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

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

Very good points, especially on the deserved demand for recognition and the public & private sphere; while I tend to associate the latter with Ancient Roman culture or Islamic countries first, it is a thread we can follow throughout history and into our own society today...

[pameladean]

Oh, my aching head. You are giving me simultaneous terrible flashbacks of, first, Ellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and, second, one of the things that has always made me deeply uneasy about, not Barrayar, since almost everything makes me uneasy about that planet, but rather, uneasy about the author's apparent take on it -- the conspiracy of women, unnoticed, unregarded in the councils of the great, but getting things done. The difference is that a lot of the things they do are deeply subversive, which cannot be said about anything Ellen O'Hara did. It's Scarlett who is subversive, but it doesn't get her anything, that's the point.

Sorry, rambling. It was such a juxtaposition. Ow.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That is one of the things that drives me absolutely NUTS about Cordelia in the Miles-books (as opposed to Cordelia in her own books, please note). The Cordelia of Shards of Honor and Barrayar is a splendidly straight-forward, no-nonsense, unfeminine person, completely unsuited to playing this sort of gender-role game ... and then she goes and turns into the Countess, who is unfailingly maternal and wise and apparently omniscient and a skilled participant in the backstage Machiavellianism you're referring to. It's not a stereotype I enjoy anyway (I like Alys much better when she's off-stage as a sort of Wodehousian aunt than when she's on-stage and the Barrayaran variation on the same damn Matriarch theme), and when I reread Shards of Honor and think about that Cordelia being squashed into the Countess-box, it makes me peevish. I really dislike the Countess and I was very fond of Cordelia, who was a character I could identify with at least a little. No one could identify with the Countess--at least, I sincerely hope not, and anyone who can is someone I do not want messing about in my life, thank you very much. The dea ex machina (which is where the Countess is always tending, and where she very much arrives in A Civil Campaign) is useful as a plot device, and she can be fun, but she is also flagrantly a fantasy ... and since it's a fantasy also perpetrated by the unfortunate later novels of Robert A. Heinlein, I'm going to go ahead and say I think it's a pernicious fantasy. Real women aren't like that And if their society makes them be that way, as Barrayar certainly would, I don't think they should be as complacent and pleased about it as the Barrayaran women are. The manipulative women I've known have all been petty and miserable. And the kind of society-wide conspiracy that is apparently the Barrayaran version of feminism should be incredibly fatiguing and stressful and miserable--face it, what you're doing is LYING to your husband and father and sons, and if you love them, that's incredibly sad, and if you don't love them ... well, that's incredibly sad, too. It's a successful strategy for humor (although I'm not quite sure why, thinking about it), but it would be much more interesting to think about it as tragedy.

[pameladean]

I am entirely with you in the matter of Heinleinian feminine manipulation. Ugh. And it is a tragedy, of course, the whole Barrayaran conspiracy; it's a dreadful waste of energy and emotional space.

I think that part of what is going on with the two Cordelias is Miles's relentlessly Barrayaran and self-centered viewpoint. He is not a very reliable narrator where she's concerned. However, I don't think that's the whole story. There's just something wrong there. Cordelia in Shards(/i> is by far my favorite character, and I agree with you about her being squashed regardless into an unsuitable box. It's my main deep dissatisfaction with the series. Feh.

(And thank you for a very thought-provoking post.)

Pamela

[papersky.livejournal.com]

"It's a very poor thing to be a woman," she said to her sister.

"It is perhaps better than being a dog," said Nora. "But of course we can't compare ourselves to men."

Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right, 1869, two admirable characters speaking.

I'm not ten percent of the way into this novel yet, but it's tackling the "angel in house, man head of woman" theme head on so far. I think he'd just noticed. I really do, I think he had just, sometime in his thirties, noticed the limits which were set on women's potentialities. Maybe George Eliot had made it clear.

[heresluck]

Of course, race and class factor into this too; middle-class women of the Victorian era were able to maintain the angel facade partly by "managing" a household in which at least one other woman did a good deal of the (literally) dirty work. Working-class women were not really women, according to the standards of the time -- that is, they were not subject to the circumscribed privileges of "the fairer sex," because the fairer sex, by definition, did not work. And of course slaves weren't even considered human.

