Zoe Lewis is a well-regarded English playwright whose Touched: the Play opens this week in London. I can’t speak for the play, but can speak about her risible op-ed in yesterday’s Times of London: Madonna syndrome: I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking.
The title of the piece isn’t promising, and neither is the rant that follows. Lewis, 36 and single, devotes hundreds and hundreds of words to decrying the feminism she embraced in her youth, which she blames for her current unmarried and childless state.
I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen. I feel like a UN inspector sent in to Iraq only to find that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams - to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.
If she writes plays like she writes op-ed, I fear for those who have invested in the show. She can’t even get singular/plural agreement in her prose. And the rest of the piece isn’t much better, as it includes staggering gems of long-since discredited pop psychology like this:
I thought that men would love independent, strong women, but (in general) they don’t appear to. Men are programmed to like their women soft and feminine. It’s not their fault - it’s in the genes. Holly Kendrick, 34, who holds a high-status job in the theatre, agrees: “Men tend to be freaked out if you work as hard as them.” This is why many of my girlfriends are still alone. The truth, though, is not that men haven’t accepted women’s modernity - the alpha woman who never questions her entitlement to the same jobs, fun and sexual gratification as them - but that women haven’t either.
(My wife, an athlete and a successful business woman and a first-time mother at Lewis’ age, rolled her eyes when I read that passage to her. “My love”, she said to me just now, “is there something wrong with your genes?”)
I’ve long since given up fisking anti-feminist screeds of the sort that Zoe Lewis has put up. But what I do want to mention is a tactic Lewis uses that is too-little remarked upon by feminists, particularly those of us who are — or who work with — young women. At one point in her piece, Lewis writes, lamenting the progressive values with which she was raised, “I wish I’d had the advice that I am giving to my 21-year-old sister.” She’s taking on a role which we train women (feminists or not) to take on, that of the wise older sister giving advice about the world to a young and impressionable woman. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with mentoring the young — I do it both for a living and avocationally. But there is something wrong with the dynamic at work in Lewis’ piece, and in so many other places in traditional culture: the emphasis on teaching younger women to avoid older women’s mistakes.
I often ask my female mentees and my women’s studies students how often they’ve been on the receiving end of a “Don’t make the same mistakes I did” lecture from an older woman. At least three-quarters of the class invariably raise hands or nod. I follow up: “How often was this advice centered around relationships?” Almost all keep their hands up. Most girls learned what Lynn Phillips calls the “Love Hurts” discourse from older women by the time they hit puberty. A great many young women, particularly those with aunts and older sisters, were told time and again “Don’t believe anything a man says”; “Get an education before you settle down so you don’t have to rely on a man”; “Don’t do what I did and waste your heart and your time on a fool”. And so on, and so on, and so on. Much of the advice given is wise, at least in part: it is good, surely, to encourage our daughters to pursue education and to at least be somewhat leery of what teenage boys promise. Even Lewis offers some sensible points, noting that love and relationships ought not to be entirely neglected by the young and the ambitious.
The “Don’t do as I did, do as I say” discourse is an old one. And Lewis is firmly within that tradition, writing like nothing so much as a spinster aunt out of a nineteenth-century novel (only in that world is 36 “old” for a woman). She wants her younger sister to not let a good opportunity pass by, and not allow the “good ones” to slip away. Lewis is following firmly in the footsteps of Lori Gottlieb, who wrote a ridiculous paean in favor of “settling” a year or so ago, but she belongs to a much older tradition, even older than the era of Dickens and Austen: that of the not-so-old, not-as-insightful-as-she-thinks-she-is aunt or sister figure who dispenses warnings to young women who are, she imagines, just like she was not so long ago. What’s so toxic about this discourse is that it purports to offer assistance to the young, but ends up teaching another lesson altogether: women are invariably architects of their own unhappiness. To be a woman is to suffer, and the only satisfaction that comes as a result of all of that suffering (whether that suffering came from cheating husbands — or, as in Lewis’ case, the absence of a husband) is the chance to issue dire warnings to a new generation of impressionable and idealistic young women. Call it the “Love Hurts” discourse, or the “Feminism turned out to be a crock” discourse if you like, but it’s really part of something else: the “Women don’t know what’s good for them” discourse.
