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.

“Whining” is an insult that gets tossed around frequently and casually today, mostly between women. I rarely hear it leveled by men against women, women against men, or by men […]
In a closely-followed case, two high school football stars in a small Ohio town were found guilty yesterday of raping an unconscious, intoxicated young woman at a party. The victim […]
One of Sandberg’s important points, in my opinion, is that women should cross the bridge of work-family conflict when they get to it.
Many years later it dawned on me that what I wanted to be when I was 14 was “erudite.” I should have known the word back then, as I had […]
NOTE:  I originally posted this column in 2012, after the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed a conviction based on the collection of a DNA sample from a suspect.  This case […]
My electric toothbrush kept me up half the night like a squalling newborn. The trouble began yesterday. My husband and I were sitting downstairs when we heard a thunderous rumbling […]
My electric toothbrush kept me up half the night like a squalling newborn. The trouble began yesterday. My husband and I were sitting downstairs when we heard a thunderous rumbling […]
The origin of Valentine’s Day has nothing to do with love and everything to do with “torturous martyrdom.” On second thought, perhaps the origin of Valentine’s Day has a great deal to do with love.
Nothing says I Love You like exsanguination, whipping, and the sweet nothing whispered in the ear of a mutual pledge not to machete each other to death. Or so an […]
My favorite Baltimorean iconoclast, filmmaker John Waters, had a wonderful line during a local NPR interview a few years ago. The topic had turned to same-sex marriage campaigns and Waters […]
Recently I had occasion to browse my collection of yellowed “second-wave” feminist paperbacks, from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I bought most of them at used book stores in […]
One day, I found a press release from an academic journal, calling attention to one of its articles. That is unusual enough, since the kinds of articles that Aaron Swartz–a […]
When is a gaffe not a gaffe?  Short answer: When it is said and done over, and over, and over. Take a certain wing of the Republican party, the wing […]
How long does it take to know that you’ve found The One—or someone who you might want to see for a second date? I found the answer to this and […]
To answer my own headline, not likely. The National Rifle Association seems to lead an “Even I Can’t Kill Me” charmed existence as the most powerful lobby in DC, and […]
Years ago, when my friends and I were applying for competitive fellowships, awards, and school admissions, we had a macabre joke that there were times when we must have been […]
French philosopher Alain Badiou has a new book called In Praise of Love (New Press). It’s a provocative and charming read. Badiou argues that love is no longer the “tenacious […]
A reader in his late 20s writes to me and poses this not-uncommon dilemma. The reader does not like his close friend’s fiancée. At all. He worries that his friend […]
I’m going to write the unpopular thing and go Tough Love on my own people.  A modest proposal: Women need to act like the successful grown-ups that they are or […]
In September of 1965, Life magazine ran a piece on medicine’s “astonishing” and “audacious experiments” that might even promise a “kind of immortality.” The first article dealt with reproduction. The […]