So, perhaps women become shrews when they refuse to be angels but could (and therefore should) be--a considerably narrower category?

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Cordelia the Countess isn't lying to Aral. Both of them are jointly - and collusively - lying to Barrayar, to drag it somewhere it wouldn't go if it knew where it was heading. A nasty conclusion, but that's politics, and given the Barrayaran alternatives there is no alternative to the sacrifice of Aral and Cordelia's vitality and integrity, if things can ever change. And she doesn't lie to Mark, either - her surprisingly vengeful remarks about "the last generation where the game will be played this way" and about "the old women" in Mirror Dance, show, to me, how disillusioned and tired she has become about what she has been forced to become. She lies to Miles, but not so dedicatedly that if he were capable of pulling his head out of his backside - which, IMHO, he isn't - he couldn't understand what she's really saying. And she speaks truth to Ekaterin, who is struggling out of being (and failed at her Barrayaran marriage because she wasn't) an Angel in the House.

It would get Heileinesque (and, since I know Weber better than Heinlein) Harringtonian, if she achieved these dirty compromises without sacrifice. (The transformation of Grayson under the influence of Honor in Weber's books makes me spit. Ingrained sexism does not melt like that under the influence of a Good and Talented Woman - I've tried it in law firms, and I wish I'd been in one that melted like Grayson when shown the right way(Εί θεγενοι μην. . .)

But there are problems, and compromises, and I think she may deserve more slack.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Okay, yes, I have perpetrated the middle-class white American feminist mistake of assuming everybody out there is Just Like Me. Mea maxima culpa.

But WHOSE standards said that working class women weren't really women? The standards of working class men, or is that another example of middle-class judgment and standards? The Angel herself is very much a white, middle-class, Anglo-American Victorian invention, but don't women of other races and classes get labeled as shrews?

[marith.livejournal.com]

I think so. And while I don't have nearly enough socioanth to discuss it, this would seem to feed right into the gigantic mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dynamic that runs households around the world.

AIUI, the daughter-in-law is required to be the angel, and possibly also the slave; her reward is a chance to become the matriarch in turn.

New Monday morning anthem: Kipling's "The SonsDaughters of Martha"?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Let us not speak of Honor Harrington, because I will commence to froth at the mouth. And Grayson is just stupid. Not as stupid as Honor's home planet, the name of which I have mercifully forgotten--by comparison to the other cultures in those books, Grayson is fascinating--but still stupid. Stupidly thought-out and stupidly handled.

I hear what you're saying about Cordelia, but the single scene which most irritates me in A Civil Campaign is from Mark's PoV, and Mark, unlike Miles, is a sensitive observer, one moreover who thinks Barrayarans are collectively a bunch of loons. But The Countess sweeping in and fixing Mark and Kareen's problems by a display of Mother-Knows-Best on Drou and Koudelka ... even by vigorous application of imagination and subversive reading, I can't make that anything other than a prime example of the Matriarch Stereotype Pamela and I have been complaining about. Yes, she's doing it in the service of a decidedly non-Barrayaran, non-patriarchal relationship, but the manner in which she does it does not belong to the socially awkward, grimly determined Cordelia of Shards of Honor. I don't mind her growing up, making sacrifices, maturing into this rather unpleasant role, but I object to the way it's presented. I would LOVE to see another Cordelia PoV novel now to dig into the sorts of things you're bringing up, but the impression I get from the books we have is that The Countess is all we get; Cordelia has been left behind by the author.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I must confess that I personally do not have this problem, because I am a lazy slattern. My husband probably does more of the housework than I do. I was, however, raised by a fair approximation of the Angel in the House, patient martyrdom and all. I fear I am a sad disappointment to my mother. *g*

[vass]

Oh gosh. One of the problems with being raised by an Angel in the House (or someone who gets a cleaner in instead of doing housework, or someone too polite to correct one - there are other examples, I'm sure) is that they don't, can't, teach one how to do things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's not that I don't know how. It's that I won't. Partly this is, as I said, laziness. Partly I think it's a kind of rebellion, defiantly refusing to conform to my mother's model of womanhood and that sort of thing. I also have an extremely high tolerance for clutter and chaos.

