Lady Business: Market crashes, Hunger Games, and '90s nostalgia

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 97th issue, published March 22, 2020.
 

Suburban golf-course gothic.
 

“I feel like I’m tracing the walls of my prison. Or my Hunger Games arena.”
 
That was how I described my daily long walk yesterday, an effort to spend as much time as possible outside while knowing that escape from what’s bearing down on us all remains impossible.
 
The last week has won the hard-earned distinction of becoming 2020’s weirdest and most-terrifying yet. More than 300,000 people have been confirmed positive for COVID-19, and more than 13000 have died. California, New York, and most of the rest of the country has shut down. Financial markets, the Federal Reserve, bailout-seeking businesses and their layoff numbers all seem to be re-enacting the last economic meltdown, one that the country spent the past decade trying to recover from.
 
Some of this week has been extremely reminiscent of 2008, and some of it is very new. (We all live in Zoom now!) The panicked uncertainty over what this virus can do to our short-term health and survival puts a fun new filter on the long-term anxiety over what happens if and when the immediate pandemic scare subsides, even for those of us lucky enough to stay home right now. Will there be a functioning economy to go back to? Will we have jobs, 401(k)s, non-emergency healthcare, our favorite neighborhood restaurants?
 
Hence the Hunger Games feeling of trying to break out of this situation, only to know that there’s nowhere better to escape to. Like the slow-moving-apocalypse analogy of a few weeks ago, I’ve found myself invoking a lot of comparisons to dystopian science fiction.

But I’ve also found myself thinking a lot about the ‘90s this week. Perhaps it’s because I’m staying with my parents in my childhood home, working from the table where I did a lot of my high school homework and going for daily walks and runs within the bounds of my pre-driving life. Perhaps because I remember being holed up here for teenage snow days, particularly one snowstorm-packed winter that closed my school down for most of a month and seemed like a surprise vacation in comparison to this anxious global quarantine.

And perhaps because I’ve been watching a lot of ‘90s-related entertainment as a real distraction from the sunny apocalypse outside, including the first few episodes of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere. The series, set in 1997 and starring the Most Intense versions of Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, is so far most enjoyable to me for its pop-culture nostalgia: Buffy! Ricki Lake! A super-serious slow cover of the nonsensical “Sex and Candy”!
 
More cheerful and comforting was a rewatch this week of A League of Their Own, which holds up astonishingly well almost 30 years later. As Katie Baker wrote at The Ringer a few years ago:
 

It is the best-earning baseball movie in history, and it holds up as well today as it did in the early ’90s. The script and characters are funny and nuanced, and the mood isn’t dampened by a forced relationship with a wet-blanket character. (Although, to be fair, and with much respect for the troops, Bob Hinson is pretty dull.)

The baseball scenes are choreographed and performed so well that they rarely take you out of the film. The frying-pan-sized leg wounds are not makeup; the actress who played the superstitious backup catcher, Alice (Renee Coleman), truly did obtain that enormous strawberry while sliding into a base. The humiliating "gracefully and grandly" charm school that the girls must attend is based on the actual baseball players of the ’40s and ’50s being sent to makeup doyenne Helena Rubinstein for etiquette and beauty instruction. Even the "batter up, hear the call" earworm that is sung throughout the movie — in the clubhouse, on the bus, in your mind for the rest of the day — is the real deal.

There’s also what the movie acknowledges but doesn’t dwell on: There was a relatively small window for the women who played professional baseball, and it closed a few years after the crisis that allowed them to do so. The All-American Girls Professional League formed in the middle of the war that we’re seeing so many comparisons to these days, a war that created some unprecedented (if restricted, and segregated) opportunities for women. But the league dissolved in 1954, and women are to this day still struggling to break back into any part of professional major-league baseball.
 
Still, this week I’m looking at A League of Their Own as a reminder that life does go on after wartime. And sometimes, even, the awful crisis can create some unexpected good.
 

Lady Bits

--“When a feminist company falls short of its utopian vision, it is the workers who must toil to maintain the illusion. And they are women, too.” I could have a lot more to say about this another time, but: The debate over whether it’s sexist to report on the failures of women founders and corporate feminism (it's not) ramped up in the last couple of weeks, seemingly partly in anticipation of this New York Times magazine feature on The Wing.
 
--“We find ourselves as reluctant participants in a global experiment of relinquishing control, but there’s one thing we can do to soothe our overly-anxious brains: learn.” Congrats to the wonderful and talented Polina Marinova, whose weekly and growing Profile newsletter is a treasure trove of in-depth stories on interesting people and companies. Subscribe here. 
 
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