Day 3

Okay, so the calendar says it is Day 5; sorry I am not yet caught up on my posts. I am in the middle of moving, and it is difficult to put up two a day when the day is filled with packing. My move will be next week, as I drive halfway across country to a new home. Once there, I hope to get settled quickly and get the catching up done. For now, I am trying to keep on track as best I can.

Today, I give you an essay. It has been something that I have thought about, and discussed with others, for a lot of years. Now, I give you some rather roughly drawn out thoughts. It isn’t particularly polished, but my thoughts are rarely polished. That requires a process, one which involves weeks, even months or years, of work. Since I put these up pretty much as I finish them, they haven’t been through that process. Today, rough though it may be, I want to talk about having it all.

HAVING IT ALL

 When I was a young girl, growing up in the middle of the feminist movement, we were urged to ‘have it all’. We were served up a steady dose of television women who didn’t have it all…unless cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, and smiling is having it all. We had few role models in our storybooks, few role models in our music or movies, and for a great many of us, few role models in our schools. Still, we were told that women could have it all…just like men.

Hold it right there. Since when did men have it all? Most men live lives that are sort of ordinary. They go to work. They come home. They go fishing on the weekend, or work on their cars, or do things with their buddies. Most men I have known…and I dare say most men everyone has known…have dreams that were unfulfilled, find little satisfaction in life, and certainly don’t ‘have it all’…whatever ‘all’ is.

So where did this mantra come from, having it all? It’s been around most, if not all, of my life. It might be traced to Helen Gurley Brown, but it appears to have been around longer than that. She believed in it, even wrote a book by that title. We could have it all…family, a career, a great life. Of course, the whispered addendum to that was “only if we do it all”. No one expected women to have it all, not really. It was always a pipe dream, but a lot of women bought into it. Fortunately, I was not one of those women. My role models modeled for me what it meant to be a woman with a career and a family…exhausting, non-stop work.

My grandmother was the first woman I knew with a career. She worked long days as a high school teacher, then went home to clean house and feed farm hands. She got up early to make sure the farm hands and the family had a large breakfast, then headed for her job. She didn’t have a lot of time for herself, though once she retired she managed to enjoy life. But she never had it all…even though she did it all. No one else offered to help her. Her children were both boys; they weren’t in the kitchen helping her beat the eggs or whip the cream.

I never really knew another woman for a long time who ‘had it all’. My mother was not a career woman; she stayed home with the house and the kids. My older sister settled into a similar life. I was the first woman in the family to approach life with the goal of having a satisfying and productive career. Marriage was sort of an afterthought for me, but it did happen, and then the child. I only had one by choice, but many of my colleagues had more than one child. Funny, it didn’t seem to be any harder to deal with having several children than having one. The first one really was the hardest, for all of them…and for me.

The brutal truth is that women of my generation were expected to have it all. We were expected to do it all. Anything less would be seen as failure. Okay, so I’m a failure, so sue me! That’s what I wanted to say. I didn’t. I don’t know any woman who did. None of us achieved  having it all, and we took it personally, because we knew we were seen as failures, in one area or another. Many were seen as failures in all areas; I was one of those. Only one child? What, you aren’t a doctor/lawyer/high power executive? No, sorry, I’m only a scientist.

Men of my generation were told they should ‘help’ their wives. They weren’t told they should consider the housework equally their responsibility. Many of them resented even being asked to pick up their socks. They grew up with fathers who went to work, leaving their socks on the floor for their wives to pick up. They felt like they lost something. Here were women, having it all, while they had to help with the housework, instead of having a real wife like their mother was. Half the housework? That was a laugh. If you were able to achieve that from your husband, you were a rare woman indeed.

 Flash forward…two generations…three. We are now in the third generation since my young adulthood. Women aren’t really being told to ‘have it all’ anymore, but the message is there, underlying a lot of articles, shows, and podcasts. Women aren’t doing something right. They are leaving their children in day care while they work…what a horror! They are tired when they come home from work…imagine that. They aren’t significantly happier than their mothers…except I suspect the truth of that is, they simply are less likely to lie about it than their mothers. Or maybe it’s just that they are less likely to hide booze and Valium in the vacuum cleaner and share it with the other women in the neighborhood. They kept the smiles plastered on because they were…well, plastered.

Men are helping more in the home. Notice, I said helping. There isn’t a groundswell of men taking on their fair share of duties. Some men do, of course, but a lot of men still consider it as helping their wife with her duties. And several studies have shown that men tend to get the fun duties. The woman changes the diaper; the man plays with the kid. The woman scrubs the oven; the man…I’m not sure what goes along with that. Scrubbing an oven is a rather singular duty. Men may share the burden of the cooking, but a lot of them balk at washing up. Dishwashers do help with that, of course. Women do most of the shopping, and no, that isn’t a pleasure duty. For some women, yes, they love shopping. For many of us, it’s just another burden, a task we complete and race home, exhausted.

Now women bear another burden…men aren’t doing as well as they used to. This must be the fault of women. Why? Who knows? Why can’t it be the fault of men? No, it must be the women. There are more women than men in the colleges, so it must be the fault of women. There are more women than men who are veterinarians; it must be the fault of women. There are more women than men who are gynecologists; it must be the fault of women. But it isn’t the fault of men that there are more men than women who are proctologists. As long as there are more men, the field is considered balanced, and there is no problem.

  Women also bear the responsibility for men’s behavior. If a man sexually assaults a woman, it must be how she was dressed, or where she was having a drink with the girls, or she flirted, or she looked vaguely in his direction, or she had the gall to be female in the vicinity of the man. If a woman is the victim of domestic violence, she may be asked what she did to provoke it. A woman cannot move an inch or smile without being guilty of something. And she can’t avoid smiling without being ordered to smile by people she sees. There is, apparently, not only not one right way to be a woman, there is no way for a woman to be right.

Face it, women. Even if you do it all, you will never have it all. But why is having it all a goal? Men don’t have it all, they just have more of it than women. They have more options, more opportunities. Now we have shifted that demographic, let’s enjoy it. Let’s quit trying to have it all, and be satisfied if we have as much as the men. We don’t, not yet, but we are still working on that. Meanwhile, we struggle to hold together families and careers, and still look and feel sexy when the time is appropriate. Having it all isn’t worth it. Just pick out how much suits you, and insist on having at least the chance to try. And make sure your man (if you decide to have one) does as much as you do before he gets as much as you have. Only then will we be truly equal.