workin'
egads, yet another book on how well-off, well-educated women (i.e., like me) are failing the world and themselves if they stay at home full-time to raise their kids. As always, Salon has the details.
Life and work are hard; some women don't want to be corporate cogs, and that's admirable; some can't find careers that let them balance work and family, and that's lamentable; and some just don't want to do the hard work of finding a career they love and getting good at it, and they use kids as an excuse, which is deplorable. For such women it's easier (in the short run; back to those actuarial tables) to pretend you never wanted to succeed in the first place, and to let your husband do the hard work of building a rewarding career. Bennetts' last chapter borrows Simone de Beauvoir's great phrase "the anxiety of liberty" as its title, and exhorts women to live through that anxiety to embrace a full and complex life of work and family.[my emphasis]"Deplorable"? Really? As in "deserving strong condemnation"? As both author and reviewer point out, there is a perfectly practical reason to not let one's so-called 'career' fall entirely by the wayside: security. Do we need to have the Protestant work ethic, macho existentialism, and the threat of being labeled lazy shoved down our throats as well? If we were to start deploring one another for everything we avoid because of our vague existential fears -- well, there'd be a lot of strong condemnation to go around, wouldn't there?
Oh wait. There is a lot of strong condemnation going around.
Let's see what Salon's own Cary Tennis has to say about a lazy feeling of just not wanting to put in the effort for a career: "Give yourself a break, my man. If you are depressed and have a drug problem or have a metabolic imbalance, then that's some serious stuff and you need medical care. But if you simply lack ambition, I take my hat off to you. The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."
That's so beautiful, I'd like just to repeat it, and thank you Cary for writing it:
"The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."
Labels: SAHM career feminism Salon
posted by AmyN @ 4/03/2007 08:25:00 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Nearly a year since I have been able to read your work Amy and the first time back I am rewarded with a real pearl. Thank you for the timely link to Cary Tennis on ambition. Often labeled a slacker myself I was fortunate to have a deep exposure early on to a more balanced European view of life wherein you are what you are and not you are what you do as is the common view in America. What is worth doing is worth doing well, it is said, and what is worth doing well is life all the rest is detail. If you are lucky enough to put bread in your mouth with work that is rewarding then bless you but an unpleasant job or a place in life that does not meet the popular cultral norms is no impediment to living well and living fully. Thanks again for beginning my day with a great link that takes me to one of my favorite topics.
Then there's what Jane Smiley calls "horse ambition" - something that she has observed in the jumpers that she has trained. It is clearly fed not by reward but by the desire to do something well, or even better than well, and to keep trying it until it works. It has nothing to do with "getting ahead," or elbowing other people. And it is irresistible, just like writing.
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