*looks at state of desk*

And a remarkably high proficiency at generating same. I swear this desk was tidy a week ago.

*sigh*

[cija.livejournal.com]

There is no shrewishness like that of the shrew who is by nature a 'highly intense' type, as Dorothea has it, but who has been shoehorned into a caretaking role for which she has no liking, no affinity, no vocation. While some sigh that woman's work is never done, never respected, never appreciated, others burn to know why women's work has to be their work.

And when you live in a culture that valorizes the absent-mindedness as actual proof of a higher order of mind, that says your choice to keep the cat fed and clothed and the house from catching on fire bespeaks a lower class of priorities, because if you were really brilliant like husband is, you wouldn't be able to concentrate on such lowly things - look at him, he can't be bothered to come in out of the rain, if you can remember to nag him about the little things you can't possibly be a genius yourself, genius is supremely selfish, but that's all right, dear, because brilliant men need stable, practical, unimaginative partners, it keeps them grounded.

I think that behind the shrill nagging of the 'shrew' is often the suppressed shriek of rage that says, "Just because I do this job well, better than you could or ever would, does not mean it is natural to me. I have better things to do with my life, too."

As well as everything else you say, of course.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Where I was talking about why women are PERCEIVED as shrews, you're talking about why they BECOME shrews, and I think you're right. I know that would be my reaction, if I were forced into that "genius-minding" role, especially if the genuine, soul-destroying, and difficult work involved in that role was then ignored and denigrated by everyone around me. Homicide would start looking like a very tempting option.

Certainly Shakespeare's Kate, the prototypical literary shrew, is motivated very much by apoplectic frustration at the limited roles available to her. I dislike most of that play a great deal, but Shakespeare doesn't play down the prison Kate is trapped in. Also, now that I think of it, Eowyn could very easily have been portrayed as a typical shrew, and it is greatly to Tolkien's credit that she is not, that we are allowed to sympathize with her frustration rather than either laughing at it or being repulsed by it.

The four classes of men

[(Anonymous)]

Men come in four classes:

Class 1's never do any housework, period.
Class 2's don't do any, either, but they feel guilty about it.
Class 3's will do what you ask, but *only* what you ask.
Class 4's will actually see what needs doing and take care of it.

I myself fluctuate between the last two classes, after spending half my life married.

John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)

Re: The four classes of men

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Women do too.

It's just that it's not socially acceptable even now for women to be your class 1, and even 2 often gets met with amazement.

I don't feel I do more than my share of housework, and I live with a husband and a son. I do feel I do more than my share of floccinaucinihilipilificating nagging, reminding people to do their jobs. I hate that. I put it as category "4" on our list, things I hate to do. But I guess it would be the same with any gender of 12 year old, and I seem to be the only person capable of even half-way remembering which days rubbish gets collected.

Re: The four classes of men

[(Anonymous)]

Dorothea, the person who started this, here, trying to keep my temper --

Papersky, right on. Cija, you are my new hero. Truepenny and Marith, do stereotypes of the "African-American matriarch" from, say, 1950s-1970s bear on your question at all?

John, I love you dearly, but... Do you really think that *housework* is the sole or even the main issue here? I wish!

Housework is a symptom. The illness is not taking responsibility for the grotty and annoying but necessary bits of one's own life, such that if they are to be done at all, somebody else has to do them. Such G&AbN bits are hardly limited to housework.

Maybe I didn't make that clear in my original CavLec post. No, I know I didn't. So here it is now.

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.

Re: The four classes of men

[pameladean]

Me too! Me too! I live with a great variety of genders and NOBODY BUT ME can recall when the recycling is collected. (Rubbish doesn't really matter -- we have two huge carts for it and it's taken once a week. Recycling is every other week and tends to pile up in the staircases. Argh. Argh. Argh.)

