"Married Life"
We live in a society deeply influenced by neoliberal thought. Simply put, it emphasizes self-choice and self-responsibility. This clever integration of ideas and patriarchy has led many individuals, especially women, to internalize them as "their own choices" after being structurally exploited, believing that they are their own "fault".
In Britain, there is a group of elite women with higher education who choose to return to the family and become housewives. But there are many contradictions intertwined with them, such as some women do not want to call themselves "housewives", but "family CEOs"; Some women are not happy, but they don't know what the problem is... All of this actually points to structural constraints.
The British scholar Shani Orgad conducted a study of this group of women who may have some of the UK's best resources, and wrote "Back to the Family? Family, Career, and Unattainable Equality.
In the book, she dissects the complexity of the choice of "becoming a housewife" and its social background, debunking the illusion of "independent choice". Using this book as an incision, we conducted an interview with Shaney to explore the plight of modern women, and where to act.
Why are there more and more demands on women in modern society? Why are gender relations regressing in some areas? What is the discipline of "work-life balance"? Is there really an egalitarian husband in marriage? What should society do to liberate women? ......
Although different countries differ, we face similar dilemmas. The following is an interview with Shani Ogard (SO) between "Don't Be Wayward" and Look Ideal, hoping to provide more perspectives on women's path to freedom.
“Fix the world, not women.”
This issue is the transcript of the #SeeGirlMaker# podcast series. On the occasion of Women's Day 2023, the British Embassy in China launched the "Women Making Waves" series of activities. By focusing on the intellect and perception of women creators, we hope that everyone will see the great influence of women on contemporary cultural thought, and support these female wavemakers who dare to challenge the rules and promote social progress.
01.
What is the discipline of "work-life balance"?
Look at Ideal x Don't Be Capricious: We want to start with a very intuitive question, your book is about elite housewives, have you had a chance to talk to readers who are housewives, and how have they reacted? Do you feel like you've done something wrong?
SO: I want to emphasize that this book is by no means a criticism of individual women, and the last thing I want is for housewives to feel guilty for reading my book. The real purpose of this book is to place the experiences of housewives in a structural context, rather than to individualize their experiences.
Back to your question. Over the years, I have indeed received many emails from readers, including housewives readers. There was a letter from a former refugee who had settled in the UK. She told me that the book gave her a respite from her breather, a sense of pause from the life she was used to. At the same time, it also provides her with a language to understand and express the choices she makes.
In this book, I try to complicate the concept of "choice" and argue that women's decision to leave paid work is always expressed by the rhetoric of "choice," but in reality, a choice made within limits and constraints.
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: "work-life balance" is a saying we often hear, and in some ways, it is getting harder and harder to be a woman because of more and more requirements and standards. Like the "work-life balance" requirement, we have to succeed in both. Why is this happening?
SO: This situation has to be placed first and foremost in a larger context, mainly referring to neoliberalism since the late '80s and '90s.
In the UK, the US and elsewhere, we will see some parallel changes. On the one hand, the state is investing less and less in social welfare. The State has vigorously recruited women into the labour force without giving families the support they need. Responsibility for caring and caring for families is increasingly being transferred to families and communities.
Childcare services were previously transferred from the responsibility of the State to families and communities, while parents were unable to fulfil their caregiving responsibilities because they still had to work and did not have the resources and support they needed.
In this case, the demands placed on the parents as individuals, especially on the mother, become very unrealistic and very reinforcing. Because the state has withdrawn from the provision of social services such as childcare, childcare has become a more personal responsibility and experience, so childcare is increasingly seen as a competitive thing.
"Marriage Story"
Therefore, there is increasing pressure on parents, especially mothers. Social media has also further exacerbated this pressure and competition, such as the need for moms to project a perfect family life by sharing family photos from the holidays and daily parenting practices.
This is all the result of structural initiatives, which, according to my research and that of many feminists, are related to a shift in neoliberal states toward policies that reduce support for families, reduce the value of care work, and put enormous pressure on women to withdraw from the labor market. This has created a situation in which women are under enormous pressure to raise children.
Many of your findings do resonate with the Chinese context in some way, such as the belief that modern Chinese women can and must have everything, including career success, financial independence, and the role of the perfect mother and wife.
However, there are also big differences, such as being a housewife is not an optional option for most Chinese women. And then some of the paths and schemes of the so-called "Western countries" do not apply to us either. So in this case, what strategies or actions do you think we might be able to replicate from the ideas and experiences in your book as a breakthrough? What can ordinary women do?
SO: I think it's a good starting point, and that's exactly what we're doing now. Denaturalize what seems natural and common sense in everyday life, and name those hidden structures of inequality.
