I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I and everyone that knew me expected me to Be Somebody.
I ended up a homemaker with a 1950s-style marriage and spent my twenties too broke to buy books for myself, so I checked out library books and, among other things, read everything I could about women's issues in an effort to try to figure out what in the hell went so very, very wrong with my life.
A TLDR of all that research is that one day while at my parental home, an old friend of the family kind of bitchily said to me "You're so smart. We all thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?" and I pointed to my two young sons and said "They happened."
Especially post divorce, I've read a LOT of articles about real life couples trying to figure out how a woman "has it all." I'm tired of being asked to "Pick one: Your left arm or your right." AKA "Pick one: You can have a BRAIN as a woman and a serious career and yadda OR you can have some kind of love life and the kids that tend to result from that for most people and be a good mom and so forth."
David Copperfield and some supermodel girlfriend of his lived together for a time. They began talking about getting married, realized that NEITHER of them was willing to tone down their jet-set careers where they each routinely went on location around the world, and broke up instead of getting married.
According to the girlfriend, they realized that to them marriage meant spending more time together and that simply wasn't going to happen. So they split.
Some Hollywood couple whose names I don't recall AT ALL got married and took turns making movies. They took turns because they were very committed parents and not willing to dump the kids off with a nanny while mommy and daddy both pursued serious careers.
After a few years or this, they both had great relationships to the kids but they no longer had a relationship to each other. They got divorced and shared custody of the kids. He soon had a new lady. She seemed to remain alone.
Etc. Etc. And the short version seems to be that women get the following deal in life: "Career, Family, Love Life: Pick TWO." (Kind of like that old saw about "Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick TWO.")
If you are a woman with a serious career, it seems like you CAN do the single parent thing and both raise and support the kids. Goldie Hawn's solution seems to be "I can have a career and kids and a love life, so long as I don't MARRY the guy."
Presumably, for her marriage triggers some set of societal expectations that makes the whole thing fall apart. As long as she ONLY lives with him and has sex with him but does NOT marry him, she can make it work. But put a ring on her finger and the whole thing presumably falls apart and it's just easier for her to navigate that by not marrying than by trying to redefine what "marriage" means to her, her partner and the entire fucking PLANET because you know people will butt in unasked to the stupidest stuff.
As best I can tell, a critical detail -- not the ONLY issue, but in some sense the crux of the problem -- is that men, women and the entire planet expect women to do the women's work in a heterosexual relationship. Especially if you marry him.
Women tend to naturally default to cooking for a guy and picking up after him and such when they get emotionally attached. And it's not illogical behavior. If you hope to have a baby -- or are young enough that it's possible you could have a baby even if you don't really INTEND to -- then it makes sense to fall into that historic role rooted in what made life work back before reliable birth control and what not caused most families to have a LOT of kids such that mom needed to spend all her time doing those tasks that have come to be known as the women's work.
Those were not tasks intended to OPPRESS WOMEN and make them the servants of men.
In hunter-gatherer societies, you can gather food with a baby strapped to your back, but you cannot hunt with a baby strapped to your back. It simply doesn't work. So MEN hunted and WOMEN gathered because that was what WORKED to optimize getting enough food for everyone to eat.
It's only relatively recently that if you are successful enough, your wife is essentially your servant and makes most of her money by being married to you. Until around 300 years ago, money was not in widespread, consistent use.
When MONEY was not a big part of life, the fact that women's work doesn't generally pay well and makes you essentially a servant to those around you did not have the impact it has today on the lives of women. Men who make good money can potentially trade one wife in for another and some do. Women who begin life as full-time homemakers cannot as readily trade their source of income -- their man -- for another source of income -- a spiffy career.
Women who cook and clean at home do not typically have the professional training to get jobs as chefs at expensive restaurants, even though they may cook extremely well. Cooking for a family doesn't really prepare you to cook for a restaurant and running a household doesn't really prepare you to run a restaurant, so women often end up as maids or similar, which doesn't pay well but that's what they can readily tranlate their existing skills into.
Three hundred years ago, a woman who was a good cook or similar could be in demand in a way she likely isn't today. Today, you can get microwave meals, grab takeout etc. When my own father was a child, his mother cooked ALL THE TIME because that stuff didn't exist. If she wasn't cooking, nobody got to eat.
So we still raise little girls to cook and clean and in some cases they are inculcated with such skills starting at age four such that by the time they are of dating age they have a decade or more experience. Boys do not get the same amount and kind of training in most households.
