341. Amanda Montei and Kristi Coulter with Gemma Hartley: Ambition, Women, and Work

341. Amanda Montei and Kristi Coulter with Gemma Hartley: Ambition, Women, and Work

Author: Town Hall Seattle November 23, 2023 Duration: 1:03:28

Many parents struggle with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with the growing lack of autonomy new moms may feel in their personal and professional lives.

Join us for an evening with Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, and Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. Moderated by Gemma Hartley, author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, Montei and Coulter will discuss the state of ambition for women, the often hidden labors of both parenthood and gender, emotional labor in the workplace and mental loads at home, and much more.

Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, out now from Beacon Press, as well as the memoir Two Memoirs, and a collection of prose, The Failure Age. She has an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Amanda's work has been featured at New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, The Cut, Slate, Vox, HuffPost, Rumpus, The Believer, Ms. Magazine, and many others.  She lives in California.

Kristi Coulter is the author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career and Nothing Good Can Come From This, a Washington State Book Award finalist. Her work has also appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, The Believer, and many other publications. She teaches writing at Hugo House and lives in Seattle and Los Angeles.

Gemma Hartley is a freelance journalist, speaker, and author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward. She has spoken on the topic of invisible labor around the world, from corporate conferences to festivals at the Sydney Opera House. Her writing has been featured in outlets including Harper's Bazaar, Women's Health, Glamour, The Washington Post, CNBC, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Teen Vogue, and The Huffington Post. She is passionate about creating a more equitable world in which invisible labor is valued and supported by both personal partners and public policy alike.


Recorded live from a historic venue in the Pacific Northwest, the Town Hall Seattle Civics Series podcast brings the stage to your headphones. Each episode captures a vital conversation from Town Hall Seattle's ongoing programming, where experts, activists, and thinkers grapple with the ideas shaping our collective life. You’ll hear historians reframe our past, legal scholars dissect constitutional questions, and community organizers explain the mechanics of emerging movements. This isn't just theoretical discussion; it's a direct engagement with the policies and cultural shifts that touch our neighborhoods and the wider world. Tuning in feels like finding a seat in a thoughtful, often provocative public forum. The series operates on a belief that an informed community is an empowered one, and this audio archive makes that process accessible to anyone, anywhere. By focusing on the substance of live civic dialogue, this podcast provides the context and depth often missing from daily headlines, fostering a deeper understanding of how society functions and changes.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Town Hall Seattle Civics Series
Podcast Episodes
347. Betty Houchin Winfield: Pioneering Women in Academia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:11
Starting in 1967, when fewer than 1% of women completed any education beyond four years of college, the Washington State University (WSU) Sociology Department dared to hire three female faculty members who became lifelon…
344. Fei-Fei Li with Todd Bishop: Using AI to Empower Humans [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:09:43
Depending on who you overhear, conversations surrounding the controversial AI Chat Bot, Chat GPT, may be punctuated with terms like, "groundbreaking!" "paradigm-shifting!" "innovative!" or conversely might be filled with…
339. Michael Harriot with Marcus Harrison Green: America Unredacted [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:43
Have you ever wondered if there was another version of this country besides the one that was taught in schools? For many Americans, especially Black Americans, the answer is yes. The backstory that most of us were taught…
338. Rebecca Clarren with Rena Priest: The Cost of Free Land [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:00
Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family's origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the U…
337. Martin Baron with Frank Blethen A Marriage of Press and Politics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:16
If you've felt like the news cycle has been out of control in the past few years, imagine being the editor of one of the most prominent papers in the US. Martin Baron had over a decade of newsroom experience before he to…