In the past, pop culture has portrayed Emily Dickinson as something of a lonely spinster—a weird recluse who spent her days gardening and writing poems that wouldn’t be published until after her death in 1886. It’s true that Dickinson never married and preferred isolation in her later years, sure, but there’s so much more to her story. And Dickinson, now available for streaming on Apple TV+, is here to tell it.
“Emily Dickinson’s life was defined by these great ironies,” explains series creator Alena Smith. “She wrote nearly 2,000 poems, one of the greatest bodies of work ever written in the English language, and almost none of it was ever published or recognized while she lived. How she found the will to keep going as an artist and where that drive came from was so fascinating to me.”
Smith’s vision: Use the 1850s—a crucial period in Dickinson’s life—as a lens for today. The result? A fresh coming-of-age tale starring Hailee Steinfeld as the titular poet. While the setting is squarely in the 19th century, Dickinson draws parallels to the present through modern music and winks at current events. In episode one, for example, Dickinson imagines meeting Death (played by Wiz Khalifa, naturally) while “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish blares in the background. In another, a period-appropriate dance ends with everyone twerking.
Apple TV+
Using these 2019 updates, Smith explains, gives viewers a direct look into Dickinson’s inner life—this is a woman who’s at war with her rigid Victorian society. “If Emily Dickinson was an artist who was quite misunderstood in her own time, maybe we can understand her better in ours,” Smith says. “Just as Emily’s poems were breaking the rules and ahead of her time, this show is just trying to catch up with her in a way.” So Dickinson is not a literal transcription of Dickinson’s life—think of it more as a translation. Everything is rooted in fact, just with a 21st-century twist.
Steinfeld found another parallel between Dickinson and today’s millennial women. “In the show Emily goes back and forth about, ‘Do I even want to have an audience?’ Because all you want when you don’t have one is to have one. And then you start to actually get into the reality of having an audience, and you’re like, ‘This could be the worst possible thing ever.’ I think that has a lot to do with what millennials are dealing with today. You can seek attention and receive it [with social media], but once you get it and realize it’s not what you want, you kind of can’t turn back.”
Naomi Hirabayashi who, with Marah Lidey, cofounded Shine, an app designed to make self-care a daily habit, doesn’t hesitate to describe the value of Entrepreneur Camp: “It’s validity,” she says. “Apple is the world’s most iconic brand, and when they elevate someone or something, it holds so much weight because they are on the pulse of innovation.” The company’s support helped when she and Lidey were marketing the app and won a “best app of the year” designation; Apple also helped them sweat the design details, especially about accessibility, adjusting for things like people who read right to left instead of left to right, or changing icons or notifications so they are visible for people who are color-blind. The upgrades—and their mission to never be “preachy, presumptuous, or pricey” and to assert that self-care is “more than taking a bubble bath at the end of a long day”—have helped them build an audience that is more representative than most, with black women making up some 20 percent of their community, Hirabayashi says. Now Shine is the largest self-care membership in the world, she says, reaching 4 million people in 189 countries every day.
Lactapp founder Maria Berreuzo Martinez, from Spain, was also looking for community when she created her app to support breastfeeding moms. Just a month after giving birth, she was in a car accident that left her hospitalized for two months. She couldn’t see her baby but wanted to continue breastfeeding, so she pumped every day until she was home and could resume nursing. It was possible, she says, because “I had information and support—I had mothers around me that really supported me. Every woman should have that.”
So Martinez set out to create a virtual version of that, spending more than a year to develop an app that would answer questions customized to each mom and the age of her infant. Now Lactapp answers 35,000 questions a week, through live chats and with the help of AI. They’ve also identified key signs a mom may be experiencing things like postpartum depression and, in the next iteration of the app, hope to incorporate information and referrals to doctors for these often undiagnosed conditions. The app, Martinez says, already feels completely new after working with Apple. “We worked for three years on this, and after one session we were like, Oh! We can do this better,” she says. Martinez is mission-driven, but she’s not shy about this being a business (smart since app developers earned $30 billion in the last year alone). “Right now the system makes money when breastfeeding fails,” she says. “What if breastfeeding succeeds? Nobody thinks that way. We have to open a lot of minds.”
