Welcome to FrauenTimes!

My name is Ed Frauenheim. My full name is Edward Edmund Frauenheim IV. I say that to distinguish myself from my dad, Edward Edmund Frauenheim III, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who also calls himself Ed Frauenheim. I like my full name and am proud of my lineage. But it has seemed pretentious to me to use that full name or even the “IV” in a byline.

And I’m a byline guy. I’ve been a professional journalist based in San Francisco since 1995, writing for newspapers, magazines and Web sites. I currently am a Senior Writer at business publication Workforce Management magazine. At Workforce Management, I work with excellent editors and reporters, and I’ve been able to publish some of my best writing there.

But I have long aspired to be more than a traditional reporter. I hope also to be a “public intellectual.” In other words, I want to come up with and express ideas that affect public debate and change attitudes. What’s more, I have found that my work as a traditional journalist can stifle the activist in me. And limit the topics I write about.

That’s where this blog comes in. On it, I plan to articulate ideas and explore topics and advocate positions in ways I haven’t up to now. One of the main topics I’ll write about is economic policy. And on that topic I plan to publish an essay that I’m currently calling “From Tough Luck to Tough Love.” It calls for treating Americans with both care and accountability when it comes to the economic realm, with greater recognition of the way individuals in today’s turbulent global economy need help from society and the way society can prosper through a stronger safety net. This essay will grow over time, I hope, and may eventually take the form of a book.

“From Tough Luck to Tough Love” and other items published here may include bits of memoir. That’s a choice inspired partly by my wife, Rowena Richie. In her writings and dance-making, she has shown me the power of combining conventional research with personal stories. Of seeing the big story in the small one, and vice versa.

Besides a writer and a husband, I’m the father of two young kids. Julius and Skyla not only amaze me with their antics, observations and curiosity, but inspire me to speak “authentically.” To be true to myself. To be my best self.

I think psychologist Abraham Maslow was on to something with his notion of “self-actualization” as the peak human state. Reading about Maslow on Wikipedia recently, I was struck by this description, attributed to him, of self-actualization: “an episode or spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic…. He becomes in these episodes more truly himself, more perfectly actualising his potentialities, closer to the core of his being, more fully human.”

I felt something along these lines when I first hit on the gist of “From Tough Luck to Tough Love” last October. A way to combine journalism with my interests in economics, intellectual history and cultural analysis. And the essay feels tied to goals I hold dear: to make the world more just, more loving, more peaceful and more joyous. I hope this site more generally will help me achieve that more integrated, true-to-myself state.

At FrauenTimes, I am taking myself seriously enough to get my ideas out in the public. But I aim not to take myself so seriously that I can’t be playful or “punny.” And I recognize that my ideas are bound to improve with responses from readers. So, any questions? Comments? Nasty remarks?

Thanks for visiting.

Ed