Hey,

Imagine women sitting together. Someone is peeling something. Someone is fixing hair. Someone is talking from a doorway. Nobody appears to be optimising the hour.

Women fought, rightly, for access to everything beyond that doorway – education, money, careers, authority, lives that did not depend on somebody else’s permission. This is not mere nostalgia for having fewer choices.

Now we’ve entered a world that already knows how to turn time into output. Work. Grow. Heal. Exercise. Invest. Network. Keep up. Even leisure now arrives with the faint pressure to use it well. #Edition90 is about the unproductive female time – and can progress bring some of it back?

Inside this Edition:
👉 What Happened to Sitting Around With Other Women?
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Somewhere between freedom and optimisation, a very ordinary kind of female time became strangely expensive: time together that did not need to become anything.

There is a strange clue hiding inside the word gossip. It comes from the Old English godsibb – a godparent or close relation. Over time, the word was also used for close companions and women who attended one another around childbirth, before eventually acquiring its modern association with idle talk – A form of female company slowly became a word for something unserious 🙄

🫛 Women’s time together was often hidden inside work…
In many communities, women did not finish labour and then socialise. The two happened at once. Food was prepared together. Children were taken care of. Clothes were mended. Hair was braided. In American quilting bees, the quilt was the task – but conversation, news and community travelled around the frame with it.

None of this makes the past idyllic. Much of women’s work was compulsory, exhausting and unpaid. Community could comfort, but it could also watch, judge and constrain.

Still, there was something porous about the time.
Companionship could live inside usefulness.

⏰ Women’s world expanded faster than their workload shrank…
Paid work brought income, identity and independence. But unpaid work did not politely disappear when women entered offices.

Across OECD countries, women still spend about four hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work, compared with about two for men. Meanwhile, workplace researchers still describe the “ideal worker” as someone highly productive, constantly available and able to devote long hours to work.

So equality could mean adding the public world without fully subtracting the private one.

📈 And then we started optimising the hours that remained…
A hobby can become a side hustle. Exercise comes with metrics. Reading becomes self-improvement. Dinner becomes networking. Friendship needs a calendar invitation.

We are fighting for time that belonged to us – and then learned to make that time productive too.

Perhaps that is why doing nothing with other women can now feel almost luxurious.

🪑 Maybe sitting around was never really nothing…
Talking carried information. Complaining released pressure. Stories preserved family history. Gossip could warn, connect, entertain and make somebody feel witnessed.

Maybe friendship was never what women did after the important work was finished.
Maybe it was part of the infrastructure that made the work — and life — survivable.

So no, the answer is not to give back the degree, the salary, the ambition or the room of one’s own. Keep all of it. But a successful life should also contain hours nobody can invoice, optimise or put on a résumé.

Keep the freedom. Bring back wasting an afternoon together. 💚

💬 Ideas for the week when life starts sounding like a deadline.

🎬 WATCH: Waiting to Exhale (1995)
Four women move through love, divorce, work, disappointment and reinvention – but what holds the film together is how relentlessly they return to one another. It keeps circling that friendship is not what happens after life. It is what gets you through it.
📖 READ: Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming
Liming takes seriously something modern life increasingly treats as frivolous: spending unscripted time with other people. No networking objective. No productivity angle. No “making the most of it.” Just the increasingly rare luxury of being somewhere together long enough for nothing to turn into something.
🀄 PLAY: Mah Jongg
Four women, a table full of tiles and several hours in which absolutely nothing needs to become content. Mah Jongg has a long history as a social ritual among American women — particularly Jewish women – where the game provided the structure, but conversation was often the real event. Perhaps we need more hobbies whose greatest achievement is keeping us at the table.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

🧪 AMH Tests Can’t Predict Natural Fertility: New research involving records from nearly 1.4 million women found that AMH testing can measure ovarian reserve, but cannot reliably tell a healthy woman whether she will conceive naturally, how quickly, or how much reproductive time she has left.
🤰 Amazon Faces Pregnancy-Discrimination Lawsuit: Four former warehouse workers have filed a proposed nationwide class action accusing Amazon of denying pregnant employees accommodations including seating, bathroom breaks and time for prenatal care. Amazon denies the allegations and says more than 99.9% of pregnancy-related accommodation requests were approved last year.
🗳️ Blind Women Still Face Barriers at the Ballot Box: Despite federal accessibility protections, blind and low-vision voters continue to report inaccessible machines, poorly trained poll workers and loss of privacy when casting ballots — an issue gaining urgency ahead of the 2026 U.S. midterms.
📚 Afghan Sisters Keep Studying Under Taliban Rule: Three sisters deported from Iran back to Afghanistan are continuing unofficial private classes despite Taliban restrictions barring women and girls from most education and public life.
🏒 Women’s Hockey Lands a National U.S. TV Deal: The PWHL has signed its first season-long national American broadcast agreement, with Scripps Sports bringing three weekly broadcast windows to ION as the league expands to 12 teams.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

In 1969, after becoming a mother, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles collapsed the distinction between: how making art was considered creative work and washing, cleaning, cooking and maintaining a home were simply things that had to get done.

In her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Ukeles declared that the repetitive work of keeping things clean, functioning and alive could itself become art. She went on to scrub museum floors as performances and, years later, spent months shaking hands with 8,500 New York sanitation workers for Touch Sanitation, thanking each of them for keeping the city alive.

Her work asks: Why do we celebrate creating something new, but barely notice the labour required to keep what already exists going?

✨ Some of the most important work in a life is the work nobody thinks to applaud.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