About making others feel positive feelings, one has to watch that. One time a colleague urged me, “Smile, Abigail!” We were both in the green pea soup. We had both been fired. My answer? “The reason I have a natural smile, buddy, is that I never use it except when I want to.”
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About Abigail
Abigail Rosenthal is Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is the author of A Good Look at Evil, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, now available in an expanded, revised second edition and as an audiobook. Its thesis is that good people try to live out their stories while evil people aim to mess up good people’s stories.
Her next book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, forthcoming and illustrated, provides multiple illustrations from her own life. She writes a weekly column for her blog, “Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column” (www.dearabbie-nonadvice.com) where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. She’s the editor of the posthumously published Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by her father, Henry M. Rosenthal. Some of her articles can be accessed at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin .
She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
I think it is very interesting to think of being a woman as similar to mastering an art or a skill, and it seems like a lot of the success of the women Abigail describes is in how they make others feel positive feelings (but not in like a servile way, because they all seem very solid). I’m not really sure what to do with that, but maybe it would be interesting to ask people to write about a woman or women who they view as having mastered the art of being a woman, and look for threads of commonality in the responses?