Telling Women's Lives

Adam Dailey – Shayla Herndon-Edmunds

The Heartfelt Healer of Winston-Salem: Shayla Herndon-Edmunds

It was a while before Shayla Herndon-Edmunds finally took her own advice. While working as Director of Inclusivity at Wake Forest University, she had been telling people for years that they owe it to themselves to follow their passions. This is how Oh My Goodness! Herbal Bar began.
Herndon-Edmunds is the founder and sole operator of Oh My Goodness! (OMG) Herbal Bar in Winston-Salem, NC, while still working as the Director of Inclusivity at Wake Forest University.
Oh My Goodness specializes in herbal remedies and aromatherapy products that are intended to provide natural and worry-free methods to support health and well-being.
The entrepreneurial process began for Herndon-Edmunds organically. Since her oldest son was a baby, she has been making herbal remedies to treat his eczema and to give to friends and family.
Herndon-Edmunds eventually gained enough experience in the field of herbal remedies and aromatherapy that she felt comfortable taking the first step to turn her passion into a business. In 2015, she opened up Oh My Goodness! Herbal Bar, selling her products via Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Oh My Goodness! Herbal Bar has been more than a simple online boutique since its inception. Herndon-Edmunds says she has always had a “secret mission” from the outset to teach people about different ways to invest in their health.
“It’s important to help people explore other ways and means of being healthy,” she says, “whether that involves exposing people in communities of color to concepts like acupuncture and alternative medicine, and just being engaged more in your health in general.”
Herndon-Edmunds is charismatic, funny and warm. Wake Forest senior Ann Nguyen describes her as “Super calm and humble, especially considering how much she has on her plate all the time.” From Herndon-Edmunds’ perspective, these achievements are thanks to one core principle that she has employed throughout her life: “I’ve always known that if I just kept helping people, things would work out.”
Nguyen describes Herndon-Edmunds’ compassion and work ethic as “infectious”, while sophomore Julie Aaron says that she is “really happy about what Ms. Herndon-Edmunds is doing, and that providing such well-made products that also benefit our local community will make you feel happy about spending money on yourself.”
Herndon-Edmunds takes motivation from many sources, among them being the joy and confidence that her products can bring to her customers and members of the Winston-Salem community alike. “I consider myself to be a healer, and I’m seeing that a lot of people are gravitating towards my business as a way to do fundraising.”
While Oh My Goodness is a for-profit business, Herndon-Edmunds sees no reason why the success of her online boutique can’t benefit others as well.
Herndon-Edmunds is currently working with a local non-profit to create a special candle to be sold at vendors throughout Winston-Salem to raise funds for the local disadvantaged community. “OMG has also been a vehicle I can use to partner with these wonderful organizations that are making an impact out in the world – whether it’s local or sending proceeds to the Standing Rock Protests in South Dakota.”
Herndon-Edmunds believes she is “reinvesting in our community”. Oh My Goodness is an extension of both the Winston Salem and global collective, and a vessel through which she can empower others on her own terms.
The work involved with splitting time between her job at Wake Forest, Oh My Goodness and being a mother to three children is immense. However Herndon-Edmunds sees the work that she does at Oh My Goodness as being therapeutic.
“I am an introvert by nature” says Herndon-Edmunds. The seminars that she conducts while at Wake Forest and the responsibilities of being a mother are not only physically draining but take a toll on her mentally.
The work that she does at Oh My Goodness helps to provide a release from daily life. She enjoys the process of making her products, and she is proud of her craft and the benefit that her customers receive from Oh My Goodness.
Herndon-Edmunds frequently does her work on a case-by-case basis, creating new products for customers with specific requests and individual needs. “People understand what I’m trying to do, and when you are able to make a proactive effort to improve people’s circumstances they recognize that and respond.”
This has also helped stimulate Oh My Goodness’ product line, producing several new goods such as the post-natal belly butter and hydrating sugar scrub, which through customer request were successful enough to be made available to the general public.
Being a female entrepreneur has its own host of unique difficulties, but Herndon-Edmunds says that sexism has strangely worked to her advantage thus far. “Women are often seen as being much more kind and nurturing than men”, she says, “and that is the principle that my business revolves around, so when people associate me with my products it makes them feel more at ease.”
While it remains unclear to Herndon-Edmonds how this social dynamic will impact her business as it continues to expand, she is unfazed.
“I’ve learned the importance of understanding and articulating your story”, said Herndon-Edmunds. “Staying true to my principles has helped OMG expand into the business that it is today, so I know that if I stay proactive, constantly learning and stay kind, it’ll be okay.”