And then we are baffled when women routinely play second fiddle to their husband, make less money even if they nominally both have the same kind of career (say actors and actresses -- MEN still make more in Hollywood in most cases) and so on. AND you aren't allowed to even TALK about these issues lest you step on the toes of some married woman with a career who doesn't want to admit to herself, much less the world, that even though she's famous and nominally has a lot of power for a woman, she still plays cook and maid at home to her husband who has vastly more power than she will EVER have.
This expectation that a wife will play helpmate to her husband and serve his career is culturally encoded in our expectations of behavior for the American President and his wife. This likely is a barrier to us ever having a woman president in the US.
Husbands don't typically play that kind of role for their wife, even if they both have serious careers.
I sometimes do most of the shopping and sometimes don't. I will cook for myself but not for the family. Most cooking and cleaning is handled by my sons, though I sometimes serve as a kind of in-house tech support since I have a lot more experience and know how to get things done.
I KNOW from firsthand experience that it is possible for adult men and women -- like me and my adult sons -- to live together and split up the essential chores without making one person a servant based on their unfortunate choice of gender at conception.
I don't know if I will ever remarry though because MOST men just assume a woman will pick up after them and cook for them and yadda because that's how life has always worked for them. It's a logical assumption based on decades of firsthand experience.
They can be the most pro women's lib man on the planet with high ideals who is both willing and able to support his wife's career and has a track record of doing so and STILL just assume that if he sleeps with you, you will take care of certain things because that's just how his life has always worked.
My mother worked sixty hours a week, kept the house spotless and cooked dinner from scratch every single night for years. If you are healthy, energetic, organized, etc. it CAN be done by SOME women.
I don't have the energy for that. I'm medically handicapped. Not only do I NOT have the energy to pick up after some man who just ASSUMES I will because SEX and longstanding habit, I don't have the energy to ARGUE with him about it and tell him five hundred thousand million times "I'm not your maid. I don't do that kind of work just because I sleep with a man."
I think some women end up as the de facto maid at home because it's easier than trying to both tell a man "Do it yourself. This is not my job." and ALSO somehow keep the peace (and also ALSO not wind up de facto living in a fucking PIG STY because he's a PIG). Most men don't want to see themselves as treating women like domestic slaves, especially if they are with a woman who has a career and are genuinely supportive of that career. They want to feel like one of the good guys.
My ex was very idealistic and high minded. One summer when his ideals and bad habits had some friction over me acting like a human being instead of acting like his slave, he was grumpy for like six weeks.
I don't think he knew why he was grumpy. I did but I didn't say one word. I just let him be grumpy and didn't engage with his bad mood.
Most women don't seem to know how to handle a situation like that and so they just keep doing what has been "allowed" historically -- by society or whatever -- because it's just too much drama with too much downside to point out how much of a burden this is on their lives and that it's entirely gender based bullshit.
I used to have arguments with my husband about me wanting to go to college and there was no college nearby because his military career didn't happen to land us someplace with a good college. I talked once about wanting to move an hour away and go to school all week and see him on weekends and I was accused of trying to destroy our marriage. Anytime we had arguments of that sort and I tried to point out "YOU leave routinely for your work and we get separated for up to six months at a time" I was told that was "different" because "someone has to support the family."
I genuinely think he did not see the disconnect. I don't think he was trying to be an ass to me. I think he really, truly did NOT see that THE REASON I did not make the kind of money he made is because I was expected to NOT pursue education or work that would separate us even though HE did so, I was expected to have dinner on the table waiting for him, etc.
My time belonged to him. Pursuing an education or a desire for a career had to be slotted around my obligation to serve him and our children.
In contrast, his time belonged to his employer. And this was entirely because he was male and I was female and we both made choices rooted in longstanding expectations that men earn the bacon, women fry it up in a pan.
At one time, entire peoples could die out in short order if women were not doing the women's work. Now, it's possible to eat without a full-time wife and mom catering to the family, but we still act like it's absolutely essential that "mom" do those same tasks even though she probably doesn't have ten kids and this makes it a burden for the family and society to expect a woman to dedicate herself to the women's work for the family and NOT pursue a paid career.
Our relationship patterns, work patterns, etc are all rooted in these past paradigms and it's a lot of work to figure out a new paradigm that works. These things tend to change very slowly because social contracts only make sense when you take the whole deal within a particular context and trying to sort out what else needs to change if X changes and how is hard.
They also tend to change slowly because even if ONE person or family can successfully sort it out, you can't share the good news with anyone else. Other people will rip your head off if you aren't extremely careful to be diplomatic as all hell when pointing out that "You wealthy, powerful women are STILL picking up after your men and it's a problem not just for YOU but for all less empowered women whose lives you impact by setting the example for accepted societal norms."
