You ARE an exception, beginning with the fact that you are working towards an academic career. I have long since made up my mind that, as a historian, I am an exception, and that my interests are not the interests of mankind at large (although they are quick enough to ask questions about points of interest, they would never make the sacrifices and efforts involved in finding the answers for themselves). More power to you; I certainly would hate a society in which the likes of Ann Douglas or Mary Beard, to mention only two, were forced to stay at home and have babies. If I ever met Ann Douglas, to mention one, I would bow before her genius and immense learning. To make such a woman do anything except the thing she has done would be a colossal waste. More: it would be a crime against the human spirit. The work of an Ann Douglas is the work of one irreplaceable human mind, and had it not been done by her, we could not have an exact replacement, and the whole world would be the poorer. But bear in mind that the vast majority of "careers" available to anyone were never the spiritually validating and emotionally fulfilling ones that research and learning afford. What is more, the academic career structure is one of the few that has not been devastated by globalization and Thatcherism. Talk to the women at the tills where you buy your food, talk to those who stack the shelves in the storage areas, talk to those who work in call centres or factories. Ask them whether that is what they want from life. Ask them if their career means anything more to them than getting a cheque to pay their bills. And bear in mind that this is the experience of work for the vast majority of women in the world.
Second, beware of projection. If you feel that there is so great a pressure on women to have babies, is that because everyone in the world is telling you to have them - or because you are trying not to hear? There is no noise, as they saying goes, so loud as the one you are trying not to hear. And I am not saying that to make you feel guilty or to undermine you. In order to pursue a calling to which you are eminently suited and which is worth following in itself - which would be worth following even if you never made a penny out of it, and had to subsidize it by stacking shelves - you have to make choices, and choices mean sacrifices. But be careful you do not project the difficulty of a choice on to the outside world; that you do misplace the will that drives this choice - which is your will - on to an anthropomorphized "society" which is trying to hold you back. That is both nonsense and spiritually dangerous: it means developing the paranoid belief that all the problems that legitimately face any scholar, or any person with a sense of mission and calling, are the result of hostile wills. They are not. They are the result of life as it is, and all scholars have to overcome them. There is a reason why Chaucer made his Oxford scholar lean and a bit shabby.
EDITED IN: I had to correct this because I mentioned both "Ann Douglas" and "Mary Douglas". They are both women of genius; Ann Douglas is the author of the two finest books of American culture history I ever read - The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty - and the late Mary Douglas was one of the greatest anthropologists in history. To make matters more complicated yet, Mary Beard is one of the greatest Classicists alive. I have read with great admiration and immense debt the works of all three.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: women and babies
Date: 2008-06-20 12:26 pm (UTC)Second, beware of projection. If you feel that there is so great a pressure on women to have babies, is that because everyone in the world is telling you to have them - or because you are trying not to hear? There is no noise, as they saying goes, so loud as the one you are trying not to hear. And I am not saying that to make you feel guilty or to undermine you. In order to pursue a calling to which you are eminently suited and which is worth following in itself - which would be worth following even if you never made a penny out of it, and had to subsidize it by stacking shelves - you have to make choices, and choices mean sacrifices. But be careful you do not project the difficulty of a choice on to the outside world; that you do misplace the will that drives this choice - which is your will - on to an anthropomorphized "society" which is trying to hold you back. That is both nonsense and spiritually dangerous: it means developing the paranoid belief that all the problems that legitimately face any scholar, or any person with a sense of mission and calling, are the result of hostile wills. They are not. They are the result of life as it is, and all scholars have to overcome them. There is a reason why Chaucer made his Oxford scholar lean and a bit shabby.
EDITED IN: I had to correct this because I mentioned both "Ann Douglas" and "Mary Douglas". They are both women of genius; Ann Douglas is the author of the two finest books of American culture history I ever read - The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty - and the late Mary Douglas was one of the greatest anthropologists in history. To make matters more complicated yet, Mary Beard is one of the greatest Classicists alive. I have read with great admiration and immense debt the works of all three.