Women, Work, and 'Women's Work'

What stories are available to us?

Motherhood and its demands have not come naturally to me. I love my four children but the tasks associated with both housekeeping and child-rearing are a far cry from my ideating, ideas-focused, artistic bent. I learned to cultivate the skillset through the means most natural to me: I read books. Then I invested in local community. Even with a supportive husband, community, and armed with a plethora of books and birthing classes, I suppose with any new skill, and any new life stage — these gaps still set us up for the creeping doubts: “Am I doing this right?” and now, with children on the cusp of nest-flying: “Have I done enough?”

What has come naturally has always been story.

Stories put us into a realm and world of meaning-making that is precognitive. Jamie Smith in Imagining the Kingdom writes early on in the book, of phenomenologist Marcel Merleau-Ponty writing of the self: “The world is not what I think…but what I live through” (ITK, 57). There is a way of knowing that is not a Cartesian brain-on-a-sticks, neither is it a sort of gross motor animal impulse that is untrained and unschooled. What Smith terms “imagination” is a sort of intuitive being-in-the-world that is shaped by our habits and practices. This, in turn, forms desire; and, if we are, as he suggests, fundamentally desiring creatures — if “we are what we love” — then stories help shape those loves. This prompts me to ask: What stories of this “lived through” life are we telling ourselves?

Even in the first paragraph above I’m telling myself a story about not being good at something, at being a certain kind of woman. It honestly took me awhile to own both my PhD and that I love a bright red lipstick. Did the lipstick make me look frivolous? Did the PhD seem too intimidating? Could I be both? What story are we told about women? About women writers? About women and their relevance to the marketplace?¹

Must a woman bifurcate herself into thinking person and desirable object? Must a woman choose either motherhood or career? (And why is it always either/or?!) Even the choice is a luxury.

The stories available to women — roles in which we might imaginatively or actually insert ourselves as (white middle-class) women — are comprise a selection of tropes: madwoman in the attic, #bosslady, the matriarch, or Suzy Homemaker. (Male readers, let me know in the comments your own tropes and, female readers, add some more). And tropes are usually lazy storytelling.

Photo by Jené Stephaniuk on Unsplash

Two of my good friends, Lore Wilbert and Jen Michel, have thoughtfully waded into these waters of late. I encourage you to run over and subscribe to their Substacks. Michel writes of aging, institutional affiliation, and the publishing industry:

“I’m turning 50 this year, and my questions about continuing in the industry are quite realistic. Given that I do not currently enjoy any institutional affiliation, given that this lack of affiliation seems to demand the building of personal brand, I can only naturally ask: how much money and effort would I have to exhaust in search of greater platform (and the aesthetics of platform)? And even if I did exhaust the money and effort, how many years would those efforts last?”
(Read the rest here)

Michel rightfully and gently untangles the connections between platform and aesthetics, especially for women. How a woman looks, dresses, and acts has a significant bearing on how her words are received. The way a woman spends her time — often in nurturing, caregiving roles, means that there are real limits to what sort of creation she is able to accomplish. Not to mention the very real financial limits and realities in pursuing creative pursuits rather than more financially lucrative work.

What is the role of creation for women writers? What stories are we telling about our very real, embodied, “lived through” lives?

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Kathleen Norris’ slim volume, The Quotidian Mysteries: Liturgy, Laundry, and “Women’s Work” on the sacramental nature of all of life — especially as it dignifies the mundane drudgery-inducing tasks — was life-changing for me when I desperately needed help connecting the dots between the diaper-changing sleep-deprived years of early motherhood and the goodness of God. It’s one of the first books I recommend to new mothers (that and The Jesus Storybook Bible).

Norris writes of a return to faith once she makes the connection between the Catholic priest serving the Eucharist and housekeeping:

I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people. It brought the mass home to me and gave it meaning. It welcomed me, a stranger, someone who did not know the responses of the mass, or even the words of the sanctus. After the experience of a liturgy that had left me feeling disoriented, eating and drinking were something I could understand. That and the housework. This was my first image of the mass, my door in, as it were, and it has served me well for years.

That is: the very ordinariness of the act mixed with transcendence made faith plausible for Norris. The transcendent must always be brought home to ourselves. And this always happens on an ordinary day, in an ordinary body.

Photo by Izz R on Unsplash

Perhaps we bemoan the small work of creativity — whether we are male or female — because the work of creating something is often more akin to the washing up than to splashy deals or headlines. There is much monotony in writing that first draft, in choosing fresh words, in caring about commas.

The problem, yes, has a certain slant when it comes to female artists and the unrealistic expectations we place on them to be beautiful, young, fresh, and sometimes also thoughtful and intellectually rigorous. There are deep structural inequalities. But the problem is also much wider: we do not afford the mundane, caregiving tasks as worth very much in our late modern consumer culture.

What can be done?

It is in our attention-keeping as artists and as caregivers and homemakers (whether male or female) that we re-ignite the imagination. That is the gift we give to the world. Norris writes: “The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life” (emphasis mine). The Incarnation of Christ shows us how dearly God cares for the material and mundane.

Whether we are doing what has traditionally been seen as “women’s work” — the sort of mundane housekeeping that both men and women do these days — or we are slogging through the creative life with draft upon draft, with words that seem to make no real mark on a life, may we all start to reframe our stories. Do not despise the small thing. From the cup of cold water, to the vacuuming, to the walk where you pay attention to the nuances of the natural world, to the first (and second and third) draft.

The artist has a great gift to give to the world — she helps us to see that we have a story that is as wide and high and tall as it is small and low to the ground. May we receive it as good news for all of us.

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This is a part of a new (generally) weekly series on creativity and a generative life, based off my reading. Earlier pieces include: On Generative Work, Creating Amidst the Machine, and On Boredom.

I appreciate you subscribing and sharing.

For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast (where we’re talking about formation, technology, suffering and hope).

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1. (To my male readers, please keep reading as you were born of woman, likely love a woman, and may father a female…and the flourishing of all lifts all).