I don’t doubt that Zoe Lewis is well-intentioned. The young women I work with who “mentor” their even younger-sisters by offering cautionary tales from their own “mistakes” are, I’m quite sure, also well-meaning. But they ought to know better; as humans, we learn far more effectively from what our elders actually did than from what they didn’t do. The purpose of telling the young about one’s fuck-ups, in other words, is not to discourage them from making the same mistake, but to show them positive steps for overcoming the most painful consequences of what they did. My stories about my drug addiction, for example, are useless in terms of teaching a young person not to try drugs. My story of recovery, on the other hand, has the potential to be genuinely helpful. That’s true for all of us, men and women alike, and it’s true whether the subject is addiction or sex or career or marriage. Contrary to what our culture claims, we learn very little from the errors of others. We only learn from the way in which they dealt with those errors. This is a message missing from the stories told by Lewis or Gottlieb or any of the current generation of thirty- and forty-something women getting book deals and stage plays based upon their desire to lament both their own mistakes and the larger “failure” of feminism itself.
It’s absolutely true that we live in a world where the sexual double standard is still, sadly and astonishingly, alive and well. It’s absolutely true that women have a smaller fertility window than men. It’s absolutely true that even the most modern of societies have failed to provide the child-care, family leave, and social assistance options that would allow women to more easily avoid the choice between motherhood and career. And it’s absolutely true that we’ve done a piss-poor job of encouraging young men to embrace family responsibility and to assume an equal share of household burdens. In other words, there is plenty to lament and plenty of work to be done. But Zoe Lewis misdirects her frustration. Rather than encouraging her younger sister and her peers to fight harder for a more woman-friendly society, to fight harder for a culture of male accountability, she encourages acquiescence to what she wrongly sees as biological truths: men are easily intimidated by strong women, all women really just want love and babies, and the sooner you find the right dude and get knocked up, the better. And all of this dubious advice is cloaked in the self-pitying, self-critical garb of the “Love Hurts and Women are Their Own Worst Enemies” discourse. It’s a sham, and a dangerous one.
Women can get married and have babies in their mid-to-late thirties, if not later (ask my wife). Women can find deep satisfaction in careers. Women can be happy without a man in their lives (ask my mother, divorced and cheerfully single since the Nixon Administration.) That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with wanting babies, or wanting them young. It doesn’t mean that every woman must consider her highest calling to be to public service or other work outside the home. Not everyone walking around with a double X chromosome has the same set of hopes and ambitions, after all. Indeed, there’s nothing more heinous than the suggestion, so often encoded into these so-called “words of wisdom” of the sort that Lewis offers, that all women really want the same thing, and that they are kidding themselves if they imagine otherwise.
One of the many goals of the feminist movement is — and has always been — to strengthen the bonds between women, to encourage sisterhood, and to facilitate inter-generational mentoring. Young women are hungry for voices other than their mothers’ (not that there’s anything wrong with talkin’ to Mama.) They need to hear from older women about how to navigate through the world; they need to hear about careers, about dreams fulfilled, about relationships and sex and men and money. But what they need most are guides to show them how to live, not cautionary tales of what not to do. Older women make a huge mistake when they imagine that their chief value to their little sisters (literal or figurative) is to offer them stories of their mistakes and their regrets. What the young need are road maps to achievement, strategies for overcoming adversity, and practical tools for negotiating their way to power, pleasure, and deep happiness. And the most trustworthy maps are those drawn by cartographers who’ve actually been to the places they describe.
UPDATE: Lynn has some very similar things to say today about the piece as well. She concludes with some splendid advice to her young relations:
Nieces, it is indeed true that you can’t have it all. Nephews, neither can you. Life involves choices, and sometimes you have to give certain things up, to get other things you want. But, nieces and nephews both, you can have balance. You can have a life that includes some form of happiness in both your family lives and your careers. You can have the loving relationships you want, and also have other aspirations. You can, nieces, be as strong as you need to be, when you need to be, and still have husbands who will find you as soft to the touch as they could wish. If that’s your wish.
No, you’re not always going to feel as invincible as you may perhaps feel now when you’re young. Bodies age, and obstacles come up that you couldn’t forsee. But life really doesn’t present you with such a stark choice between dreams and men as Lewis’ article tries to make out. It really, truly doesn’t.
