What Women Want

"When Mr. Ramsay expects Lily to reincarnate feminine influence and 'sympathy,' she feels the rage of the childish Maggie or thoroughly modern Isa. 'That man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died.'" ~ analysis of George Eliot's Middlemarch

I'm going to be arrogant and generalize my post last week (and the one last year)--because it's not just me, is it? Wanting is fraught territory for women, period. If it weren't, we wouldn't need umpteen gazillion pounds of paper each month on the newsstand devoted to telling us what we are supposed to want, how much, when, and under what circumstances. Even the best of mainstream women's magazines are little more than catalogues, inculcating socially appropriate desires based on class, relationship status, employment and age. Which leads me to think that Freud's famous question:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

likely has no answer. Not because women are mysterious, impenetrable creatures whom no reasonable person (aka man) could possibly be expected to fathom, but because women themselves have been so trained into wanting what they don't want that in many cases we don't know ourselves what it is we do want. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go out and scan the covers on the newsstands. What kinds of shoes are you supposed to want this year, and why? What kinds of skirts, lipstick and jackets? What kinds of relationships with what kinds of men (and it always is men on the newsstands)? What are you supposed to want for dinner? How much? Are you allowed to want desert right now?

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. ~Grover Cleveland, 1905

It's easy to mock such sentiments, but the situation has not changed all that much. Yes, we're allowed to want to vote now (but sensible and responsible women do not want to run for office; it's not a good environment for women). But there are still a lot of people out there, many of them not-women, perfectly happy to inform women about what sensible and responsible women do want. Unsurprisingly, it still mostly revolves around other people: We want to look attractive in current ways to impress friends and colleagues and attract mates. We want to eat certain things and do certain kinds of exercises for the same reasons. We want to read the books that other people are reading and watch the shows that other people are watching so we can converse with those other people. We want books and quizzes and articles that will help us save our relationships (funny how men are never supposed to want that). We want recipes to feed the perfect meals, however defined, to our families. Everything that women are sanctioned to want is meant to allow us to perform our societal role--service.

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. ~Marya Mannes

Rephrased: What women are supposed to want for themselves is to be more help to other people. Or:

Man can never be a woman's equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her. Mohandas Gandhi

I'll bet you didn't know it was biological. Don't you want to give nature a big wet thank-you kiss for endowing you with the spirit of selfless service?

Consider that most women still carry the burden not only of the obvious caring work (housework, feeding, cooking, shopping for food, laundry, bathing, etc.) within their families, but also the less-obvious caring work (gifts, cards, invitations, thank-you notes, meal planning, reading about childrearing and nutrition and relationship advice and marriage manuals, keeping track of what housework needs to be done, purchasing clothing and keeping track of kids' sizes and what needs to be replaced, remembering birthdays, etc.). Consider that many women's hobbies even today revolve largely around one of those fields of caring work--knitting, embroidery, scrapbooking, cardmaking, sewing, and so on--so that even when women are having fun it is in the "spirit of selfless service." Consider that the work of service that women still normally perform is still mostly unpaid or underpaid, and that when it is paid women have difficulty asking for money for it or being clear about their expectations of payment. Consider the different emotional reactions of widows and widowers two years after bereavement:

Late life widowhood, selfishness and new partnership choices: a gendered perspective

KATE DAVIDSON Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender, University of Surrey.

Abstract

Little sociological attention has been paid to the repartnering of older people after widowhood, and how age, gender and the meanings of marriage influence choices about new cross-gender relationships. This paper reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 widows and 26 widowers over the age of 65, widowed for at least two years and who had not remarried. Respondents were asked about their current lifestyle and relationships and whether they had ever considered remarriage. The words 'selfish' and 'freedom' were often used by the widows when describing their present existence, which was associated with not having to look after someone all the time. Few of the widowers mentioned selfishness and this was more likely to be associated with feelings of anger at the loss of their spouse; none of the men associated widowhood with a sense of freedom. The paper argues that the desire for repartnering after widowhood is gender-specific: widows are more likely to choose to remain without a partner for intrinsic factors: the reluctance to relinquish a new-found freedom; while for widowers, extrinsic factors of older age and poor health are more salient issues in new partnership formation choices and constraints.

