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Jun. 20th, 2005 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiI'm still recovering from an insanely busy weekend, and I know I still owe a tonne of comments, but I did want to post about an article in the New York Times from last week: Our Little Women Problem.
As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.
She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.
This is especially galling as the little tyrant is named for a feminist icon, in a novel I clearly should have read more closely. Jo March represented many of our first encounters with a capable, independent-minded heroine. She stands alone in a field crowded with submissive women.
She isn't sitting around with dwarfs or sweeping floors. She is waiting neither for a fairy godmother nor a handsome prince. She makes choices - and seemingly perverse ones, too. Perhaps most significantly, she is the first girl in literature with a room of her own.
Or so I remember it.
Writing in the May l6 New Republic, Deborah Friedell offers a startling revelation. I have misread "Little Women." It is true that Jo is spunky, thirsty for adventure and grappling with her "disappointment in not being a boy." It's also true that - 15 years later - she has entirely reconciled herself to her disappointment. Having relinquished her dreams, she looks from stout husband to unruly children and pronounces herself happier than she has ever been.
She is philosophical about her early ambition: "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now." One day she may well write a good book - as indeed she will, in a sequel - but she has no qualms. Nor does she care that she has kissed the tenure track goodbye.
How could I have got this so entirely wrong? It's like holding up Emma Bovary as an emblem of marital bliss. In part I have conflated the Jo of "Little Women" with the Jo of the sequels. And in part I've had help from Hollywood, which has filmed "Little Women" three times, and three times blessed Jo with both career and children.
Friedell feels that Alcott was not so much swayed by market pressures as she was eager to spare Jo her own fate. She lent her heroine the domestic bliss she would have preferred. (She also allows Jo the luxury of not working, something she could never afford.) So it was that from the proto-feminist, the single woman who put in 14-hour days at her desk, supported her extended family, and died of overwork, we got Rapunzel redux.
Two volumes later Jo indeed finds work she loves, and success, and money to spare. But the realization of her "wildest and most cherished dream" comes at a price. It is exhausting, and a strain on the domestic front. The feather duster brings more satisfaction than the fan mail. Alcott's message is loud and clear. Evidently it does not in fact require testosterone to deliver an opinion.
It helps, though. "First of all," resumed my husband, swabbing the counter, "two parents have to know how to make breakfast." Yes, and 75 percent of male executives have non-working wives. Seventy-four percent of female executives have working husbands. Guess who's making breakfast? "And," he continued, "the women who manage well will be the ones whose fathers listened to them."
I suspect he's reading this stuff while I'm wielding the feather duster. But the research bears him out. Mr. Alcott was a case in point. John Munder Ross, clinical professor of medical psychology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, is among those who have argued that for the Jos in this world to manage work and love, they need fathers who teach them to think - and to think that they deserve to marry their equals. Those men are as crucial to a girl's development, Ross holds, as the frantic mother who brings in a paycheck.
It could well be the route to the Hollywood version of "Little Women." Happy Father's Day.
Coincidentally, thanks to a mention of Rainbow Tour last week by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
folk, I've been listening to Evita for the last few days - it's a show I first saw when I was 11, but didn't listen to much until I was around 15 or 16 - not sure why I picked it up again then, but I did.
It's probably weird to say that I "identified" with Evita as a character (ie not the real life person) but in a roundabout way, I sort of did, especially parts of High Flying, Adored - "a shame you did it all at twenty-six..." At sixteen, and at eighteen, and at twenty two, I was certainly on my way to something resembling that. I was the first intern hired at CNBC, I covered the Supreme Court with Chris Gordon for CBS in Washington, DC, I had a standing offer to produce at Mtv when I was in college, but I'd have to drop out of school to take it. But part of me knew I didn't really want to give up ordinariness for that sort of presence of lifestyle, and I've never once regretted the married-with-children track; while I have some bad moments with the very busy, very active, very strong boys, I truly, truly love my life.
So this opinion piece in the Times made me think, did I take the Jo track? In ten years, I very well may return to some form of journalism - perhaps what I do online with TLC and FA are more tightly tied to the work I used to do for TheKnot than may be obvious at first glance? Does that mean that I should write, now:
No qualms. I don't feel any. I don't think I have any, regarding the decision my husband and I made seven years ago to start having kids. But if I really, truly, absolutely have none, then why have I been so focused on making this post?
[not friendslocked but anonymous posts will be screened]
ETA: I realised after the fact why this has been on my mind over the weekend. It's because four years ago, when I had one child and was working full time, my husband came down with menengitis the week after I'd been given a talking-to by my department-head, Rich. While he was fine wiht my hours, the firm was concerned that I wasn't billing enough, and the fact that in the previous month, my sister had gotten married, so I'd taken a few vacation days, and the fact that only a few weeks before, the co-head of my department had been killed in a single-engine plane crash and our San Jose office had been closed, didn't hold any sway with them. So with my husband in the hospital, I felt obligated to still show up for work every day, and be in the office on the weekend, and just be glad that my mother in law could come into town to be at the hospital with Aaron and my nanny and sister were around to spend extra time with Harry.
And that, both at the time and in retrospect to a larger degree, were the reasons why I decided to stop with the full-time working, and move to a schedule that was more reasonable for - well, I won't say for a parent, because I won't generalize here. It was more reasonable for me.
I know there are women who can do both - the full time job and the 1, 2 or 3 little kids. I also know that the circumstances of the time dictated that I was not going to be one of them, at least for now.
As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.
She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.
