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The Application

You're Cordially Invited to Apply

Seven questions, an evening, and the whole of your attention. It would be our privilege to read yours.

What The Membership Opens

The Women's Essay Library — written by members, private and unindexed. The kind of honest that cannot exist on the open internet, kept for women who can be trusted with it.

The Evening — twelve women, one long table, once a quarter, in a new city every time. Breaking bread, plates, and glass ceilings. By invitation, and every member is considered.

The Sabbatical — four weeks, once a year, twenty women, a castello. Come for a week or for the whole month. Only members may apply.

Welcoming women with joie de vivre to apply.

Who We Welcome

Women. Identity verified through a specialist service — we never see or store your documents. We verify every member so that every member knows exactly whose company she is in.

Beyond that, we read for three things. Range — a woman who is holywater and hellfire both, and has stopped apologising for either. Appetite — she means to take the month, or to build her life toward it on purpose. And generosity — she will make the other nineteen women better, and can be trusted with everything she hears at the table.

What Sabbatical is not: not a networking group, a women's circle, or a yoga retreat. Not a course. Not for everyone. Being able to pay for the retreat is a requirement, never a qualification — women who can afford it are declined every Reading.

How It Works

i.

You Take the Time

Seven questions, an evening, and nothing charged. Answer them the way you would write to a woman you trust.

ii.

A Real Person Reads

Every single word, by a woman, unhurried. The first pass is blind — your writing is met before you are.

iii.

The Committee Sits

Four times a year — March, June, September, December — and you hear from us either way, on a day you already know.

iv.

You Are Welcomed

The Membership is $180 a year, charged only once you are through the door. Many are waitlisted, and a 'no' just means no right now.

The terms, plainly:$180 a year · nothing charged until you are welcomed · renews annually · lapse gracefully whenever you wish · removal for breach of the code is permanent and unrefunded
Postcard

Seven questions, read properly rather than skimmed.

There are no right answers and we are not counting accomplishments. We are reading for a woman who knows what she wants and is not embarrassed by it. Protecting the integrity and cohesion of this group is our deepest, most sacred endeavour — which is why the committee reads next in September.

Somewhere along the way you were handed an either/or — by your mother, your industry, your church, your own good sense. Serious or beautiful. Ambitious or beloved. Devout or free. Tell us which one you were handed, who handed it to you, and what you have done with it since: whether you obeyed it, outran it, or are still quietly negotiating with it at three in the morning. Start where it actually started, not where the story got tidy.

The one you have never apologised for, never optimised, never scheduled away. The good butter. The long bath. The terrible novel. The horse, the second glass, the hour before anyone else is awake. Tell us how it began, what it costs you to protect, and who first taught you it was allowed. Name it plainly — we would like to be able to picture it.

You are welcome here as holywater and hellfire both, and we mean it literally, so tell us about the two of you. The woman who builds the thing, closes the deal, carries the weight, answers at midnight. And the woman who wants a long lunch, a cold swim, a whole afternoon face-down in the grass. How do they live together? Which one has been running your life this past year, and what has the other one been doing while she waits?

What are you carrying for someone else that you have never once set down? A family, a company, a diagnosis, a debt, a name, somebody's expectations of you that you agreed to at twenty-six and never revisited. Tell us what it is, how long you have had it, and what it has asked of you. Take your time with this one, and say only what is yours to say.

A mother, a sister, a rival, a mentor, a daughter, a friend you have not spoken to in a decade. Not what she did for you — what you did for her, what it asked of you, and what it taught you about how to be in a room full of women. If you have also loved a woman badly, and most of us have, tell us that too. There is no wrong woman to choose.

Every member adds to the Women's Essay Library. Give us your first contribution now — the essay, the book, the letter, the sermon, the recipe, the poem you would press into the hands of every woman in this house. Tell us plainly what it did to you, and what you have never quite managed to say about it out loud.

The Sabbatical is a month in a Tuscan castello — long harvest light, twenty women, nowhere on earth to be. Walk us through one ordinary Tuesday of yours there: what wakes you, what you eat, what you finally read, what you let yourself be terrible at, who you sit beside at the long table, what you refuse to do. Then the harder half — what would have to be true at home, in your company, your household, your calendar, your nerves, for that Tuesday to actually happen? The second half is the one we read twice.

Not ready to apply? The Manifesto is free, forever, and three essays are open this quarter. Start There.