Xanthippe

[truepenny]

Over on Caveat Lector, Dorothea's been talking about shrewishness, an entry which I've been thinking about at odd moments over the past day or so. And I think that the perceived "problem" with Xanthippe isn't so much that she's a competent woman, managing a household and a woefully impractical spouse, as it is that she calls attention to her competency. She expects to be thanked for it. And she gets resentful when her miracles of organization are dismissed as unnecessary. I would argue that that is Xanthippe's sin. Patriarchy and its great minds are perfectly okay with women doing all the work; they just don't want it pointed out that that's what's going on. It's the Emperor's New Clothes again. Women's work is supposed to be invisible and it's supposed to be performed out of the goodness of our sweet little martyred hearts. The opposite of "bitch" is "doormat."

This is also, it's occurring to me, the idea behind the massive Victorian ideological apparatus of the Angel in the House. The Angel is supposed to rule over the private sphere; it's her toy, to keep her from trying to venture into the public sphere. And that private sphere is supposed to be perfect and beautiful and well-managed, but that descriptor of "angel" makes it completely impossible for any woman who desires to live up to this standard of womanhood ever to mention the effort that goes into this perfection. It's like the toxic version of sprezzetura, where you don't merely do something difficult as if it were easy, you and everyone around you are expressly forbidden from ever admitting that it was difficult in the first place.

Women become shrews when they refuse to be angels. Another neat double-bind brought to you by Western cultural patriarchy.

Comments

race and matriarchy

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

do stereotypes of the "African-American matriarch" from, say, 1950s-1970s bear on your question at all?

I've been towed right out of my competency to discuss with this one, but since I've been well trained by grad school, I'm not going to let that stop me. If anyone has greater knowledge and/or experience, please chime in and correct me.

It is certainly true that Afr-Am archetypes allow for a positive "managing woman" role, but also true that Afr-Am women, especially of that same period, were facing much worse misogyny at EVERY level of their lives than white women (if I'm remembering Patricia Hill Collins correctly). Also, since the Afr-Am matriarch archetype got co-opted by white hegemonic culture (partly as an updated version of the "mammy," cf GWTW) as a way to make African-Americans seems (a.) nonthreatening and (b.) accepted by white society (us? no, WE don't oppress black people! see how much we love our housekeeper?), I'm a little uncertain about how to evaluate that depiction.

Re: race and matriarchy

[libskrat]

Well, that isn't exactly where I was going with that -- and I'm out of my depth too, so if I say something especially inane, somebody slap me.

My understanding of reactions to, say, some female characters in Lorraine Hansberry plays includes a backlash from black men who felt the "African-American matriarch" characters to be emasculating. Such strong women somehow necessarily implied that the men around them were weak.

If you accept that premise (and I don't know enough to accept or reject it), the analogy to Xanthippe and her sisters throughout history should be fairly evident.

Re: race and matriarchy

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, I was reading stupidly and somehow things got twisted around in my head so I thought you were advancing the African-American Matriarch stereotype as a counter-example to shrewishness extending across race- and class-based divides. Whereas you were actually saying what I was waffling about in my response to you, which is that that stereotype CAN be positive, but can also be exceptionally negative, as with the "emasculating" idea. So actually we're agreeing with each other.