Essays

The Wall Street Journal (She-Wolves)

“What Wall Street’s Women Pioneers Had to Put”— Up With The untold battles of women in finance who broke into the old boys’ club—and stayed. (A lot of fab photos!)

Spear’s MAgazine (UK) [She-Wolves]

The New York Stock Exchange was a man’s world – until a few trailblazers brought the glass ceiling crashing down.

Financial History (magazine of the Museum of American Finance) [She-Wolves]

Cover Story for Winter 2025 Issue.

The Gloss Magazine (Ireland) [She-Wolves]

“The ‘Ugly Suits’ Of Wall Street’s Power Women” — They broke down the doors of the old boys’ club, finding a foothold in small brokerage houses before making their way into investment banks and exchange floors. But first, writes Paulina Bren, the female pioneers of Wall Street needed to get dressed …

AirMail (The Barbizon)

“Working Girls” — Even guests of New York’s women-only Barbizon, the revolutionary residential hotel once home to Sylvia Plath, found the sexist rules of their era hard to shake.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall…Is the West the Fairest of Them All? 

The politics of pitting a communist lifestyle against capitalist consumption. (Winner of the Stanley Pech Essay Prize.)

Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia 

Dissent and conformity played out in the Czech countryside between weekend “tramps,” imitators of cowboy fantasies, and city escapees to their state-sanctioned weekend cottages.

Looking West: Popular Culture and the Generation Gap in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1969-1989 

The tug-of-war between communists and dissidents over images and influences from the West: from Angela Davis to hippies to New Wave punks.

1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from across the Iron Curtain 

How Czech students during the 1968 Prague Spring viewed student revolutionaries across the Iron Curtain with both awe and jaundiced skepticism.