Bold is mine. That’s what belongs in the flippin’ London Times.
perhaps the answer if to tell Zoe that maybe it’s her. if a man or woman can’t find a snugglebunny blaming cultural trends is the most obvious face saving shifting of blame. it’s somebody (insert convenient target) fault. this could be, for young people, a lesson in understanding psychology, motivation and the reasons why people attribute emotions.
I don’t understand why the work/life/family balance is seen as a “female problem”. How come men get to “have it all” (as she puts it)?
I guess I tend to agree with greginak … how unfortunate that feminism is so readily the scapegoat.
well actually i always thought the “have it all” was a problem in many ways. as a generalization men decades ago didn’t have it all. they focused more on work and lost out at home. the feminist push ( if it truly was) to have it all was a truly American notion and an unreasonable expectation. It was an American notion in that we are supposed to believe we can have everything and do anything just because we are American. the notion of a balance at anything suggests giving up something to have more of one thing. if you want to focus and put a lot of effort into work then other things have to be sacrificed.
Work/life/family has always been a difficult balance and nobody can have enough time for everything. When women say they want it all , that always rings of a bit of obsession with high achieving. Life isn’t like getting all A’s in school however.
The other part about “having it all” is “all” is defined by a glossy, pop image of what a generic person should based on a certain set of norms. If you have a reasonable understanding of “all” based on your true emotional, physical , etc needs then “all” is possible although unique to you.
Maybe she should have thought more about what she wants, or taken time for self-discovery, to know what she wants.
This remark may be unpopular, but the whole “I let feminism ruin my life!” argument irks me enough to make me brutal.
I just Googled her image. She is absolutely butt-ugly and clearly was in her younger days as well. Yes, Zoe, it’s true–only attractive women can get away with not kissing male butt and still score the husband-and-traditional-little-fambly-package from the kind of men who want to provide that. That kind of man either wants a submissive wife or a beautiful one (preferably both, of course, but that’s really hard to find unless he decides to go the mail-order bride route), and you clearly weren’t either.
There are plenty of men out there who don’t demand submissive-or-beautiful, but they also aren’t the types to coddle you into a suburban love nest filled with poopy little angels all your very own. And you’ve turned them all off you by this little rant, trust me now!…so you’re right, you really ARE probably going to be alone.
So, it never occurred to her that it is actually legal to be married and be a playwright at the same time? Or, god forbid, a parent and a playwright? Find another excuse, Zoe.
The point being missed (perhaps intentionally) is that feminism, like all other ideologies, feeds people a set of unattainable, unrealistic goals. One is bound to be disillusioned when the promised promises fail to happen. In high school I was fed to typical “You can be whatever you want to be” and “Nothing’s impossible” nonsense. However, the fact of the matter is that I cannot be whatever I want to be, I cannot do whatever I want to do and I certainly cannot have it all (a message that, as a male, I have curiously never heard directed at me or any other males). With every choice I make about what path to go down, I close off dozens of others. I think most of the boys at my all-boy school realized that after they took their college entrance exams. At some point reality must be acknowledged: choices come with cost, sometimes coats that one does not want to pay.
Lewis’ point about feminism is that it fed her a false message and false promise. She was taught that the thing she wants now she ought not want and did not want. It turns out she does. It may be different for other feminists, but there are a lot of feminists who have discovered that many of the things feminists and feminism taught them are not true. Certainly, it is much easier to deride women like Lewis who discover that feminism failed for them. It takes significantly less effort to ignore experiences that do not vibe with one’s opinions than it does to give out dubious advice cloaked in self-aggrandizement. It is a more difficult to examine whether the feminist messages that women of Lewis’ generation were exposed to led these women to form a set of false beliefs about what was possible and what they wanted.
Some disconnected observations.
After what LisaKS said, I just had to google Zoe Lewis’s image. She’s not “butt ugly”. She has a nice smile too.
We have to admit that there is an unavoidable biological dimension to this. A man who ultimately wants a family can throw himself into his career for 30 years (a full-length career) and only begin to think about nesting at age 50. A woman is on a much shorter time span. If she waits until 40, she’s cutting it awfully close. For all she knows she’ll hit menopause at age 42.
Feminism was supposed to be about choices. Zoe Lewis simply made a choice that she now regrets. She should not be denigrating the right she enjoyed to make that choice.