It's not okay to state a long list of fairly obvious conclusions and WOMEN are often the most vicious about giving pushback over it.
Due to my medical situation, I didn't wear makeup and had extremely short hair for a lot of years. It became apparent to me that men don't typically wear makeup and typically have very short hair and the time and energy and such they save by NOT having to do any of that is time and energy they can invest in their career.
No, women do not want to hear that the time they take to do their makeup and hair in the morning is time not spent on more essential self care, like SLEEP, and time not spent on their career and THIS is one reason men make more money than women: They aren't asked by society to "put on their face" before they are allowed to set foot outside the house.
I'm not suggesting women should dress like men or look like men or all have short hair. Rock star men have long hair and some of them make plenty of money. But as long as we cannot TALK about the fact that women are expected to play domestic servant in a hetero relationship and this tends to hold true at ALL levels of society, even for rich and powerful career women, and related issues, no, it's not possible to sort out what the hold up is and why women continue to make less money on average than men, have less power, etc etc etc.
For me and my life, I have fantasies that IF I can convince some man that sleeping with me and eating well and having a clean home doesn't require me to be his personal domestic servant, maybe I can "have it all" and NOT feel compelled to "pick two" of the following: Career, Family, Love Life.
If such a man simply doesn't exist, I'm quite clear that I will continue to sleep alone. My medical situation means that such implicit assumptions aren't merely a burden for me ruining my hopes of a career. Instead, they equate to a sentence of slow, torturous death.
Any man who expects me to accept slow, torturous death in order to have the "privilege" of sleeping with him does not love me. It's not hard to turn down such a deal given that I am clear what the stakes are for me personally.
He could literally be a billionaire. He doesn't have enough money to make such a deal worth my while.
Can other women who aren't me learn anything useful from my writing to enhance their lives? I have no idea.
But if you have a big fucking problem with me trying to sort out how to make my life work because me thinking out loud might cast light on your life and you don't like what you see, feel free to drop dead.
I ended up a homemaker with a 1950s-style marriage and spent my twenties too broke to buy books for myself, so I checked out library books and, among other things, read everything I could about women's issues in an effort to try to figure out what in the hell went so very, very wrong with my life.
A TLDR of all that research is that one day while at my parental home, an old friend of the family kind of bitchily said to me "You're so smart. We all thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?" and I pointed to my two young sons and said "They happened."
Especially post divorce, I've read a LOT of articles about real life couples trying to figure out how a woman "has it all." I'm tired of being asked to "Pick one: Your left arm or your right." AKA "Pick one: You can have a BRAIN as a woman and a serious career and yadda OR you can have some kind of love life and the kids that tend to result from that for most people and be a good mom and so forth."
David Copperfield and some supermodel girlfriend of his lived together for a time. They began talking about getting married, realized that NEITHER of them was willing to tone down their jet-set careers where they each routinely went on location around the world, and broke up instead of getting married.
According to the girlfriend, they realized that to them marriage meant spending more time together and that simply wasn't going to happen. So they split.
Some Hollywood couple whose names I don't recall AT ALL got married and took turns making movies. They took turns because they were very committed parents and not willing to dump the kids off with a nanny while mommy and daddy both pursued serious careers.
After a few years or this, they both had great relationships to the kids but they no longer had a relationship to each other. They got divorced and shared custody of the kids. He soon had a new lady. She seemed to remain alone.
Etc. Etc. And the short version seems to be that women get the following deal in life: "Career, Family, Love Life: Pick TWO." (Kind of like that old saw about "Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick TWO.")
If you are a woman with a serious career, it seems like you CAN do the single parent thing and both raise and support the kids. Goldie Hawn's solution seems to be "I can have a career and kids and a love life, so long as I don't MARRY the guy."
Presumably, for her marriage triggers some set of societal expectations that makes the whole thing fall apart. As long as she ONLY lives with him and has sex with him but does NOT marry him, she can make it work. But put a ring on her finger and the whole thing presumably falls apart and it's just easier for her to navigate that by not marrying than by trying to redefine what "marriage" means to her, her partner and the entire fucking PLANET because you know people will butt in unasked to the stupidest stuff.
As best I can tell, a critical detail -- not the ONLY issue, but in some sense the crux of the problem -- is that men, women and the entire planet expect women to do the women's work in a heterosexual relationship. Especially if you marry him.
Women tend to naturally default to cooking for a guy and picking up after him and such when they get emotionally attached. And it's not illogical behavior. If you hope to have a baby -- or are young enough that it's possible you could have a baby even if you don't really INTEND to -- then it makes sense to fall into that historic role rooted in what made life work back before reliable birth control and what not caused most families to have a LOT of kids such that mom needed to spend all her time doing those tasks that have come to be known as the women's work.