Through cross-cultural and cross-country comparisons, we can realize that if another gender arrangement or gender configuration is possible elsewhere, it means that the situation we have is not normal or natural.
For example, many of the women I interviewed saw Sweden as a gender equality utopia. Imagine if we could imagine another possible arrangement beyond our current situation?
I think another important thing to do, and that's very applicable to the Chinese context, is to historicize the women's experience.
Little Women
In the book, I tell the story of a woman I call Beatrice, who is 41 years old, has two children, is a journalist, and left paid employment three years after having children. Her story, like many women, was too hard to juggle work and family, so everyone around her was helping her normalize her experience and tell her, take your time and don't worry about your professional life, it's an inevitable compromise.
But the turning point came when she historicized her experience, when she realized that her experience was generational, that she was exactly the same as her grandmother, and she felt, no, I'm not her, I have a choice. Historicizing individual experiences made her realize that things needed to change.
Fast forward to today, and we can think about what has changed and what has not changed historically. Whether and to what extent women are still doing unpaid domestic work, and how can we make this situation more visible to expose the "second shift" or even the "third shift" that women are going to.
Despite the different structures and circumstances we face, I believe these strategies can still be applied and can inspire and help feminism.
02.
Women are not obliged to educate men
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: When it comes to action, does a woman have a responsibility to cultivate the gender consciousness of the men in her life? Including her husband, partner or father, or even just friends? Further, do men who believe and practice egalitarianism really exist?
SO: (laughs) We often hear the thought, "I'm so lucky, my partner is an egalitarian." In some ways, we are all complicit in such discourse.
In many of the texts I read while doing my research for this book, there are many suggestions, so-called feminist proposals, which repeatedly tell women that it is their responsibility to choose the right partner and that women must educate their husbands from the beginning to become a true egalitarian partner.
But I really resist that because it's putting the responsibility of educating men on women. It's like saying you're lucky, because "luck" and "luck" mean having the right partner, which becomes an individualized problem, and it is completely accidental and random. What it obscures is that marriage and partnership are actually systemic problems.
Instead of talking about how lucky we are or thinking about the need to educate men, we need to think about how to create the social conditions and structures that enable equal relationships, and how to support women in value, not just by so-called "luck."
When we build these structures, they will organically produce more equal relationships between men and women. Instead of relying on luck and relying on oneself to pick a so-called "right person" among the unequal objects, as is the case now. I really suggest that we need to resist this frame of thinking.
"The Good Wife"
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: When you read your books, especially when you interview men, it is really easy for them to feel self-satisfied, easy to feel good about what they do, and easy to accept criticism.
So many women not only don't get the help they need, but also have an extra layer of responsibility, which is to make their male partner feel good and make him think that he is quite progressive. For women, it's actually more emotional labor. And some of the housewives in your book, they also feel the need to resist the image and identity label of "housewife", which is also a layer of emotional labor.
Therefore, many women choose to withdraw from marriage because we find it too difficult to achieve feminist goals and principles in marriage, so many women take withdrawal or rejection of marriage as a course of action. So why do so many women still feel forced into marriage?
SO: Marriage, or heterosexual marriage, is a social construct. In fact, the data shows that marriage rates are declining in many Western countries, while more diverse family arrangements and more diverse intimate arrangements are emerging.
There is no natural force that compels us to marry, and the idea of being driven is largely the result of the socio-cultural script we follow. So I think one of the main ideas of Back to Family is to convey and show that no woman is an island.
Although we are often encouraged to view our life choices as completely personal and to rewrite our own stories, the reality is that we are influenced by very powerful social forces, social norms, and social and cultural narratives, including the idea of married life and family as a source of stability. Of course, this is also an idea that managers in various countries have been promoting throughout history.
There is a very strong contradiction and disconnect between these cultural scripts and the lack of support in real life, and it is this contradiction that drives many people to make different choices, including a different path from marriage.
"Dickinson"
03.
Women are used to burying their disappointments
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: As you said, women have long been disciplined and conditioned in terms of emotions. It's surprising that you write about women who regret their decision to be 'housewives' because these respondents are from the most educated group of women in the UK.
So we wondered why it seemed so difficult for many women to identify and express their needs. It's as if we've been colonized ideologically.
SO: The phrase "our minds are colonized" is powerful. Why this is the case, the answer may not be straightforward.
I think part of the answer lies in the social and cultural pressures that women continue to endure. As you say about this colonization, social norms encourage women to be selfless mothers, selfless wives, to suppress and compromise our own desires to serve others, and these demands are often naturalized and normalized.
You ask why it's so hard for so many women to figure out their needs, and that's something I've struggled with throughout the book. I point to a seductively balanced image portrayed in media representation, confidently striding toward work with a briefcase in one hand and her children in the other, happily juggling work and family life.
