mary ventura burns the ninth kingdom down

Our Foremothers

Joan Snyder (American, b. 1940)

1995

Sometimes I look around at my generation of women writers, the ones a little older and a little younger too, and I know we will be gone: disappeared the way Jean Rhys was disappeared. She was better than most of us are. She said more in the little she wrote—with her twenty-seven-year silence. Her narrative genius was just that: genius. We expect our mediocre little books to last forever, and don't even think they have to risk anything to do so. Yet, the fine books of our time by women go out of print continually; some are brought back, most are not. I wish I had grown up reading Jean Rhys. I did grow up reading D. H. Lawrence and Jean Genet and Henry Miller. But her truth wasn't allowed to live. To hell with their fights against censorship; she was obliterated. I couldn't learn from her work because it wasn't there. And I needed Jean Rhys a hell of a lot more than I needed the above-named bad boys: as a woman and as a writer. I don't know why we now, we women writers, think that our books are going to live. There is nothing to indicate that things in general have changed for women writers. I know the children of the future will have a lot of sexy literary trash from men; but I don't think they will have much by women that shows even as much as Jean Rhys showed in 1934. This disappearance of women writers costs us; this is a lot worse than having to reinvent the wheel. When a woman writer is "lost," the possibilities of the women after her are lost too; her true perceptions are driven out of existence and we are left with books by men that tell "a lot of lies one way and another." These are lies that keep women lost in all senses: the writers, the Annas. We have not done much to stop ourselves from being wiped out because we think that we are the exceptional generation, different from all the ones that came before: the lone generation to endure male dominance (we say we are fighting it) by writing about it. Our dead sisters, their books buried with them, try not to laugh.

Hi mom,

According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, we’ve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work – the kind of stuff men do – isn’t the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage ‘pottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dusting’, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said ‘pottering about’ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?

Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that ‘Gen Z women are officially done chasing the “girlboss” grind’:

“A new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife — married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.

Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife — the classic MRS degree.

The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

Hear that ladies? You’ve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!

I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminism’s fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. It’s never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.

Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who ‘didn’t work’ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to ‘housewives’ was matched by that extended to ‘working mothers’ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the ‘career women are bitches who’ll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at all’ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties – Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl – that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported ‘mommy wars’ – supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against ‘working mothers’ – always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.

When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as “they’ll all go off to have babies” (I was never sure whether I counted as a “waste”. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college – which only started admitting women in 1980 – by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of “the new momism” – “a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood” – and sought to pitch this as ‘true’ choice and liberation for women:

“Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But here’s where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ‘real’ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a ‘mom’ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.”

Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look – doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, it’s not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ‘realise’ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if there’s other stuff we’re interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.

At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, “we adore our kids […] The smell of a new baby’s head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents – these are joys parents treasure”). But that’s just a bit insulting, isn’t it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesn’t love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of “we’ll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at you”. Like we couldn’t have worked that out for ourselves!

There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace – or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves – trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. It’s not so much that ‘women’s work’ or ‘motherwork’ is devalued – it’s that anything women are doing isn’t classed as ‘real’ work. That’s why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being ‘girlbosses’ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and it’s time for them to give it up.

This is the story we are told: feminists – who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative – told other women – who apparently hadn’t ever worked outside the home before – that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women – who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid – let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadn’t realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom ‘liberation’ is nothing more than some teenage ‘when I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!’. Therefore it’s best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men don’t have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).

It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldn’t make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. You’ll get your own place! You’ll earn your own money! You’ll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didn’t know how good they had it. We’re like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).

I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didn’t always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him ‘top earner’ – not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because we’d have more money (I wouldn’t mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldn’t mind having fewer mundane tasks to do – the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didn’t do. I wouldn’t mind having ‘a wife’, as Judy Brady Syfer’s classic essay put it. I wouldn’t mind things just being easier.

On paper, I’m someone who ‘left it late’ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). I’m also someone who was ‘reckless’ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didn’t qualify for maternity pay). For women – particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations – the ‘making it up as you go along’ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But it’s never the perfect choice.

When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, it’s selfish of women to take ‘their’ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they don’t ‘deserve’ as much as men. Either you’re outside the home, doing something contrary to your ‘true nature’ (so you can’t be doing it as well as a man), or you’re in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isn’t really work.

Even if “the joy of motherhood” is “better than any job title”, mothers don’t just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees don’t just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being ‘allowed’ to work (or pretend-work, when it’s something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, it’s about time they were recognised as such.

The uncritical use of the term ‘girlboss’ by feminists – whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists – has really bothered me in recent years. While I’m quite aware that the ‘feminism’ of Sheryl Sandberg hasn’t exactly helped things, ‘girlboss’ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. It’s all very “look at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!” It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several ‘girl boss’ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a “no-budge, matte finish for a killer pout”).

It reminds me of terms such as ‘manageress’, ‘WPC’ and ‘coed’, words given to women in places or roles that ‘originally’ belonged to men. ‘Girlboss’ covers anything a bit important – so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]

Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isn’t the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of ‘girlbosses’ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of ‘Karens’, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people who’ve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldn’t have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally don’t, if you discount all the times in which they do).