Those were not tasks intended to OPPRESS WOMEN and make them the servants of men.
this was not an attempt to oppress women and prevent them from participating in public life. This was accommodation for the burdens imposed on both women and society by a lack of birth control, a lack of alternative means to feed infants, etc.When most families had many children, women spent a lot of time pregnant or breastfeeding and doing the cooking while tending to the kids was what they COULD do to make life work in subsistence cultures where most people were just struggling to literally put enough food on the table. Historically, BOTH parents spent most of their time working to literally put food on the table, they just did so via different kinds of work because pregnant or breastfeeding moms needed to ALSO care for the children at the same time.
In hunter-gatherer societies, you can gather food with a baby strapped to your back, but you cannot hunt with a baby strapped to your back. It simply doesn't work. So MEN hunted and WOMEN gathered because that was what WORKED to optimize getting enough food for everyone to eat.
It's only relatively recently that if you are successful enough, your wife is essentially your servant and makes most of her money by being married to you. Until around 300 years ago, money was not in widespread, consistent use.
When MONEY was not a big part of life, the fact that women's work doesn't generally pay well and makes you essentially a servant to those around you did not have the impact it has today on the lives of women. Men who make good money can potentially trade one wife in for another and some do. Women who begin life as full-time homemakers cannot as readily trade their source of income -- their man -- for another source of income -- a spiffy career.
Women who cook and clean at home do not typically have the professional training to get jobs as chefs at expensive restaurants, even though they may cook extremely well. Cooking for a family doesn't really prepare you to cook for a restaurant and running a household doesn't really prepare you to run a restaurant, so women often end up as maids or similar, which doesn't pay well but that's what they can readily tranlate their existing skills into.
Three hundred years ago, a woman who was a good cook or similar could be in demand in a way she likely isn't today. Today, you can get microwave meals, grab takeout etc. When my own father was a child, his mother cooked ALL THE TIME because that stuff didn't exist. If she wasn't cooking, nobody got to eat.
So we still raise little girls to cook and clean and in some cases they are inculcated with such skills starting at age four such that by the time they are of dating age they have a decade or more experience. Boys do not get the same amount and kind of training in most households.
And then we are baffled when women routinely play second fiddle to their husband, make less money even if they nominally both have the same kind of career (say actors and actresses -- MEN still make more in Hollywood in most cases) and so on. AND you aren't allowed to even TALK about these issues lest you step on the toes of some married woman with a career who doesn't want to admit to herself, much less the world, that even though she's famous and nominally has a lot of power for a woman, she still plays cook and maid at home to her husband who has vastly more power than she will EVER have.
This expectation that a wife will play helpmate to her husband and serve his career is culturally encoded in our expectations of behavior for the American President and his wife. This likely is a barrier to us ever having a woman president in the US.
Husbands don't typically play that kind of role for their wife, even if they both have serious careers.
I saw a Reddit discussion recently where foreigners were saying things like "Americans have a weird interest in the wife of their president. I think the wife of our president ...maybe has black hair?" And that was surprising and interesting to me.As noted previously, I write a site called Nutrient Dense because I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years, got divorced, kept the kids -- both of whom happen to be male -- and I now live with two adult men and they handle a lot of the women's work.
I sometimes do most of the shopping and sometimes don't. I will cook for myself but not for the family. Most cooking and cleaning is handled by my sons, though I sometimes serve as a kind of in-house tech support since I have a lot more experience and know how to get things done.
I KNOW from firsthand experience that it is possible for adult men and women -- like me and my adult sons -- to live together and split up the essential chores without making one person a servant based on their unfortunate choice of gender at conception.
I don't know if I will ever remarry though because MOST men just assume a woman will pick up after them and cook for them and yadda because that's how life has always worked for them. It's a logical assumption based on decades of firsthand experience.
They can be the most pro women's lib man on the planet with high ideals who is both willing and able to support his wife's career and has a track record of doing so and STILL just assume that if he sleeps with you, you will take care of certain things because that's just how his life has always worked.
My mother worked sixty hours a week, kept the house spotless and cooked dinner from scratch every single night for years. If you are healthy, energetic, organized, etc. it CAN be done by SOME women.
I don't have the energy for that. I'm medically handicapped. Not only do I NOT have the energy to pick up after some man who just ASSUMES I will because SEX and longstanding habit, I don't have the energy to ARGUE with him about it and tell him five hundred thousand million times "I'm not your maid. I don't do that kind of work just because I sleep with a man."