Who wouldn't want to be such a "balanced woman"? But what this image actually does is that it silences and masks the structural conditions that make most women unbalanced, the structural conditions that prevent women from balancing the two spheres of family and work.
This information makes women unaware that this requirement to "balance women" is simply impossible, because the situation is determined by the structure that makes up it. In this structure, family life and working life are often completely incompatible, and women see this incompatibility as a personal failure.
"Marriage Story"
Sadly, we still live in a culture that encourages women to deny, mediate, or bury our anger and disappointment.
Over the last decade or so, we've seen a lot of the popularity of positive psychology, as well as the so-called "happiness industry," the "love yourself" rhetoric on social media, the emphasis on the need for self-confidence, all of which promote an enduring idea of femininity, about happiness, inner peace, success, positive energy, and so on.
Today there are countless messages telling women that they should exclude negative emotions, not get angry, and be calm. I think this information and these narratives make it difficult for women to identify their desires or connect with their own disappointments and desires.
04.
How to recognize the illusion of "independent choice"?
Look at the ideal x don't be willful: In your book, you expose the illusion of "independent choice", in fact, not only marriage, but also many decisions in life are influenced by social factors that we are not aware of.
But how do we identify this impact? How do you distinguish between "what I really want" and "what society wants us to have"?
SO: As individuals, it is often difficult for us to recognize the social environment, and the social forces that shape our lives. This is especially true under neoliberalism, where the dominant narrative is self-sufficiency. So we are often told that we can write our own stories and become who we want to be.
I think one way to break this is to understand the situation of women collectively rather than individually, by sharing our stories.
Because by understanding collective patterns through individual stories, we can see that we are always shaped by forces that are not of our own making, and in the process, we can also find ways to greatly improve our lives, that is, through concerted structural action.
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: you emphasize not only focusing on women as individuals themselves, but asking what society can do and change, so what can society as a whole do to help liberate women?
SO: How long do we have left? Just kidding. That's a big question, and I want to answer your question in two ways.
A simple, but not always easy, strategy for women is to speak up. In my book, I call this "disappointment without silence" because one of the things I've discovered throughout the book is how silence helps maintain the status quo.
Women don't talk about how they bury their desires, and couples rarely talk about how their marriages become unequal structures.
When I finished writing the book and came to this conclusion, I stopped and went to reread all the interviews, and I suddenly remembered that there was so much silence in women's lives in general. I think that in addition to the many restrictions that our lives are limited by others, society, workplaces, partners, we women also discipline ourselves by remaining silent. So I would say that one of the things we need to do is remove the mute key from disappointment.
"Marriage Story"
Then, to answer this question structurally, an important conclusion I draw is that we need to create resources and tools to allow and encourage women to express themselves and fulfill their desires and needs. In particular, how these two key institutions, the family and the workplace, can provide a safe space for women to express their aspirations?
In my opinion, there is an urgent need to consider the relationship between inequality in the workplace and inequality in the family, as we often discuss these issues separately. There are problems and inequalities in marriage – he doesn't do much, I do all the housework – and then we talk about women's inequality in the workplace, and the two are actually connected.
Therefore, we need to fundamentally rethink the work culture of long working hours, which continues to characterize many workplaces even after the pandemic. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for women and their partners to participate in family life in any meaningful way.
The workplace continues to require employees to completely separate their personal and work lives as if the two could really be separated. Men, in particular, are still expected to be a worker first and a father second. This needs to change.
It's also important to note that the cultural narrative about women being naturally better suited to take care of children and parents, and that women are the primary caregivers, needs to change. Only when these things happen together can we have some possibilities, not dare to say liberation, but at least an improvement in gender equality.
05.
What does a gender equality utopia look like?
Look at the ideal x don't be capricious: You talked about the intertwining nature of capitalism and gender equality. This is well illustrated in one of your interviews, a full-time housewife who hates certain housewife stereotypes such as doing nothing every day, just taking a nap to read magazines, and so on.
In her words, you will see the image of a good woman, and the image of a good member of capitalist society, integrated and inseparable. On the one hand, as a result of capitalist discipline, we are very ashamed of the fact that "doing nothing", on the other hand, the great contribution of what this mother has done as a housewife is always considered "doing nothing", so this leaves no way out for her.
We, as capitalist subjects, cannot be treated as idle, while at the same time what housewives do is considered to be of little value. So it seems that our fundamental solution to gender inequality cannot be a gender solution alone.
We need to go deeper into larger issues, such as the division between the public and private spheres, and our culture of competition, but also the meaning of work, the meaning of family, the meaning of marriage.
So we wanted you to describe a picture of an ideal world, what would an ideal world look like for a woman in your wildest and queer imagination? Will there still be marriage and family in this world? Or will we abolish the family altogether?
