A Woman’s Place is Wherever She Wants to Be

To some of us, embedded in the slogan “Make America Great Again” is the idea that traditional gender roles should be embraced and celebrated. The motto suggests that things were better in the past, and although the exact era isn’t specified, the vitriolic hatred of the Clintons likely means that the putatively bucolic epoch pre-dated Bill’s administration. In other words, back when women’s wages were two-thirds of men’s, compared with the lofty four-fifths that they are now, and their participation in the labor force was twenty percentage points below that of men. Back before the lead character on Murphy Brown caused a stir by choosing to become a single mother. Back when women knew their place.

The thing is, I was brought up to believe my place was wherever I wanted to be, provided I had the right credentials. I thought the differences between the sexes were purely biological. I don’t remember exactly when things changed, but at some point, I started internalizing the idea that men mostly wanted a particular type of woman – as their wives, as their coworkers, as their fellow citizens. And at some point I must have also internalized the idea that men were better than women at certain things. In middle school, I excelled at math, even winning competitions. I took all the math offered in high school as well as several years of it in college. However, when I sat down to ask a question in office hours with my professor for my master’s level microeconomics course, I was shocked when, as a preface to his answer, he stated frankly, “Well, you’re good at math.” Somewhere between winning my first graphing calculator when I was twelve and acing linear algebra in college, I had decided for some reason that I wasn’t that great at math.

I don’t think of myself as a susceptible person. Nor have I ever been accused of being a shrinking violet (at least, not to my face). Nevertheless, a widely held belief had seeped in via societal influences and corrupted my view of myself, completely obscuring reality. My professor had still seen the truth – he had the advantage of actually knowing my work – but how many other people just took my lack of confidence at face value? How often does this happen – a papier-maché façade of cliché over reality that eventually hardens into the truth?

How it happens is less mysterious, and women are as much to blame as men in keeping expectations moored in the past. We can try to blame the media, but that is only a credible scapegoat if our private conversations rise above the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) assumptions inherent in the magazine aisle at the grocery store. It is discordant to hear beautiful, successful women admonishing each other to downplay their accomplishments and their intelligence and “let him be the man” in the relationship, as occurred in a recent exchange recounted to me by a friend. Such reproaches were often the plot drivers of the Victorian romance novels that we all likely devoured in our youth, and we all know about the infamous 1955 “The Good Wife’s Guide” from Housekeeping Monthly, which includes the gem, “Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.” However, why is any woman still telling another that her success depends not on her own accomplishments but on her ability to subjugate her personality to appease the self-esteem of a man? This is the 21^st century, and we are supposed to have moved beyond such pettiness.

Except that a lot of people don’t think it’s petty. They include both men AND women who feel safer in a world of delineations, and they are uncomfortable when people are not easy to define. In reality, nobody is easy to define, but it is a natural human trait to want to categorize and create pecking orders. Inherent in the Trump brand is reverence for patriarchal hierarchy, and while such veneration had fallen out of fashion, his rise highlights the enduring admiration for the order that his world symbolizes. Each Mrs. Trump has embodied the stereotypical female ideals of beauty, loyalty, dedicated motherhood, and, above all else, deference. In the past – when, presumably, God smiled more often on America – deference was often instead called modesty, which was deemed to be an advantageous trait in a woman. Confidence, on the other hand, was a desirable trait in a man. Whatever the historical reason for this demarcation, be it evolutionary or cultural, there is no reason any longer to perpetuate it. As touched upon in a previous post, we need to encourage young women to charge into the world unfettered by bias. To do that, though, we must recognize our own internalized prejudices, including whether girls can be good at math.

*The photo accompanying this post is of Katherine Johnson, who worked for NASA when “computing” was deemed women’s work. She is portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the Oscar-winning movie Hidden Figures.