Heiresses

When I was in the sixth grade, after I had just discovered what the word feminism meant, my mother bought me Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. I was frankly much too young to be reading indignant feminist theory, but since my mother has "never believed in censorship" (her words, not mine), I read it anyway. I've forgotten most of it by now, but this quote has always stuck with me: "We are heiresses to a burdensome past."

I remembered this line when Marissa Meyer took less than ten days of maternity leave. She was heavily criticized for doing this, as women argued that her decision to return to work so early would become the new standard for working mothers everywhere, which is neither attainable nor desirable. But her choice made sense to me -- as one of twenty-one female CEOs on Fortune 500 in 2012, who was extending her the luxury to take six weeks off? She couldn't simply make a choice for herself: everything she did representated her entire gender. 

I watched The Dropout last year, and there's one scene where a flock of news reporters debate what Holmes's fraud conviction means for feminism at large. "How are any VCs ever going to trust another female entrepreneur with a medical product ever again," one posited. "Better question -- how is any VC supposed to trust another female ever again," the other countered. And, though blunt, they're right: Holmes is the posterchild for 'Lean In Feminism,' and the next time a young, female, college dropout with wit and a cunning business intuition emerges in Silicon Valley, we won't be so quick to trust her. 

If this seems unfair, that's because it is. When Adam Neumann's WeWork is exposed for financial fraud, did anyone suggest that all male CEOs should be reevaluated based on character? No -- in fact, his docuseries WeCrashed portrays him as a genius. Frantic, crazed, and crazy, but a genius. 

But alas, 'tis the burden we heiresses must carry. The burden of being the glass ceiling breakers, the burden that comes when everything we do is accompanied by an asterisk. We will never be CEOs, always female CEOs; we will never even just be terrible human beings, always terrible human beings which in turn makes us anti-feminist. 

Needless to say, this was quite stressful for eleven year old little me. Since everything I did represented the entire feminist movement, I was wracked with guilt each time I wasn't feminist enough. But recently, I read Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love, where she writes:

"It is futile and knackering to try and make all your tiny choices representative of your moral compass then beat yourself up when this plan inevitably fails. Feminists can get waxed. Priests can swear. Vegetarians can wear leather shoes. Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make."

From this I learned that life is long and hard, and it's longer and harder when you are constantly paying the price for your identity. It's not our job as women -- or as members of any other minority group -- to predict what asterisk-filled headlines they're going to write, to shape our lives into a smooth narrative arc for the sake of a movement*. We aren't martyrs. This half of a paragraph shattered my worldview on a casual Friday night. Maybe it'll do the same for you. 

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*And also, if you're interested in a little feminist theory: modern feminists belong to two main camps: choice theory or adaptive preference theory. 

Choice theory feminists argue that a woman making a choice is inherently feminism. For example, if a woman chooses to go get a Harvard education in computer science (a male dominated field) and then get married and become a stay-at-home mother, that's just as "feminist" as if she had chosen to use her degree to climb up the corporate ladder. The freedom to do either is what feminism is. 

Adaptive preference theory feminists argue that sometimes women make choices that hurt themselves and the feminist movement at large because they exist within a patriarchal structure. Perhaps the aforementioned stay-at-home mother has been subconsciously trained to "not want" a corporate career simply because that's what society deems acceptable, but if not raised in these sexist institutions, she would want to work outside the home. The common example we use here is pro-life women: a woman advocating for pro-life legislation is technically a woman "making a choice", but it's definitely not a feminist choice by any modern standards. Extreme adaptive preference theory feminists would argue that women are incapable of making truly feministic choices while living in a patriarchial society, because we are unable to understand what we truly want as anything other than what the social constructs we participate in want for us. 

But anyway...my point here is that if you believe in what the choice theory feminists argue, then we as women should feel empowered to do whatever makes us happy without regard for how it affects the movement on the whole. We are autonomous beings, not beholden to whatever a movement decides is fit for us.