Making every day International Women's Day
Is there anything wrong with channeling my inner 8-year-old? Asking for a friend. | What the invisibility of older women has to do with the burnout of younger ones | Trader Joes knows all
I remember being a kid and asking my mom a few days before Mother's Day, "But when is KID'S day?" "Every day is kid's day," she answered. (At the time I thought it was a good idea for parents to acknowledge the contributions of kids to their families, but now I'm cringing. Kids. Argh.) (Hi, Mama!)
As I think about International Women's Day, I'm going to channel 8-year-old me and wish for every day to be Women's Day. That women were safe every day. That they didn't disappear. That we didn't need a "day." And with this in mind, I'm creating a theme for this week: visibility.
It's hard to talk openly about burnout, loadsharing, overwork, and the associated feelings, causes, consequences.
Yes, we might have someone to open up to -- a friend, our husband or partner, a parent -- but these topics are not something we comment on broadly and casually, like we might the traffic.
"God, it was bad today."
"They need to do something about that merge."
"Totally!!"
Because there's a cost to opening up, and the benefit isn't clear. You risk looking how you feel: tired, incompetent, or worse. And in a society where women who don't have their act together in the way society has deemed they should (and especially mothers, and mothers who look a certain way -- ethnically, for example), there's a lot at stake.
But the cost of staying silent is also great.
For the rest of this week I'm going to propose some ways to increase the visiblity of women's loads and contributions at work, within the household economy and beyond. If you have ideas, I'm eager to hear them.
Day 1:
Older women often use the word ''invisible'' when talking about themselves because they believe that society has largely ignored them and their concerns. But at the White House Conference on Aging, going on here this week, they are a highly visible force.' (Source: NYT)
That conference happened not in 2021, but 1981.
Yep.
This week's theme is visibility, and my focus today is older* (whatever that means, see * below) women.
Years ago I read an essay by a woman in her 60s who described feeling the hunger of younger women for her job and sensing that her legitimacy was being questioned only because of her age. (I have hunted for it can’t find it! I probably emailed it to myself, in 2011 or so, and it will never see the light of day again.) The reader comments stuck with me. Many were about the freedom that comes with looking a certain age. After getting unwanted attention from men, women were relieved they could cross the street and not get catcalled. Others talked about being invisible: spending an entire day walking in and out of stores, public transit, and nobody making eye contact. No one, seemingly, seeing them. Others talked about the way American culture divorces women past a certain age of their sensuality -- a different story from (proverbially at least) France.
These days I consider myself in comfortably “in between.” I stopped dying my hair years ago. When I went back to Italy in 2010 (woah: more than 10 years ago) I was called signora by default. When I didn't have my ID at Trader Joe's last week for some wine, the cashier leaned in for an inspection and took a good look at my eyes. "You're good. No way you're an underage college student posing as someone who lost their ID." Truth. And I didn't even mind. I was like: "Please. Just give me the bottles so I can get started." (Disclaimer: joke.)
What does this have to do with burnout and overload? Why this, here, now: The invisibility of women at any age is part of the same problem as the overburdening of women in household and professional economies. Ignoring and erasing women's concerns and needs at 70 is validated by the system that dismisses them at 35 and 15. And vice versa.
Once women stop fulfilling the roles that they are assigned (I'll reduce this to "sexual object" and "servant" -- either provide pleasure or utility -- obviously it's more complicated, but I'm galloping here), their “value” (another icky word here) doesn't go POOF. Refusal to collapse women into this dichotomy can happen in many ways, and one of them is by acknowledging our wholeness outside these roles, at all ages. Critically, the denial of erasure is a way to resist this system’s flawed premises.
I had started a list of recommendations. (Hire women who are older than you might think would be a good "fit" for the job or culture. Talk about age stuff across generations. Hand the microphone to women who won’t get it handed by someone else. Do the opposite of a “micro aggression.” Would that be a micro protection? micro friendliness? Eye contact. Hello to the person in line behind you at the ATM. Don't do the "husband handshake," where you address who you think wears the pants -- their kids, their caregivers.) But they were not real strategies — just glances in the general direction of an idea. Parts for a vast whole. A way to get these thoughts moving. And they seemed too obvious, unnecessary, for readers of this newsletter. So I'm stopping now.
(I did a lot of writing and deleting before starting this take. I was thinking: they already know this. I also thought: This shouldn't be a quick write up. This needs more and better. But I also thought: This is what I can do right now. I hope this something is better than nothing.)
Unerasure strategy 1: See women, hire women, help women be seen, after they turn N*
*N = whatever age you consider "mature" or "older" or "oldish"
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Until next time,
Roxana