This is especially galling as the little tyrant is named for a feminist icon, in a novel I clearly should have read more closely. Jo March represented many of our first encounters with a capable, independent-minded heroine. She stands alone in a field crowded with submissive women.
She isn't sitting around with dwarfs or sweeping floors. She is waiting neither for a fairy godmother nor a handsome prince. She makes choices - and seemingly perverse ones, too. Perhaps most significantly, she is the first girl in literature with a room of her own.
Or so I remember it.
Writing in the May l6 New Republic, Deborah Friedell offers a startling revelation. I have misread "Little Women." It is true that Jo is spunky, thirsty for adventure and grappling with her "disappointment in not being a boy." It's also true that - 15 years later - she has entirely reconciled herself to her disappointment. Having relinquished her dreams, she looks from stout husband to unruly children and pronounces herself happier than she has ever been.
She is philosophical about her early ambition: "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now." One day she may well write a good book - as indeed she will, in a sequel - but she has no qualms. Nor does she care that she has kissed the tenure track goodbye.
How could I have got this so entirely wrong? It's like holding up Emma Bovary as an emblem of marital bliss. In part I have conflated the Jo of "Little Women" with the Jo of the sequels. And in part I've had help from Hollywood, which has filmed "Little Women" three times, and three times blessed Jo with both career and children.
Friedell feels that Alcott was not so much swayed by market pressures as she was eager to spare Jo her own fate. She lent her heroine the domestic bliss she would have preferred. (She also allows Jo the luxury of not working, something she could never afford.) So it was that from the proto-feminist, the single woman who put in 14-hour days at her desk, supported her extended family, and died of overwork, we got Rapunzel redux.
Two volumes later Jo indeed finds work she loves, and success, and money to spare. But the realization of her "wildest and most cherished dream" comes at a price. It is exhausting, and a strain on the domestic front. The feather duster brings more satisfaction than the fan mail. Alcott's message is loud and clear. Evidently it does not in fact require testosterone to deliver an opinion.
It helps, though. "First of all," resumed my husband, swabbing the counter, "two parents have to know how to make breakfast." Yes, and 75 percent of male executives have non-working wives. Seventy-four percent of female executives have working husbands. Guess who's making breakfast? "And," he continued, "the women who manage well will be the ones whose fathers listened to them."
I suspect he's reading this stuff while I'm wielding the feather duster. But the research bears him out. Mr. Alcott was a case in point. John Munder Ross, clinical professor of medical psychology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, is among those who have argued that for the Jos in this world to manage work and love, they need fathers who teach them to think - and to think that they deserve to marry their equals. Those men are as crucial to a girl's development, Ross holds, as the frantic mother who brings in a paycheck.
It could well be the route to the Hollywood version of "Little Women." Happy Father's Day.
Coincidentally, thanks to a mention of Rainbow Tour last week by
folk, I've been listening to Evita for the last few days - it's a show I first saw when I was 11, but didn't listen to much until I was around 15 or 16 - not sure why I picked it up again then, but I did. It's probably weird to say that I "identified" with Evita as a character (ie not the real life person) but in a roundabout way, I sort of did, especially parts of High Flying, Adored - "a shame you did it all at twenty-six..." At sixteen, and at eighteen, and at twenty two, I was certainly on my way to something resembling that. I was the first intern hired at CNBC, I covered the Supreme Court with Chris Gordon for CBS in Washington, DC, I had a standing offer to produce at Mtv when I was in college, but I'd have to drop out of school to take it. But part of me knew I didn't really want to give up ordinariness for that sort of presence of lifestyle, and I've never once regretted the married-with-children track; while I have some bad moments with the very busy, very active, very strong boys, I truly, truly love my life.
So this opinion piece in the Times made me think, did I take the Jo track? In ten years, I very well may return to some form of journalism - perhaps what I do online with TLC and FA are more tightly tied to the work I used to do for TheKnot than may be obvious at first glance? Does that mean that I should write, now:
[Heidi] has entirely reconciled herself to her disappointment. Having relinquished her dreams, she looks from stout husband to unruly children and pronounces herself happier than she has ever been.
She is philosophical about her early ambition: "the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now." One day she may well write a good book - as indeed she will, in a sequel - but she has no qualms. Nor does she care that she has kissed the tenure track goodbye.
No qualms. I don't feel any. I don't think I have any, regarding the decision my husband and I made seven years ago to start having kids. But if I really, truly, absolutely have none, then why have I been so focused on making this post?
[not friendslocked but anonymous posts will be screened]
ETA: I realised after the fact why this has been on my mind over the weekend. It's because four years ago, when I had one child and was working full time, my husband came down with menengitis the week after I'd been given a talking-to by my department-head, Rich. While he was fine wiht my hours, the firm was concerned that I wasn't billing enough, and the fact that in the previous month, my sister had gotten married, so I'd taken a few vacation days, and the fact that only a few weeks before, the co-head of my department had been killed in a single-engine plane crash and our San Jose office had been closed, didn't hold any sway with them. So with my husband in the hospital, I felt obligated to still show up for work every day, and be in the office on the weekend, and just be glad that my mother in law could come into town to be at the hospital with Aaron and my nanny and sister were around to spend extra time with Harry.
And that, both at the time and in retrospect to a larger degree, were the reasons why I decided to stop with the full-time working, and move to a schedule that was more reasonable for - well, I won't say for a parent, because I won't generalize here. It was more reasonable for me.
I know there are women who can do both - the full time job and the 1, 2 or 3 little kids. I also know that the circumstances of the time dictated that I was not going to be one of them, at least for now.