Unfinished Business Reader Response – Adam Dailey

Ann Marie Slaughter’s perspective on raising a family as a primary caregiver is hugely valuable and insightful within the larger context of our society. This is a difficult conversation to add any original thought to other than your own opinion, and while it may have been said before I had never heard the assertion that women had to leave the home by emulating men in their search for autonomy and success. It is widely accepted now within Western society that women are capable of doing men’s work, but the incredibly important act of raising a child is still essentially seen as a cop-out from a legitimate career.
A men’s movement for greater autonomy as a lead parent would be a huge step forward in terms of equality for both genders — it would help to further legitimize the act of parenting as a full-time commitment, as well as give stay at home fathers the credit they deserve without any judgment from society.

What Unfinished business is trying to do is to start a new conversation, and it is one that is inherently valuable and important for us to talk about as we begin another chapter of social development and acceptance. In that regard, I think that Slaughter’s book succeeded hugely.

Farmer Jane Reader Response – Adam Dailey

It’s difficult to choose whose experiences and accomplishments stood out the most while reading Farmer Jane, but if I had to pick one woman I would say Lois Ellen Frank led the most interesting and inspiring life. Her interest and compassion for Native foods is a prime example of how new fields of study are born and then continue to flourish after their inception. Food has always been among the most genuine and positive modes of overcoming cultural differences, as feeding someone is always a gesture of care and kindness but it is also a way of opening yourself up to your guests. When you cook something for someone that has cultural or familial significance for you, you’re kind of opening yourself up to them in a way, and saying “this is who I am”. I think that while it can’t be denied that Lois Ellen Frank was passionate about culturally significant foods by themselves, I think what probably drew her the most was the combination of kindness and openness that they entail.
Through Frank’s initiatives of cooking Native foods she is also raising awareness and respect for the Native American people, and the cyclically positive nature of Red Mesa is also helping to give hope to an astonishingly disenfranchised people. What I like most about Frank and Red Mesa is that it is founded on a premise of kindness and openness, and uses that kindness and openness to help a suffering community.

Adam Dailey – Why are there still so few women in science?

I found this particular piece to be so poignant because of the twofold problem that it represents. The lack of women’s participation in STEM fields is a direct manifestation of the problems that we have been studying in class, but it is also a huge problem within the STEM fields themselves. STEM is what ultimately is responsible for the major progressions in making life tangibly better for people, and the continued trend of positive development as a result of STEM jobs must be part and parcel with the expansion of the field’s vetting process to include women. It is a setback for both the STEM community and the global community when a woman is the best person for the job, but due to either institutional patriarchy within STEM fields or even the total dissuasion of taking on that career path in the first place, she does not do it.

The presence of a “boy curve” and a “girl curve” because the author’s professor thought that men and women would score similarly based on gender can only be described as baffling. How do you get such a prestigious job while still having such a fundamentally skewed vision of how the world works? This can be seen as a small portion of ultimately a much bigger problem; a social stigma outlined in one of the studies mentioned by Pollack as associating talent and interest in math as exclusively for “Asians and nerds”. This mindset is clearly hurting America, and the idea that pursuing an interest in math can lead to social ostracism will have a big, negative, and difficult to measure impact on our contributions in STEM unless it is averted soon. This is a fantastic article that informatively and concisely describes a big problem in both the professional and social realms of society.

Adam Dailey NYTimes Profile – Yuriko Koike

Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s first female mayor, is a contradictory figure within Japanese politics. She rose through the ranks of the Japanese government, taking home a landslide victory over a rival democrat after a long career as a television anchor before assuming the role of Defense Minister. Despite her incredible resume and strong presence in a political field which is overwhelmingly male, Japanese feminists are unsure how they should feel about Mayor Koike. She follows a strict republican agenda, which has shown in her two months in office, and is backed by several ultraconservative groups who call for the reestablishment of Japan’s traditional gender roles, as well as the whitewashing of Japan’s war crimes.
However, the cause behind the Mayor’s decisive victory has a different reason entirely – according to Dan Sneider, faculty at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, she was elected as a welcome change of pace from the abundantly scandalous zeitgeist of Japanese politics.

Adam Dailey Interview Profile – Ann Nguyen

I will be conducting my interview with Ann Nguyen. Ann is a student social activist who also runs the Wake Forest University snapchat account during midterm and finals weeks.