Pamela
belatedly

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think there are patterns. They're patterns it's easy to fall into when writing, and they're patterns it's easy to fall into in life. The "angel" pattern means you just automatically don't get to see men, fictionally, rushing round picking up stuff before the visitors arrive, or looking after kids, and read that as neutral. I'm trying to think of fictional scenes of men casually cleaning and not played for laughs, and I can only think of one, Albert in Jack Trevor Story's Something for Nothing. The Angel pattern in life means that there are a number of things that just happen to be my job that also just happen to be female socialisation. And when I was reading the post about the valorization of absent minded genius, well, yes, absolutely.

And the "shrew" pattern is there as well, yes angel becomes shrew, but what is the "hen-pecked" pattern for men!

There's another pattern too, which I'd call the "Mary" pattern, after Martha's sister. Mary got to sit and chat with the guys, while Martha made dinner. Mary walks in and puts her boots on the sofa, just like a guy, and boasts about how liberated she is, while dropping cigarette ash Martha has to vacuum. Like cavlec said, somebody has to do those things, and there's only a certain amount of not getting done that's tolerable, and women are socialised to believe that a) it's their job, and b) to be less up to tolerating it, and if they go against a and b, then it's still interesting to look who is doing it. I've seen a lot of situations where Mary gets validated and Martha gets invisible, and I've been Mary in that situation and I don't like that either. Honor Harrington is a Mary. Marian Alston in Stirling's Nantucket books is another. You can put a Mary into a story very easily, and in fact it is quite hard to avoid making a female protagonist a Mary. The pattern's exerting pressure.

At earlier tech levels, there was more physical labour, we have machines to do a lot of it (but we also have higher standards of clean) but that isn't the point, it's the nurturing thing, it's the taking care and that's got to be human work.

So you get SF futures where the engineer just happens to be a guy and the nurse just happens to be a woman, where the absent-minded doctor happens to be a man and his nurturing wife happens to be into ballet (Falling Free) and there's something really odd somewhere.

And you write, and you make up characters, and you want someone to walk past with a toddler, and your mind follows pattern and says "mother" and you think no, break pattern, "father" and then have men and women swapped roles? How does this make sense? Where does it make sense? And the whole thing is a jangle right now, I think, it's something it's very hard for us to see clearly from where we're standing.

I need to stop this and go and wash dishes, after which I should work on my novel.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem maybe is that we've constructed two (completely artificial) binaries: male/female and nurturing/non-nurturing and then insisted that they map onto each other, so we get male-non-nurturing/female-nurturing (I'm using "nurturing" loosely to also mean "tidying," "getting stuff done," and "partner-minding"). And then when we're feeling feminist and want to go against expectations, by the nature of the binary, the easiest thing to think of--and consequently the thing that's extremely hard to think AROUND--is flipping: male-nurturing/female-non-nurturing. That's the "gimmick" of Ethan of Athos, for one. What we need is to teach ourselves to think of both as a continuum.

You're also right that it's extremely easy to write Mary, because she does guy stuff and acts like a guy and we all know how to write guys doing guy stuff. Martha appearing as a character in her own right, instead of just the Shrew or the Other Sister or similar background noise, is scarce as hen's teeth. And you can have angel-Martha or shrew-Martha. In Little Women, Jo's a Mary, Beth's an angel-Martha, and I can't remember the other characters clearly enough to comment. (Interestingly, in Little Men, Jo's been tamed into an angel-Martha, too.) In The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Mary Russell is definitely a Mary; her unnamed aunt is a shrew-Martha. (And now that I think about it, the misogyny in that book is appalling. Ick.)

Myself being a non-nurturing woman, I think I simply tend to avoid the whole question. I haven't yet written the sort of book where you have to wonder who makes sure the trash gets taken out and the bills get paid. (High fantasy protagonists, even heroines, have More Important Things on their minds--also generally no domestic household.) And actual, literal mothers ... I can think of one (well, there's a Dead Mother in the standalone, and look at me perpetuating a stereotype), and she's a scholar and a working woman, and come to think of it we never see her interacting with her child. Neatly, I side-step. Ole!

As it happens, though, the most nurturing character in The Project is a man--and boy does that open up a Pandora's box of troubles for him.

I, too, have work I should be doing. *sigh*