Progress on women’s issues, says Kim Azzarelli, cofounder of Seneca Connect, has been “too damn slow. Technology is what’s going to bring us that leap forward.”
photo courtesy of Apple
Kim Azzarelli, cofounder of Seneca Women (alongside Melanne Verveer, the ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues in the Obama administration), admits she wasn’t a tech native when she first had the idea of launching an app, but that didn’t deter her because she felt such an urgency for change. “Those of us who have been working in women’s issues a long time know we have a lot of the solutions, but unfortunately, we’re not able to scale the ideas quickly enough,” she says. “If you want to be part of designing the future, we need women at the table. And to do that we need women in technology.” Azzarelli and Verveer already had a book, Fast Forward, and a newsletter, but that wasn’t enough. An app, Azzarelli explains, offers “the ability to be interactive, to poll people, and to reach the community, but also the ability to be more direct and send daily, more snackable information. In a newsletter we can give people thoughts, but here we can give people something to do, right away.” Apple advised on their Seneca Connect app, which provides tools and resources for female entrepreneurs around the world, and includes the ability to shop from women-owned businesses. The company helped with engineering expertise, and Azzarelli brought her decades of knowledge about women’s issues to the table. Azzarelli has other ideas about AR to help bring these ideas and information to life, but she’s mum for now. “We are coming up to the 100th anniversary of [women getting] the vote…and [progress] is just too slow, too damn slow,” she says.
For her, it would be irresponsible not to use technology to help further the Seneca goals. “Susan B. Anthony traveled all over this country by horse and buggy, not Uber and Lyft,” she says. “They really made sacrifices for 50 years to get us the vote. My fear is that we’re at this moment where [activism is] just in vogue. If we don’t give people actionable things to do and leverage technology, the action we’re seeing now could become another fad, and people will say, ‘Oh, we did that.’ No we didn’t—we’re still stuck. We don’t want the appearance of progress…. Technology is what’s going to bring us that leap forward.” Like the other developers, she found a new community at Entrepreneur Camp, or E Camp, as some call it. “I’ve been in a lot of rooms full of women,” she says. “At E camp, I was with another 15 women-led businesses, from all over the world. You just feel like you’re in something together. You feel like you’re building the future.”
There was good news for women and bad news for women at Apple’s conference Tuesday. The good: A female executive took the stage. The bad: All anyone could talk about was her pink lace trench coat.
Almost immediately after Senior Vice President of Retail Angela Ahrendts took the stage (the only female presenter during the two hour event, by the way), Twitter erupted with commentary on her Burberry pink lace trench—some of it complimentary, some of it downright offensive. Either way, you’d hardly know Ahrendts was talking about the retail plan for one of the world’s most valuable brands.
Apple often touts itself as an inclusive and diverse company, but its onstage presence tends to be anything but. In fact, just a handful of women have ever been featured onstage at Apple’s many events to discuss or demo products, while dozens and dozens of white men continue to circle through.
Even when women do get the chance to represent the tech giant, they only get mere minutes to speak. As Mic reported in June, women got just 7 percent of the speaking time at Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference 2017 keynote. Men spoke for approximately 117 minutes, while female speakers received just nine minutes of speaking time. Yikes.
Meanwhile, public support for more female leadership in the tech world is stronger than ever. As The Cut reported, social media lost its collective mind in 2016, when Bozoma Saint John, Apple Music’s Head of Global Consumer Marketing, took to the stage. It finally felt like Apple was representing its consumers with smart executives, no matter their gender.
We can certainly applaud women like Ahrendts rocking their personal style on a big day, but it’s important to remember that Silicon Valley is suffering from a devastating gender imbalance—one that Apple CEO Tim Cook has even admitted being a part of.
“Women are such an important part of the workforce,” Cook told the student body at Auburn University in April. “If STEM-related fields continue to have this low representation of women, then there just will not be enough innovation in the United States. That’s just the simple fact of it.”
While Cook may say he’s willing to push for women in tech, Business Insider reports that just 23 percent of employees in technical roles at Apple are women.
As for why tech is so egregiously failing women, Cook told Mashable in 2015, “I think it’s our fault — ‘our’ meaning the whole tech community. I think in general we haven’t done enough to reach out and show young women that it’s cool to do it and how much fun it can be.”
