a […]
A Harvard Business Review blog this week presents fascinating data on long work hours, and speculates on why men work so hard. They cite experts who note that long hours […]