2 Case Studies on Women & Work

Our first subject grows up in a trad family. She sees certain aspects of the situation—her mother’s eternal workload, her mother’s dependence on the dad—and consciously reviles them. But she unconsciously also likes aspects of her mom’s situation, like how she doesn’t have to be around people all the time like her dad does, & also that she gets to depend on a man. She spends a lot of time on the internet & it consciously teaches her a lot of third wave feminism stuff about how being a SAHM is unfair, but it also teaches her that the world out there sucks for women, and (the content of the internet being largely created by people inside, alone) it teaches her to want to keep being inside and alone.

She brilliantly solves her problems by developing severe anxiety. The anxiety keeps her from going out & from working, but it doesn’t keep her from finding a boy online and letting him make her a wife. he is very understanding about her mental health and very understanding about feminism. He goes to work & then splits the house chores with her, as if anxiety is her full time job.

One day, for whatever reason, she decides to try to get better. She spends time on different self therapies she learns about online. She gets a part time job.

But does this make him happier? No. It makes him unhappy. He was willing to do everything for her as long as she stayed unhappy. But now that she isn’t balancing his full time workload with full time misery, now that she’s using his hard hours at work to get better, it feels unfair to him. He starts sabotaging their relationship. Within a year she is home at her mother’s house.

Like many women, our second subject becomes more trad as she approaches menopause. A combination of regret (for not having had more children) & the fact that being trad imposes less demands on her now (that she can’t have more children). She quits her s-tier girlboss job. Her type-a personality is surprisingly well-suited to contemporary high-demand homemaking.

She is desperate for her daughter not to make her same mistakes. She wants to inculcate her with tradition. She doesn’t know that tradition means your daughters make your same mistakes—mistakes that, at least, got you daughters. She tries to inculcate tradition by telling her daughter, verbally, what to do. “Stay home with your babies, they need you.” As the daughter grows older & they have normal tween conflict, the mother projects her own rejected desires on to the daughter. “You want status, you want to climb the ladder, you want the money & the lifestyle, but really being a mom is what’s important.” But what she never did was acknowledge that she had done to her daughter the thing she was telling her daughter never to do to her kids.

Children, whether they mean to or not, often do manage to obey their parents’ commands, whether the parents mean to give those commands or not. The daughter obeys her mother’s command to focus on children, her mother’s command not to be a working mom, & even her mother’s command (which her mother did not think of as a command when she said it) that she want a job—by specializing in research on early childhood.