The XX Factor: What women really think.

Dark Ceiling Without a Star

Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing."  "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.

Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.

Do Family-Owned Businesses Do Better on the Recession-o-Meter?

Jessica, it doesn't surprise me that tailors are getting rich these days. Last weekend, I was perusing the Bureau of Economic Analysis' quarterly data on Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Product (don't judge, it's a more amusing pastime than Sudoku in these apocalypse days) and noticed that it's the repair industries, like auto or jewelry repair, that held steady or did well in the gloomy fourth quarter of 2008. And among retailers, it's "health and personal care" stores (body repair!) that have experienced the biggest recession boom. (I do have to say, though, that the spend-money-on-repair phenomenon seems to have skipped over my household, whose Saturn lost the use of its horn last month in its slow, untreated process of multi-organ failure.)

I wonder, too, whether family-owned businesses aren't seeing a boost compared with chains. The article on tailors you linked to suggests that the "bright smile and homespun advice" customers receive at Andy's Secrets tailor are a big part of the store's recent success. That anecdote jibed with a shopping experience I'm having. The last time I bought glasses, a few years ago, I went to an outlet of the hippest, most pretentious Washington chain and felt as though I was being fleeced of all my money by unctuous hipsters, for whom fashion was all about the price tag—but hey, those were flush times. Now I need new ones, and while I swung by the Pretentious Chain, I ended up at the slightly dowdy little glasses shop next to my office, whose rather bootleg Web site boasts that its staff "hasn't changed in 15 years." I walk by the Dowdy Little Shop every day and know and like the guys inside. In the end, I'm going to pay nearly as much for what I'm ordering as I did at the Pretentious Chain. But the purchase feels less like a commodity-for-cash trade and more like an exchange of gifts. Giving the Dowdy Little Shop a substantial gift in thanks for their earnest, friendly work to find just the right frame to fit my narrow nose-bridge establishes a bond between us, a sense of integration and community in an unsettling moment.

Introducing the Lipstick Level: A Recession-o-Meter

At the early end of the current economic downturn, the New York Times published an article about how lipstick is a potential economic indicator. The theory is that in times of fiscal woe, women won't be able to afford that $200 frock, but they'll splurge on a $10 lipstick, a cheapo manicure, or some other kind of small luxury. And lately we've heard reporting not on just the lipstick effect," but also on how the credit crunch is killing boob-job loans, how Nordstrom's profits have tanked since the ladies who lunch are brown-bagging it, and how moms are cutting back on their kids' birthday parties, causing a seismic blow to the clown community.  

It seems that every day now there's a trend piece on the way women are spending—or not spending—our increasingly meager earnings. That's why we're introducing the Lipstick Level, an occasional Recession-o-Meter in the mold of Slate's Change-o-Meter rating how the economic downturn is shaping the way women make purchases. A low Lipstick Level score indicates spending as if you still believed those returns from Uncle Bernie were for real, like the article on Bloomberg.com today about how Shiseido is still profiting from a face cream costing $1,350 for a 1.4-ounce jar. “High-priced cosmetics are resisting the economic downturn,” says Shiseido president Shinzo Maeda.

A high Lipstick Level score says we're fast approaching diets of ramen and Target-brand pants held together with twine. An article in Women's Wear Daily by Rosemary Feitelberg on the notoriously spendthrift fashion crowd cutting back is an example of this. According to Feitelberg, "Constance White, eBay’s style director, said she has been trying to explain to her husband what Wal-Mart is." Even those who are aware of Wal-Mart are finding new ways to save: Tailors are doing better business as people try to revive old clothes rather than buying new ones.

So what's today's LL? I'm going to give it a 40 on a scale of 1 to 100. If people are still blowing rent money on cold cream, it could get much, much worse.

Addendum: The Big Money's Hans Eisenbeis wrote brilliantly on the lipstick index theory late last year. His take? "For this recession, lipstick has been upscaled right out of its own economic index. Hello, Hosiery Index!" Sigh. TBM also wrote on Uggs as an economic indicator here.

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