I think some women end up as the de facto maid at home because it's easier than trying to both tell a man "Do it yourself. This is not my job." and ALSO somehow keep the peace (and also ALSO not wind up de facto living in a fucking PIG STY because he's a PIG). Most men don't want to see themselves as treating women like domestic slaves, especially if they are with a woman who has a career and are genuinely supportive of that career. They want to feel like one of the good guys.
My ex was very idealistic and high minded. One summer when his ideals and bad habits had some friction over me acting like a human being instead of acting like his slave, he was grumpy for like six weeks.
I don't think he knew why he was grumpy. I did but I didn't say one word. I just let him be grumpy and didn't engage with his bad mood.
Most women don't seem to know how to handle a situation like that and so they just keep doing what has been "allowed" historically -- by society or whatever -- because it's just too much drama with too much downside to point out how much of a burden this is on their lives and that it's entirely gender based bullshit.
I used to have arguments with my husband about me wanting to go to college and there was no college nearby because his military career didn't happen to land us someplace with a good college. I talked once about wanting to move an hour away and go to school all week and see him on weekends and I was accused of trying to destroy our marriage. Anytime we had arguments of that sort and I tried to point out "YOU leave routinely for your work and we get separated for up to six months at a time" I was told that was "different" because "someone has to support the family."
I genuinely think he did not see the disconnect. I don't think he was trying to be an ass to me. I think he really, truly did NOT see that THE REASON I did not make the kind of money he made is because I was expected to NOT pursue education or work that would separate us even though HE did so, I was expected to have dinner on the table waiting for him, etc.
My time belonged to him. Pursuing an education or a desire for a career had to be slotted around my obligation to serve him and our children.
In contrast, his time belonged to his employer. And this was entirely because he was male and I was female and we both made choices rooted in longstanding expectations that men earn the bacon, women fry it up in a pan.
At one time, entire peoples could die out in short order if women were not doing the women's work. Now, it's possible to eat without a full-time wife and mom catering to the family, but we still act like it's absolutely essential that "mom" do those same tasks even though she probably doesn't have ten kids and this makes it a burden for the family and society to expect a woman to dedicate herself to the women's work for the family and NOT pursue a paid career.
Our relationship patterns, work patterns, etc are all rooted in these past paradigms and it's a lot of work to figure out a new paradigm that works. These things tend to change very slowly because social contracts only make sense when you take the whole deal within a particular context and trying to sort out what else needs to change if X changes and how is hard.
They also tend to change slowly because even if ONE person or family can successfully sort it out, you can't share the good news with anyone else. Other people will rip your head off if you aren't extremely careful to be diplomatic as all hell when pointing out that "You wealthy, powerful women are STILL picking up after your men and it's a problem not just for YOU but for all less empowered women whose lives you impact by setting the example for accepted societal norms."
It's not okay to state a long list of fairly obvious conclusions and WOMEN are often the most vicious about giving pushback over it.
Due to my medical situation, I didn't wear makeup and had extremely short hair for a lot of years. It became apparent to me that men don't typically wear makeup and typically have very short hair and the time and energy and such they save by NOT having to do any of that is time and energy they can invest in their career.
No, women do not want to hear that the time they take to do their makeup and hair in the morning is time not spent on more essential self care, like SLEEP, and time not spent on their career and THIS is one reason men make more money than women: They aren't asked by society to "put on their face" before they are allowed to set foot outside the house.
I'm not suggesting women should dress like men or look like men or all have short hair. Rock star men have long hair and some of them make plenty of money. But as long as we cannot TALK about the fact that women are expected to play domestic servant in a hetero relationship and this tends to hold true at ALL levels of society, even for rich and powerful career women, and related issues, no, it's not possible to sort out what the hold up is and why women continue to make less money on average than men, have less power, etc etc etc.
For me and my life, I have fantasies that IF I can convince some man that sleeping with me and eating well and having a clean home doesn't require me to be his personal domestic servant, maybe I can "have it all" and NOT feel compelled to "pick two" of the following: Career, Family, Love Life.
If such a man simply doesn't exist, I'm quite clear that I will continue to sleep alone. My medical situation means that such implicit assumptions aren't merely a burden for me ruining my hopes of a career. Instead, they equate to a sentence of slow, torturous death.
Any man who expects me to accept slow, torturous death in order to have the "privilege" of sleeping with him does not love me. It's not hard to turn down such a deal given that I am clear what the stakes are for me personally.
He could literally be a billionaire. He doesn't have enough money to make such a deal worth my while.
Can other women who aren't me learn anything useful from my writing to enhance their lives? I have no idea.
But if you have a big fucking problem with me trying to sort out how to make my life work because me thinking out loud might cast light on your life and you don't like what you see, feel free to drop dead.