Author Topic: What women and men should have and know by the time they’re 30  (Read 11892 times)

Joe Carillo

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The quirky, wacky, and often pseudo-profound list of advice to young women written in 1997 by Glamour magazine columnist Pamela Redmond Satran strongly resonated with its target readers, even becoming viral on the Internet over the next 15 years. Somehow the must-have prescriptions of “30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30”—like “A set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black lace bra” and “A résumé that is not even the slightest bit padded”—became a veritable manifesto for many of its target readers, even inspiring and drawing in more advice in the same vein from other women.



Now the editors of Glamour magazine and various women have turned that list into a book with the same title, 30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30 (Hyperion, 168 pages). The book expands on each item on the list with essays and personal insights from a wide range of contributors that include novelist Maya Angelou, TV journalist Katie Couric, teenage singer Taylor Swift, and TV star Portia de Rossi.

Has the effort to put the list into book form been worth it?

Says writer Stephanie Zacharek in a review of the book that came out in the July 27, 2012 issue of The New York Times: “The appeal of the original list was its pithiness; start embroidering and you get a tangle of bromides… (But) not everything in 30 Things is useless, reductive or ridiculous. The comedian Kathy Griffin’s entry is the liveliest (‘Heterosexual men are like Martians to me — they may as well have antennae and arrive on a spaceship instead of picking me up in a Prius’), and the eminently sensible TV finance expert Suze Orman offers the kind of advice no one wants to hear and everyone ought to heed: ‘Live below your means but above your needs.’”

Read Pamela Redmond Satran’s original list of “30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30” in Glamour magazine now!

Read Stephanie Zacharek’s “Thirty Candles: An Updated Guide for Young Women” in The New York Times now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pamela Redmond Satran is a columnist for Glamour and frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and More Magazine. The author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Possibility of You and the humor book Rabid: Are You Crazy About Your Dog or Just Crazy?, she is also the co-creator of the million-visitor website Nameberry.com and coauthor of ten bestselling books about names.

RELATED READING:
In an article he wrote for the May 1, 2012 edition of the Role/Reboot website in response to Pamela Redmond Satran’s “30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30,” Hugo Schwyzer reports that plenty of similar lists exist for men as well and, in the same spirit, offers his own list of “Ten Things a Man Should Know or Be Able to Do by the Time He’s 30.” Here’s #4: “Acknowledge your male privilege. Whatever your race or economic background, you’re safer from rape, sexual assault, and harassment than women. People will defer to you just because you’re a man, not because of any special merit. Your job is not only to do what you can to renounce those privileges, but to work on making a safer and fairer world.”


Read Hugo Schwyzer’s “Ten Things a Man Should Know or Be Able to Do by the Time He’s 30” in the Role/Reboot website now!
« Last Edit: April 27, 2023, 07:23:07 AM by Joe Carillo »