Danielle Crittenden

Life and career

Crittenden was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is the daughter of Max Crittenden, a former editor with the now-defunct Toronto Telegram, and her mother is journalist and book critic, Yvonne Crittenden. Her stepfather was Peter Worthington, the late award-winning Canadian journalist with the Toronto Telegram and founder and former editor of the Toronto Sun. Crittenden graduated in 1981 from Northern Secondary School in Toronto. She did not attend university but immediately became a full-time general assignment reporter and feature writer at the Toronto Sun until 1984. She then traveled and freelanced for magazines and newspapers until marrying David Frum, in 1988. The couple moved to New York and later to Washington, D.C., where they currently reside. They have three children, Miranda (born 1991), Nathaniel (born 1993) and Beatrice (born 2001).

Crittenden is currently the Creative Director and CEO of Fig Tree & Vine (www.figtreeandvine.com), a Jewish-oriented website and lifestyle platform she launched in April, 2015. Previously she worked as International Blogs Editor for the Huffington Post, and before that as the founding Managing Editor of Blogs for the online journal, Huffington Post Canada, which launched in May 2011. A longtime contributor to the Huffington Post U.S. site, her numerous articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and the Ladies Home Journal, among other publications. A former columnist for the New York Post, she has appeared on NBC's Today show, The O'Reilly Factor, ABC's 20/20 and Nightline, network news shows, as well as numerous programs for CSPAN, Exact MSNBC, PBS, CNN, Fox, NPR, CTV, and CBC.

She is co-author of the cookbook, From a Polish Country House Kitchen (Chronicle, Fall 2012), with Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum, and the author of three previous books: Her non-fiction book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1999; Touchstone 2000), resulted in a November 1999 Vanity Fair feature describing Crittenden as “one of the most important new thinkers about women and family”. She also has written two works of fiction: The President’s Secret IMs (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007), originally published on the Huffington Post; and Amanda Bright @ Home, the first novel ever to be serialized by the Wall Street Journal (Warner Books, 2003). From 1994 - 1996, Crittenden created and was editor of The Women's Quarterly, published by the Independent Women's Forum, a non-profit 501C3 organization. The IWF was founded to challenge policies and ideas of then-mainstream feminists and the National Organization for Women. In the pre-internet era, and under Crittenden's editorship, the Quarterly became an influential publication for female thinkers who dissented from feminism's presumed anti-male and anti-motherhood dogma, much of it a hangover from the 1970s women's movement. In partnership with the IWF, Crittenden encouraged a "new wave" of feminism, promoting the works of such writers and scholars as Christina Hoff Sommers, Anne Applebaum, Camille Paglia and others.

Works