The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion by Gloria Steinem

It’s been half a century since Gloria Steinem published “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” and 56 since she went undercover in a skimpy, fuzzy-tailed outfit to document the exploitation and mistreatment of female workers at the New York Playboy Club, but she hasn’t lost her knack for expressing complicated, challenging ideas in punchy, memorable ways. In fact, if The Truth Will Set You Free is any indication, Steinem’s gotten even better at joining scholarly rigorous foundations with easily digestible take-aways and strong aesthetics. (If you’re interested in evolutionary biology and behavior, the chapter on “Families Born and Chosen” is for you; many of the illustrated quotes seem tailor-made for a millenial-styled “live, laugh, love” IG account.)

Especially relevant to the gendered work of holidays with family is chapter three, “Work Is Not a Four-Letter Word.” Steinem conceptualizes work not simply as labor in exchange for compensation or profit, but as what we do to be valued. She relays her own work history, including a stint as a magician’s assistant, and how those undervalued positions informed her later work, and prepared her to understand and embrace the work of feminst thinkers like Frances Beal and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Her depiction of building community with her fellow workers, especially during her time as a lifeguard at a Black pool, could easily apply to my aunts and girl cousins laboring in the Christmas kitchen.

This isn’t just one to read; it’s one to gift to your teenage nieces, Aunt Lois, Gramma Mabel, or any other women in your family who might want to have a seat and take a rest after the holiday meal.

It's So Much More Than Cooking by Zoe Fenson

Be warned: This short read by Zoe Fenson might make your blood boil. In it, Fenson writes about a “sobbing meltdown” precipitated by what at first seems like a small, simple thing: Her husband volunteers to make dinner.

Except, not really. Because when the time to host came around, Fenson’s husband “waltzed through the door from work, bubbling with enthusiasm” and said “okay, I’m ready to start cooking.” He went so far as to ask Fenson what was in the fridge. Fenson goes on to pick apart all of the miscommunication and differing expectations that came before the meltdown—all of the unseen, unappreciated labor she must have done for her spouse to be so completely oblivious to the “mental load” that she carried as the primary food preparer.

Of course, there’s nothing groundbreaking there. Even if we aren’t familiar with the statistics on gendered domestic labor in heterosexual domestic partnerships, the vast majority of us have seen the imbalance play itself out in real relationships. And this imbalance is what’s on display and what’s being transmitted intergenerationally at extended family gatherings like holiday dinners, when the womenfolk plan and execute and their male counterparts just show up for the grub.

What is interesting about this read is Fenson’s recognition of how she contributes to the imbalanced dynamic in her home and in her partnership. As she explains, her husband “didn’t want to guess at the cooking process on his own because I had so thoroughly claimed my title as the keeper of the food.” For most of her essay, Fenson isn’t complaining about her husband’s faux-pas (though she has every right to); she’s sharing the ways in which she and her husband are working to build a more balanced relationship, so that she doesn’t end up sobbing on the floor again. And what she shares can be applied to all kinds of relationships predicated on sharing responsibilities.

Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much To Do (And More Life To Live) by Eve Rodsky

Like Fenson, Eve Rodsky focuses on gendered labor imbalances at home. But where Fenson thinks, Rodsky does. In Fair Play, Rodsky explains how she found herself fulfilling the role of the default—or “she-fault”—parent, even though she had set out with the explicit goal of establishing an equal partnership. Like Fenson, she ended up sobbing over a seemingly small, insignificant thing (in Rodsky’s case, it was a text about blueberries), and, like Fenson, her sobbing meltdown pushed her to search for a solution.

After crowdsourcing a “Sh*t I Do” spreadsheet, in which women across the US added all of the unpaid, unseen tasks they were responsible for in their households, Rodsky realized that the imbalance in her home wasn’t rare, and that just writing to-do lists for her husband wasn’t really a solution. She didn’t need a list; she needed a system.

Fair Play is that system. It’s a figurative card game that partners play together to help them prioritize household responsibilities, and decide who should take the lead on all the tasks needed to run a home. It’s full of useful take-aways for creatives and doers who want to succeed in business without sacrificing relationships, and Rodsky’s inclusion of career and wellness in her discussion of the “costs” of domestic responsibilities is both challenging and refreshing. And though it’s designed for monogamous heterosexual romantic partners, it’s easy to see how the Fair Play system could be applied to other family structures, at specific events like holiday gatherings, and even used by people who want to establish equitable systems to share work loads with their business partners.

Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis

Rachel Hollis’s big media break came in 2015, when an Instagram post showing off her stretchmarks in a bikini went viral. A year later, she leveraged her social media influencer status to publish Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About What You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant To Be, in which she shares some of the strategies she implemented to work through the negative effects self-doubt and low self-esteem had on her both professionally and personally. In Girl, Stop Apologizing, Hollis picks up the pen again, this time focusing on how being socialized to define ourselves in relation to others—as daughters, sisters, mothers, employees—can limit women, and keep us from following our goals and instincts.

Hollis’s book is broken into 3 sections: “Excuses to Let Go Of,” “Behaviors to Adopt,” and “Skills to Acquire.” Hollis’s writing strength is her ability to connect light, humorous anecdotes (like the time she and her husband accidentally went to Germany) to larger social patterns, then present practical solutions. It’s a quick, easy read, and one that offers constructive tips for quieting the voices of gendered socialization and advocating for yourself in personal and professional contexts.