Shackles and bondage

Back in the late sixties, I fancied myself "liberated".  No housewife life for me, no siree, I was going to be a liberated career woman.  Afterall, I was in the vanguard of the movement, the age of the pill, the age of the university-educated woman, the holder of a job the equal of any man's.  Women in my cohort were going to change the world. 

All that went out the window when I got married and had kids.  Problem was, the men we married had been raised by stay-at-home mothers who did everything for them.  How we thought our husbands were suddenly going to wield a vacuum and grab a toilet brush is beyond me?!  Of course, they didn't.  I coped....sort of........until I had children.  Then the workload doubled and tripled.  But was I going to give up my career and stay at home?  Not on your life because, as I have blogged many times, society does not value child care -- witness the below-the-cost-of-living wages daycare workers are paid.  "I'm staying home and caring for my children," was not a response I would ever give anyone who inquired about what I did for a living at a cocktail party.  I'd seen it too many times.  The guest who asks the question sneers and walks away.  (The only time I ever heard a good retort to that question was when a woman replied, "I'm a leisure expert, ask me anything."  That was a good one.)

But she was older than I and had obviously missed the whole "women's lib" thing to which I had attached myself at the time -- you know, the "before-kids" time.  Debora L. Spar has just written a book about it, 'Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection'.  Been there, done that.  It's really about the shackles borne by the liberated woman.  With a hyphenated last name, people always assumed "Marley" was my maiden name.  "No, I'm not liberated," I would reply.  "I am in bondage like every other woman with a job and kids."  Spar writes, “My generation made a mistake. We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations.” 
 
Proving it, Spar outlines the many conflicting and impossible ideas of what women living and working in supposedly post-feminist environments are expected to be: well-dressed, fit, beautiful and sexy, but not self-interested, self-regarding, threateningly beautiful, or overly sexual; successful and ambitious but always likeable and accommodating; fertile and maternal but never distracted from their work; corporate citizens, earth mothers and ever-available wives, and also vegan, gluten-free chefs and on-trend decorators and active social directors and rigorous personal organizers. 

Give me a break.  Nevertheless, it's all true.  Although super-busy women already know their lives would be easier if they stopped going to parent-teacher association meetings, like Spar did, or cut way down on the number of lessons and practices their kids attend, upped the kids’ responsibilities around the house, or had groceries delivered and stopped throwing dinner parties, we don't do it.  We do it all -- or at least I did.  

"Why are you always in a bad mood," B would ask while I was frantically preparing dinner for six people after slogging it out in a hostile office all day.  Why he had no clue I have no clue!

But bottom line: would I have traded in my lifestyle to be a stay-at-home?  Never in a million years.