"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' " [Betty Friedan] told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."
Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique told women that if they wanted to be happy they should get out in the world, use their educations, and get a job. That would mean that they would have another job, cleaning the house, raising the children, doing the shopping, driving the children to this play date and that baseball/football/ballet/piano lesson/school, and working outside the home usually for men who devalued their work in the workplace or sexually harassed them.
Ms. Friedan didn't tackle equal pay for equal work with equal qualifications although the Kennedy Administration did pass such legislation the year Ms. Friedan's book appeared. Her book did not talk about how to raise sons to clean up, cook, respect women and themselves. It just said get a job, use your brain, be happier. If you can live without your vacuum cleaner you are truly liberated from the cultural mindset of "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." I think however, that "Cleanliness is next to Impossible."
I bought myself a Serenity Prayer plaque. It looks like someone threw it hard against the wall or floor. It looks cracked and re-glued together. As imperfect as my world. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell's Uncle Ellis told him that it was vanity to think that anyone can personally make a difference. I can't change the world, I can only change the way I relate to it. And the way I relate to it is giving me ulcers and shingles.
Has it occurred to anyone that if raising children and cleaning house were the most important jobs on earth, that men would think that they should do those things and leave women to do the lesser jobs? Well, of course not. Babies come out of our bodies, like urine, feces, spit, and blood and therefore keeping those filthy issues at bay belong to women. But if women can potty train their sons they can sure as hell teach them to pick up their socks and do their own laundry.
In Fur: An Imaginary Biography of Diane Arbus her husband whines he can't run the business and raise the children and be the tooth fairy, too. I don't know why the hell not, she can. He wants her to stop all this personal development and run an orderly house and be his assistant. She falls in love with Lionel Sweeney because he doesn't ask her to keep house. He ask her to reveal her mind and use her creativity. And not pick up his socks. He plays with the children, reads to them, and opens Diane to herself. And she sees the world and herself differently. No longer just her husband's wife, her children's mother, the parents' daughter, she is a fully realized woman, artist, force, who accepts her talent as she accepts her photographic subjects. As they are, not as what they are trying to hide.
Well, I hired a handyman to help me with the yard, the household things that constantly need repair. I am interviewing housekeepers, I am about to end my credit card debt, I am hiring a friend who needs the money to tutor me for the Bar--she is licensed in Texas and New York and said hands down the Texas Bar is the worst--I am sitting for the February Bar. Roofers have been secured, a fence builder has been asked for estimates.
My ulcer/shingles demand it. New meds, appointments for eye exams, cardiologist, dermatologists, have been made. I have, however, a disease that has no name, as Friedan would say. A personal doubt that I can't shake, a situation that I cannot master and conduct a normal life. I can't get no satisfaction until I get my law license and get it back from the frame shop. But I can't work my day job, which I must, keep the house, the yard, repair the flotsam and jetsam, cook, wash the dishes, the laundry and study for the Bar. It must be Bar, Exercise for health and fight stress, and Work. And what keeps me from it? I keep myself from it by trying to serve too many masters. We can have it all. Just not all at once. And some of it isn't worth it. All labor has dignity and I shouldn't feel bad about paying a housekeeper.
And feeling bad is the trained response. Am I less than Wonder Woman because I don't clean my own house? And it is that thinking that must be overcome. Because that is the tug of a conventional, safe, life void of creativity, energy, and vitality.
