can we do it all?
on women's ambitions and home-making [53]:
A few months ago, I had my first viral tweet when I shared about how as I grew older a lot of my ex-hustling, ex-grinding, overachievers female friends turn their ambitious dreams into domestic and “softer” aspirations like being stay at home girlfriend/wife/mom. They half-jokingly discuss giving up working life to be prioritizing domestic matters as long as they are provided financially. I’m putting soft in quotes because I am fully aware of the burden of domestic tasks and how that can be as taxing as working outside of the home.
I respect anyone’s decisions to stay at home or work outside. I only found this shift intriguing because these friends are one of the most ambitious and driven friends I have. Only a few years prior, they “ran the race” and “grinded the grind” much faster and harder than I have ever had. They had strong conviction about excelling outside of the house. When I told my mom of this trend, she sneered at this and told us how we would get bored so quickly being trained to aspire for achievements in the working world our entire life. That makes me wonder how many of these friends genuinely want to quit their ambitions and stay at home. Or do they want to do that because it is easier to not fight against the grain as a woman?
When I was a tad younger, I was headstrong about a woman being able to do everything and anything a man can. Now, technically women can but we don’t exist in a vaccum. In
essay on monsters, they discussed how women are rarely “art monsters”.Writer Claire Dederer: “[t]he female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: ‘I wish I had a wife.’ What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.”
and…
It’s very telling how ‘wife’ is used here — a feminine partner is defined as a role of service, assistance. A wife is the antonym of a monster in this context. For a male art monster (or more generally: a craft monster), his female counterpart serves as an extension of him making sure the roads of his megalomania are slick and unblocked. He’d never see marriage as an obstacle to his craft because his concept of it would be one that would center around his obsession, be secondary to it.
As a woman growing up in a Confucian society, I have learnt by heart the stories of how women’s lives evolved. The experience starts when girls are young, expected to help around the house to know how to do things comes marriage. The experience gets more intense as they get to early adulthood, particularly the “fertile years” usually mid to late 20s. Women then begin to be seen as a mechanism to reproduce and make a home. Questions surrounding a potential partner surface frequently.
How dare we to think of our own passions and dreams? The lives of women revolve around her family and a partner.
When I live in America, the conversations and expectations around women giving births, raising children and coddling men are significantly less, nevertheless not non-existent. A lot of the time, I see it in my friends’ heterosexual relationship dynamics. A frequent occurence is when the boyfriend works on something entrepreneurial or traditionally more “hard core” than the girlfriend, whether that job pays more or has more growth prospects. All the while, the female will pour much effort into taking care of the guy’s wellbeing, concerning the mundane aspects of his life like how he eats, how he lives, etc. and the guy only needs to think about his “art” - whatever that art might be. Looking at my own social circle, however limited a sample that is, gives a glimpse into what a lot of their futures can be. In general, I have seen the women in my life caring much about the “mundane things” while men can mostly disregard them, usually because they have the female in their lives, first is mother and then girlfriends and wives to handle them.
As a headstrong and passionate person who wants to be great in writing, I think a lot about how I can get there. From the book Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill:
“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”
Art monsters might be seen as a metaphor for people dedicated to a cause. How can women be art monsters if we are still seen as, perhaps feel like an extension of our partner. A common practice in my home country is to call identify a person by their partner’s name. For example, if A is married to B, then it would be the AB family. If the couple is heterosexual, the male’s name will come first, followed by that of the female. It is deeply ingrained in us to think about a woman as secondary to her male partner.
I think in order to be art monsters, women ought to be selfish. Truth is, not a lot of things are harder than a woman being selfish and unaccommodating in the 21st century. Not only do women should have space to think about our pursuits more often, women should be obsessively pursuing our passions to the point we can comfortably put the mundane aspects of life on the backburner. If you are a woman and have the option, ask whether you are genuinely interested in caretaking or is it because it is easier to follow what has been written out for you? Would it be easier for me to choose more pleasant life choices: being at home, choosing a long-term partner to build a family with as my main life goal? Yes. But I am choosing anything but that now because I want to have the same rights as men do, pursuing what I like and proving myself.
A guy friend once told me whatever person I ended up with would likely be a dependent and clingy one. He used a term in Vietnamese that can be translated into English as dress-clinging. I processed the comment with half part amusement and bewilderment. He might be speculating that my determination to be great by myself first before yielding to my male partner as ludicrous, guaranteeing me having a submissive partner.
In some ways, I do think that might be true. I won’t be the one to fold socks and clean the floor when demanded. I only cook but only because I like it and when I have the time. I will pursue the things I am adamant about so whoever will be in my life for a long time should be able to see that as normal. Giving my friend benefit of the doubt, I think he meant I needed a self-sufficient person, someone who could well take care of themselves and can support me doing what I want.
Ava from
wrote in her latest essay about how no one expects greatness from women, not even women themselves:How so many men see their wives as a reflection of themselves but their children as an extension of themselves. How the women in the life coddle them, mollify their egos. And always I’ve thought: who’s gonna mollify my ego except me.
Men should be eased of expectations and women should have more expectations put on them to be great. In raising women expectations, we are empowering them to strive more than being the backbone of families but are rarely recognized. Women can and need to be recognized more as students and masters of arts, law, medicine, business, technology, etc.
To have the privilege to put our passions first and to only think about relationships and marriage as uplifting factors, not our entire world, women can do it all.
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i loved this!
Beautiful newsletter. I can relate. It's so important for women to be self-sufficient and not depend on men for their survival. If a woman is self-sufficient, she will expect to form a relationship with a self-sufficient man. Don't settle for less. I saw so many women of my mother's generation being subservient to men and those women lived a life of misery as they dependent on their husbands to provide for them emotionally and especially financially. Those women stayed in unhealthy relationships because they had limited resources and no money, and their religion forbid them to get a divorce. Women can choose to have a career and a family or stay home as long as they are financially autonomous which bring up the question: Can one be financially independent by staying home? I believe women should be self-accomplished and if a partner should come only, he/she will be the dessert and not the main course. Thank you for sharing such a relatable topic.