SO: For me, a radical utopia would place its true core and cutting-edge values on nursing and caring labor, valuing it economically, but also valuing the structure of our working lives.
I don't know if this will translate into a family or a different form of family, but in a way, I think it may not matter what the family will be if there is this social structure that really values nursing labor.
I was born on kibbutz farms in Israel (Wikipedia: kibbutzis is a common collective community system in Israel, traditionally based on agriculture, but now undergoing a transformation to combine industry and high-tech industries. Kibbutz is a mixture of utopian socialism and Zionism), a socialist experiment, of course, an imperfect experiment, but it partly inspired me to think, because it at least tried again in an imperfect way, whether we can value work and care for labor at the same time.
I think the traditional, rigid nuclear family structure that prevails in our modern society is likely to be more marginal and niche in this utopia.
"Thief Family"
In this utopia, we may see more intergenerational caring care relationships and lifestyles that are disappearing from this world and re-emerge. For example, different generations live together, such as community-style parenting, and nursing and caring labor will be rewarded and valued here, and the importance to the smooth functioning of society will be recognized, and it will not be underestimated.
Moreover, production and reproduction relations based on gender segregation are fundamentally challenged, because at the heart of this separation is the debasement of care labor, or reproduction labor, which considers economic production to be the most important thing, without seeing that the two are interdependent.
I don't know how much detail I can paint a utopia for you, but if I need to revolve around a core of values, it's nursing and caring labor.
06.
What is a "culture of self-confidence"?
SO: The Culture of Confidence is a book I co-wrote with my colleague and friend Rosalind Gill. This is a phenomenon I've been talking about since Back to Family because it comes in part from stories I've heard from the women I interviewed.
"Self-confidence culture" refers to the urgency that we have observed in recent years, which is that in a variety of different areas, from intimacy, body image and acceptance, from the workplace to parenting, to international development, we have noticed that this message tells women that wherever gender inequality exists, the solution is to love yourself, believe in yourself, and become more confident.
This issue is considered a feminine-specific crisis, a product of our self-doubt and perfectionism. And it was cited as a hindrance to women's participation in public life. The solution, then, it claims is that women should strive to improve themselves and should believe in themselves in an individualized and psychological way.
"Dickinson"
We actually have contradictions in our attitude towards "self-confidence". We're not saying that confidence is negative, we certainly want women to thrive. Almost every day, I tell my female students, "Be more confident and don't always apologize." Don't start your email with 'I'm not an expert' or 'I'm sorry.'"
So in the book "The Culture of Self-Confidence", we realize that we are also involved in this culture, and we are wrapped up, because there is something very tempting in it. But what fundamentally bothers us is that this culture constructs structural problems in an individualized way, positioning problems and solutions to women themselves rather than the world and society.
Simply put, the culture of assertiveness tells us to change the woman herself, not the world. And our efforts are actually to change that narrative, to turn our gaze outward again, to think, how can we fix the world, not women?
As a woman living in the UK, how do you see the country's progress towards gender equality over the past few decades? Have you witnessed some positive examples of policy change or cultural action?
SO: There are a lot of critics of gender issues in the UK, but there have also been some important developments in British society at the legislative level.
For example, the Gender Pay Gap Monitor, introduced in the UK in 2017, makes it imperative for organisations and companies to be more accountable. Every company with more than 250 employees must report to the government and then be made public. While the gender pay gap has not disappeared in the UK, these initiatives have created a pressure to encourage organisations to be more responsible and work to close the gender gap.
Suffragists
In 2019, a new provision in the Advertising Law came into force prohibiting ads with harmful gender stereotypes. It's funny because it's really common in this kind of advertising, like the man in the ad sitting, raising his legs, while the woman sucks the floor and cleans and so on.
Now, if there are enough complaints, the responsible body is obliged to investigate. That said, there have been some horrible advertising in the UK during the pandemic, but at least now there is this rule in the advertising regulations.
More broadly, in the UK and elsewhere, there is a growing emphasis on "EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion)" responsibilities in the workplace and workplace, which is the commitment and effort of companies to "equality, diversity and inclusion". There are also various projects, particularly around anti-racism and anti-sexist training and local policies. But I need to point out that there is still a frequent gap between paper and practice of these policies.
These are some of the positive examples that come to mind. In conclusion, I think legislation is important, policy is important, but we really need to think about how to practice it, how to match the work culture with our lifestyle.
This article is compiled from the podcast "Seeing a Female Wave Maker: 'Am I Volunteering to Be a Housewife?' ’ | No ideal x don't be willful", this episode can be searched on major podcast platforms.
Interview: Alexwood, Lin Lan
Interview co-creators: Juice, Purple
Podcast planning and production: Alexwood
Assistance: Ideal Republic