Caroline Fryar

Here is what I am so, so, sick of hearing about:

• Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer, Hillary Clinton or Anne-Marie Slaughter
• the 50th anniversary of 1) the publication of The Feminine Mystique, 2) Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and the unholy union that is their mystifying conflation
• glass ceilings & sticky floors
• motherhood (y/n), parenting, division of household chores (“the final feminist frontier”)
• putting all these discussions in journalism’s pink ghetto (“Men, y’all go ahead and skip this part. Now, women: you’re doing it wrong.” Discussed here.)

But I did have a few good conversations last night about this algorithmically-perfect (and therefore utterly awful) piece from New York Magazine about (yawn), this one rich lady in New Jersey who quit her job one time to be a perfect, happy wife and mother.

We all love a story of renunciation because it’s escapist–we get the catharsis of trash-talking current situations (“You go to the woods, Thoreau!” “Renounce that worldly wealth, St. Francis!” “You quit that miserable job, lady!”) without a) running any of the risks or b) engaging in real criticism about things as they are (I mean, I don’t want to think about it, either).

The utterly safe route is, at the end, to flip the renunciation–”that isn’t so great either, but now she’s stuck with it!” If seeing through one construct is good, then seeing through two is better, and it leaves the reader and writer allied in the static knowledge that both choices are pretty crummy ones, and they’re too smart for either. Doubling-down on debunking is pretty pleasant, and leaves a nice taste in the mouth: Thank goodness I didn’t fall for that. (Unsaid: I have yet to make any real choices. and Unthought: But why are there only two choices, and why are they both crummy?)

So Kelly, the Retro Housewife, is backhandedly presented as pretty boring and maybe dumb (she spends hours upon hours doing things that would make another kind of woman scream with boredom), retrograde and culturally barren (mining their grandmothers’ old-fashioned lives for values they can appropriate like heirlooms, then wear proudly as their own, best barb in the batch), not even a good homemaker (laundry explosion), willfully blind and morally bankrupt (She resented working with 12-year-old rape victims, and instead misses getting dressed for work in clothes that have buttons and hems and sexy shoes to match). If it weren’t too low a blow, we’d probably get the intimation that young Connor and Lillie are turning out to be dimmer than hoped.

Laborious recusatio aside, I don’t want to talk about Kelly–she’s written in such a way to send us through the cathartic wringer–but I do wonder what about our writer, Lisa Miller, is doing. She alternately rails against and luxuriates in the fantasy of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out:

I press her on this point. What if Alvin dies or leaves her? What if, as her children grow up, she finds herself resenting the fact that all the public accolades accrue to her husband?

versus:

How delicious might our weeknight dinners be, how straight the part in our daughter’s hair, how much more carefree my marriage, if only I spent a fraction of the time cultivating our domestic landscape that I do at work.

And I was most interested what was she wrote between lines like these:

But what if all the fighting is just too much? That is, what if a woman isn’t earning Facebook money but the salary of a social worker?

In the tumultuous 21st-century economy, depending on a career as a path to self-actualization can seem like a sucker’s bet.

A lot of the new neo-traditionalists…regard Sandberg’s lower-wattage mini-mes, rushing off to Big Jobs and back home with a wad of cash for the nanny, with something like pity.

And so I couldn’t help but wonder: Why does the workplace rub so many women the wrong way?

Just kidding, guys, that’s a rhetorical question.

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ETA: Okay, Emily Matchar (who is awesome! read her blog! I’m so excited to read her book! We live in the same town, so I have this fantasy that we’ll, like, meet at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market and, I don’t know, sneer at the artichokes together or something) has answered a rephrased version of the question I was feeling too–anti-pessimist?–to answer.

Instead of “Why does the workplace rub so many women the wrong way?” it’s “why does American society rub so many women the wrong way?”

I quote liberally:

They’re reclaiming traditional women’s work in the name of environmentalism, sustainable living, healthier eating culture, anti-consumerism.

What they shared was a conviction that America was messed up, and that all-out careerism and materialist values weren’t working anymore. They believed that a different way of life—a slower, more handmade, more family-focused life—was the key to happier, more sustainable future.

Okay, yes, fair. But then Matchar shows where the argument to stay at home & save the world takes a turn for the Tea Party:

These people are taking the bumper sticker sentiment “all change begins at home” quite literally, which is a natural outgrowth of DIY culture and the longstanding American belief in the power of personal agency. Don’t like the public school? Homeschool your kid. Don’t trust the food system? Grow your own tomatoes. It’s a reaction to record-level distrust in government and institutions, to the gloomy economy, to worries about climate change, to fears about food safety.

All too often, the movement ignores broad social change (workplace reform, school reform, food reform, etc.) in favor of a DIY approach. That’s a lot more work for mom.

Is the moral of the story POLITICS? I mean, who were the Luddites? They were knitters.