Consider that women who know what they want and ask for it are often penalized:

Women and Salary Negotiation: The Costs of Self-Advocacy Mary E. Wade Manhattan College Abstract Introducing the concepts of self- and other-advocacy should prove useful as a means of understanding the different contexts in which women and men can effectively and comfortably exert power and influence when making requests. In this conceptual paper, social psychological research is reviewed demonstrating that women can advocate effectively on behalf of others without incurring costs, but gender-linked stereotypes, roles, and norms constrain them from advocating as freely and effectively for themselves. It is argued that women do not frequently make requests for themselves, because they have learned that they may ultimately lose more than they gain. This gendered difference has implications for ongoing pay and promotion inequities.

Poor Freud: toiling away for thirty years trying to ask a question of women which by its very nature undermined their femininity. Women and girls aren't supposed to want for themselves, period. Any mother of a daughter can say without hesitation that this is not biological or essential, that little girls come into the world with a full measure of personal entitlement. They want what they want and they say so, sometimes loudly. And then, sometime between girlhood and womanhood, it's lost.

Selflessness

Women tend to put others first. This is a very attractive quality to a man. Sometimes a man gets caught in his ego and pride. In the short term there is nothing wrong with this. However in the long term this can create a selfish man. This is why it's very refreshing for a man to be around a woman who is compassionate and cares about others [sic] needs.

I'll bet it's refreshing. I'll bet it's convenient, too.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am an extreme case for a host of unbloggable reasons. But I don't think I'm unique in this. What do you want? If you strip away the audience for your appearance and the clientele for your service work so that clothing, body size or shape, and service wants are eliminated, what's left? What do you want for you, when there is no one else to want things for, or want to be different for? If you had a wife for the next month, someone who would take care of the house for you, do the meals and the cleaning up, take care of the kids, grease the relationships, and everything would run like a well-oiled machine; and moreover, if you were entitled to be oblivious to that work so that you do not have to notice it or be grateful for it--what would you do with that month? What would you want for yourself if, for a month, no one else wanted anything from you?

Margaret Oliphant was a writer of fiction and non-fiction who had three kids of her own and three kids of her brothers to raise on a writing income without a spouse (her husband died). This is what she had to say about writing:

"The writing ran through everything. But then it was subordinate to everything, to be pushed aside for any little necessity. I had no table even to myself, much less a room to work in, but sat at a corner of the family-table with my writing-book, with everything going on as if I were making a shirt instead of writing a book .... And I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night when everyone is in bed) in my whole literary life."

It's that biologically-ordained spirit of selfless service. Again. Contrast with Joseph Conrad:

"For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation ... mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day ... a lonely struggle in great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection."

What do you suppose his wife (aka "tireless affection") might have preferred to be doing for those twenty months?

This is all disjointed and confusing, I know, but (as I sit typing this with two young girls playing a Shrek adaptation on the floor beside me with Little People, having stolen minutes here and there for all the rest of it between loads of laundry, bouts of dishes, fixing snacks and fetching drinks and calling the super's office to get a toilet fixed) I think one of the things holding back women's progress at this stage of the game is the relentless way in which women are trained in what to want and who to want it for (it's never ourselves, even when it's marketed that way) in order to continue a model of the "spirit of selfless service" and keep the status quo largely unchanged.

None of which is to argue that no one should ever put their own wants aside in order to help someone else instead; but that maybe, when we do this, it would be healthier to do it within a context of at least knowing what we want to begin with.

I wouldn't mind being Margaret Oliphant, and that quote makes Joseph Conrad look like an arrogant, entitled, ignorant ass, so I don't mind not being him; Frances hasn't only expanded my horizons about writing itself and what I want to write about but has increased my time management skills by a thousandfold. I sincerely cannot fathom what I used to do with all the spare time I used to have. It's the expectation that women are so naturally selfless that they don't have wants for themselves at all that needs to change.

Posted by Andrea at June 6, 2008 10:33 AM under Female Trouble

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