The bit about men being afraid of women who work really hard, that might still be true in some settings (though I assumed that the people in the arts were more liberal). Maybe she also came across as a bitch. The problem with women and men moving into new roles is that sometimes people don’t know how to act (or REact).
Men can also be bastards, of course, which might not be as bad as being a bitch. The traditional view is that the bitch is sexually frustrated and a few good orgasms would loosen her up. She is particularly susceptible to this if she’s unattached.
My experience with traditional men is that they might have prejudices against women in the workplace, but they respect individual women who know what they’re doing and work hard (”like a man”).
Indeed I agree that Ms Lewis has missed the point here about feminism. It is indeed supposed to be about choices. I hate those people who say that all women should vote in elections because women died to get them the vote. No! - women died to give them the right to vote, but the individual has the choice whether they use it or not. This is the thing which really bugs me. The ideal situation of equality between the sexes is women and men being able to take on any role that they want and combine any roles they choose and that motherhood and children should be just as valid a choice - rather than a lack of choice. Of course if she wants to look after children she can foster or adopt - she’s not lost the chance to make a difference to the life of a child. It’s the material possession obsession coming out again - she’s achieved the career success and now she wants to produce her own children, rather than being a mother in more general terms.
I suppose a point that has been missed here is that Zoe Lewis and her contemporary feminists, being in the first wave of career women trail-blaizers, has unfortunately been on the pendulum when it was swinging on its most extreme way away from the traditional family unit of women at home with children and without careers. The pendulum will gradually swing less and less viciously until we reach the balance in the future which is needed. These career women didn’t have older feminists who had got twenty or thirty years down the line to give them some real experience of what being a feminist means. Being in this first wave who have now grown older and become disillusioned she’s just trying to share her experiences where presumably she didn’t have much previous experience from others to rely upon when she was pursuing the principles of feminism. This sort of information will help the next wave of feminists make a more informed choice about their paths in life.
Toysoldier, what was this “false promise”? That you don’t have to expend any effort to find a partner, the right husband will just drop into your lap? That every playwright will be a success if she just puts in the effort? That if the grass looks greener on the other side, it really is? That if your life isn’t perfect, it’s because somebody tricked you along the way?
Lewis is not part of any “first wave of feminists” or “career trailblazers”. She’s 36. She’s not part of the generation that had to fight for a place at the table at all; she’s of the generation that listened to “Free To Be You and Me” growing up and (at least in the US) doesn’t remember a time before Roe v. Wade.
Cynically, I think she’s trying to get some more publicity for her play, because being a career woman telling everyone else to get back in the kitchen is always good for some column inches.
I found this post very stimulating and comments, especially Toysoldier’s very interesting too.
To those reading me, please excuse my broken english.
I am quite new to feminism (although I was raised by a happily married feminist mother)
To me, Zoe lewis is speaking as a bitter woman rather as a feminist.
Plus, I’m wondering if at some point, things we say and do are not mostly due to energy and adaptability rather than to gender. the “survival of the fittest” thing.
What I mean really, is that obviously it is possible to be an athlete, a successful business woman and a mother and to be in love, (because your wife is) but let’s face it, it’s hard and some women might at some point in their lives, find that it was too hard for them because of a lesser energy level and would have prefered a life pattern that was less demanding. To those women, who had less energy or stamina, feminism can appear as a theory which did not give them a choice.
Coming back to my mother, who is definitely a feminist, she repeatedly told me how much she despised Simone de Beauvoir who was an “easy feminist” because she intended to tell women what they ought to do while she herself didn’t want or couldn’t be a mother. Feminism should also address uneducated mothers.
I have not read “ex utero” by Peggy Sastre, but it seems to me that feminists should take the present crisis into account.
I agree. It never seems to occur to these dopes that maybe they’re just unpleasant women, period. There’s also something doubly-perverse in her argument, because she’s not just blaming “feminism” for her bitter, emotionally-barren state. There’s also the clear implication that men are just too gutless to be attracted to a strong , talented woman. Come on, Zoe. No one likes a sourpuss, period.
Great post, but more importantly, congrats on your baby girl!
