Is the emancipation of women making a career, doing everything or going back to caring, if you feel like it?
New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck – famous for her charts about motherhood, work and guilt – would schematize the history of women as a vicious circle ranging from staying at home with children in the 1950s, to working neglecting them in the 1970s, to making a career as perfect mothers in the 2000s, up to today’s resignation to return to the starting point, that is, at home with the children.
The choice of many, men and women, after the pandemic
We have already talked about how the pandemic has awakened the need to give careor to put it in the American way, of generativity: that feeling fulfilled by taking care of children, animals, plants, and in short by sowing seeds for the new generations or for the future. It is one of the feelings behind the great designationthe large international wave of layoffs followed the lockdowns of 2020 and ’21, in favor of escapes in the middle of nature and more flexible hours. Thus, many managers who had never seen their children’s dentists in the face were able to convert to smart working as fanatical as their corporate fervor had been, and feed Instagram profiles with photos of laptops by the sea. As long as it is the neighbors who start up freelance activities compatible with care, everything can be attributed to the usual welfare, but when they are women with entire teams of nurses at their disposal, other hypotheses and categories need to be disturbed.
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Three important cases
In the last few months, they have been right two prime ministers who had managed the crises in their respective countries, New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Scottish Nicholas Sturgeonto go from one excess to another, or from a surreal idea of omnipotence to a more realistic one of oppression.
The first, who had put in place the strictest anti-covid protocols in the world while her baby with a Maori name sucked the thawed milk (and we complained about closed nests), today, after a statement that focuses on the famous mental health and family wish, was acclaimed leader also in the resignationas the first in a string of great women to drop one after another.
The second has no children, but on closer inspection it seems that the real cause of her personal collapse is neither the failure of the Supreme Court to approve the referendum on Scottish secession, nor the controversies caused by its reform which allows for gender changes at 16 years. No, Nicola understood that it was up to his hair at the funeral of a brotherly friend, and left politics with the more modern excuse that he doesn’t leave you time – I’m not saying for the children – but not even for coffee with friends.
A few days later Nicola left his post as CEO of YouTube after 9 years Susan Wojcickione of Silicon Valley’s most successful women, crazy enough not only to rent Brin and Page the famous garage where the search engine that would change history was born, but also to make five children while scaling Googleand that last month she “decided to start a new chapter centered around her family, her health, and the projects she’s passionate about” (and which, I assume, don’t take place in the garage).
Artists and bad mothers
It is not only in the circle of tech and power, par excellence male chauvinists, that contemporary society pretends to be able include women who are actually überwomen: the art world has very similar mechanisms, with the tacit expectation that female artists lead intense, nocturnal and free lives, to pursue, according to the rhythms of inspiration, the free time of the public, the intense relationships with the rest of the culture industry or free promotion. Marina Abramović declared the impossibility of being artists and mothersand as always, female writers have been known to be degenerate mothers.
The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva left her youngest daughter to die of starvation in an orphanage, preferring her brilliant daughter to her, with whom she frescoed a miserable frozen attic with verses (again, no welfare). Alice Munro moved the begging girls so they wouldn’t hit the moving roller of the typewriter, and she feverishly wrote at night fearing she would die of it. Even today, women writers, except rare exceptions, like Rachel Cusk, I’m not looking for a social order within which to reconcile the two drives of creating and procreating. Rather, they are eager to reaffirm theirs freedom not to become mothers, so heralded as to seem boring by now. We get it: the female artists (the premiers, the CEOs) even mothers cannot do well.
And who wants to be a mother?
But let’s talk about this: if they wanted towhat are the social mechanisms to undermine It has been said, returning to the women in charge, that they have on their side the all-female advantage of having a healthier attachment to power of men, and to therefore be able to give up at any moment. Yes. But as long as they stayed on board, did that mean they played, in a sense, the men’s rules?
It is then, that of the quitting, another way to be a feministafter the woman who emancipated herself by putting her career before her family, and the one who hoped to have goat and cabbage, embodying an unattainable model of efficiency?
It’s not exactly a brand new idea. Already in 1983, at the graduation speech of Mills College, the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin said graduation speeches usually
“They’re made with the tacit understanding that whoever’s graduating is a man, or should be a man anyway. (…) The intellectual tradition is masculine. Public discourse is made in (…) the language of men. Of course women learn it. We are not stupid. (…) We have had far too many words of power and speeches about life as a battle. Perhaps what we lack are the words of weakness. Now, instead of wishing you could progress from this ivory tower of college into the Real World, build a career of triumphs (…) support our country to remain powerful and succeed in every way possible (…) what you hope is that be able to survive (…) in dark places. (…) And when you fail, and feel defeated (…) then I hope you remember that darkness is your country (…) where there are no wars to fight or win, but where the future exists (…), where human beings cultivate human souls.’
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