Hmm.. I think I stand corrected after my post above. I have to admit that I had not read things very thoroughly and made some assumptions. I considered just leaving this alone, but I wanted to post and say that I wouldn’t particularly “stand by” calling her a trailblazer and such-like… ok leaving all that aside my point really was that the “career woman” in the terms we see her now is a fairly recent phenomenon and it’s reasonable to find that there is still a lot to learn about the effects of these types of life choices. Sharing experiences will help everybody surely?
Anyway I agree with mythago - I’d imagine it is possible to be a playwright and a mother. Zoe can still do this, but if she’s having a problem conceiving then she can adopt and still be a mother. I’m 33 and I’m still trying to have a baby, but if I don’t manage it I don’t have a wonderful achievement such as writing a play to blame it on, it’s just nature and bad luck at the end of the day.
Anyway, I promise I’ll make sure I get my facts straight before I post on anything in future :-)
Call it the “Love Hurts” discourse, or the “Feminism turned out to be a crock” discourse if you like, but it’s really part of something else: the “Women don’t know what’s good for them” discourse.
I disagree. I think the motivation for most of the “do as I say, not as I did” lectures is to counter the strong cultural pressures women face. Women, especially young women, are still encouraged to scale back dreams and ambitions, still encouraged to seek romantic relationships at any and all cost, still encouraged to be enablers and the responsible moral actors, still reminded to be superwomen—not necessarily “having” it all, but certainly doing it all, and above all not to trust their (our) own voice. I do and will continue to provide my daughter with counter-arguments and counter-examples to all the anti-feminist messages I can’t prevent her from receiving in the culture at large. In no way do I believe that she doesn’t have her own mind, or that she won’t sometimes fall prey to some of that toxic bullshit. But I still believe it’s my responsibility as a parent to mitigate the toxic messaging that she is already receiving, to the extent that I can. As well as to let her know that we all make mistakes, and that it’s not the end of the world when you do.
With that said, there’s no way in hell feminism is to blame for her lack of children or a relationship. Looking around my union hall, damn near every married man under 50, and all of them under 40, chose professional women as wives. In fact, lack of an education and/or decent paying job is considered a “deal-breaker” when it comes to dating. I’m having a really hard time believing that it was her career that kept her out of a relationship. Maybe it was her, as other commenters have said, or maybe she just hasn’t been getting out of the house or work much—not getting out and circulating where she would be likely to meet single men. And then again, as another commenter said, maybe the op-ed is strictly a publicity stunt.
Mythago, Lewis stated, ” I was led to believe that women could “have it all” and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dreams - to be a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.”
I cannot, nor do I intend, to argue with whether she feels feminism failed her. That is her opinion of her experience (the knowledge of which none of us are privy to and therefore should not presume to know). I do think it is worth listening to women who grew up with feminism, who cannot recall a time when it did not exist and now find that what they believed, as a result of feminism,turned out to be far different. I can understand why, from an ideological standpoint, one would be disinterested in her opinion of experience. What she says is the equivalent of an atheist finding that promises of Christianity never materialized. That does not mean her opinion is worthless, although that seems to be the message here.
Odd to find me saying this has nothing to do with “feminism” - but it doesn’t.
Lewis prattles on and on but the bottom line is this - she put “career” and “family” in a prioritized hierarchy, and put “career” first. And she didn’t find a man willing to play second string to her career.
Why she is surprised at this is beyond me.
I am one of those women who grew up with feminism; I’m just about Lewis’s age. I still think she’s a whiner looking for column inches. But that’s uncomfortable to someone of your ideology, isn’t it?
The “men” don’t want strong women is a crock of feces. “Men” don’t have uniform beliefs and preferences any more than “women” do. I know of many happily married feminists, so this is a clearly false belief that men don’t want feminists.
Gonz - she wasn’t looking for a man. She was busying partying and writing plays (nothing wrong with that, mind) and then found herself in her mid-30s without a suitable husband and babies having fallen magically into her lap.
Now, a sensible person who still wanted those things might have thought “Okay, now I should start focusing on finding the right guy.” A not-very-sensible person, perhaps one looking for publicity for her new play, acts like a frustrated five-year-old, sitting on the floor and throwing a tantrum because she doesn’t have a marriage and kids and candy and a pony RIGHT NOW and it’s somebody else’s fault.
Gonzman wonders why she is surprised not to find a man playing second fiddle to her career. Why not? Women have been expected to play second fiddle to their partner’s career for years.