For my
parents and friends: My goal here is to leave you asking yourselves why you got
married, why you want to get married…and why you think I should get married.
Hello there and welcome to the first-ever
Geography Wife podcast! I want to start by saying that I’ve never made a
podcast before, let alone a podcast for an academic project. Please forgive me
if the presentation of my ideas are too colloquial for your liking, but the way
I interpreted this assignment from what I’ve seen from other podcasts is that
I’m supposed to be having a conversation (right?). An intelligent one, given,
but a conversation nonetheless. The spiel I am about to present to you will be
a reflection of my passion for the topic of feminist marriage, the knowledge I
have obtained in this course as it can be applied to my life—and of course—I’m
going to try to muster up all of the writing talent I possess (or should I say
“oral skills” since this is supposed to be a podcast? I’m not sure) so that I
don’t put you to sleep.
Here we go!
To start, I suppose I will tell you a bit
about myself. Just as everyone else seems to do when they don’t have anything substantial
to put on their resumes yet, I will tell you that my name is Katelyn and I’m a
fourth-year university student reluctantly studying to be a teacher. Well,
maybe not everyone says that. My major degree is in English, which stemmed from
a profound love for creative writing ever since I could hold a pencil, and my
minor degree is in (can you guess?) geography. How I ended up taking on a minor
degree in geography is rather a funny story, especially considering the level
of interest I have acquired in the subject over the past four years. It was
pretty well all a fluke. I initially wanted to minor in French thinking I’d
have a better chance of getting a job that way, and I ended up coming home
crying and swearing maliciously about how difficult it was and how unfair it is
for core French students to be put with immersion students. My friend Christina
was in GEOG 1F90, so I thought: why not? I dropped French and picked up
geography. And four years later here we are.
That was a great story, wasn’t it? I wish
I had something more romantic and inspiring to say, but that’s the truth. I
think that’s quite sufficient for an intro though, so let’s move on.
As I touched upon in the first part of
this assignment, the idea of feminist marriage is something that really hits
home for me. As a woman who has spent four years in English and human geography
courses that frequently apply feminist frameworks to their studies, it’s no
surprise that I’m approaching graduation proudly identifying myself as a
feminist (just as everyone should! But that’s an issue for another podcast).
The problem I have encountered, however, is that before these enlightening four
years of university education I have spent a heck of a lot of time thinking
about, dreaming about, chasing and dating boys, all with the hope that someone
might “put a ring on it” one day. But the more I think about it, even when I
reflect on that proposal every girl fantasizes about: do I really want to be a
part of a system where traditionally and still today, I’m not given the
authority to ask someone to be with me forever? A system where I have to wait
around like a big goof until my boyfriend finds the nerve to get down on one
knee, put a ring on my finger and claim me for his own with a last name I don’t
like for the rest of my miserably oppressed life?
Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic.
But only a little.
Sure, times are changing. And sure, some
women propose to men. But that’s certainly not the norm, and there’s always the
risk that the woman makes the man feel “emasculated” if she steps up before he
does.
Are you kidding me?
The sad part is that most people don’t
think critically about these things, and a major reason for why that happens is
because of our upbringings. My dad was not shy in revealing to me that he had
hoped for his first child (me) to be a boy (he also hoped for the second one to
be a boy as well, but he got my sister Erika instead). Even though I’m not the
boy he wanted, I know in my heart that he thinks the world of me and believes
that I will be successful someday: when I was little he drilled in my brain the
importance of education, and to this day he hounds me mercilessly about what
I’m going to do with my life. But as much as my father believes in me, however,
the way he approaches domestic space and how a marriage should operate makes me
wonder how much he believes in women in general. My father has openly told me
that women should be in charge of tasks such as cooking and laundry and men
should assume those stereotypically “masculine” roles like that of home
renovator and Mr. Fix-it. While there were other issues involved with my parents’
divorce (now this is personal…), I
think one reason was that my mother was not the housewife he envisioned having
in his life. My mother has always been a career-focused woman who was simply
too busy running a business to be home at five o’clock every evening to put a
homemade lasagna in the oven.
As for me? I don’t cook, I rarely clean
(or make my bed for that matter) and I spend most of my time with my head in a
book, writing essays, in a classroom or at my shitty retail job. The dream I
have always had for my own marriage has been to find someone who will respect
my career goals and who will be willing to split those monotonous, unfulfilling
household chores with me. He can do the laundry, I can cook; maybe we’ll switch
sometimes. But I wonder: could
achieving a “feminist marriage” really be as simple as sharing the household
chores? Or do we have to completely reorient our imagination of our gendered
roles and spatialities? In lecture we talked about home as an imagined space,
but what is it that we imagine when we envision our homes? For example, when we
imagine a kitchen, do we see the husband at the stove or the wife? And when we
envision the workplace, who do we see sitting in the office chair? Marjorie
Weinzweig (1986) beautifully captures precisely my predicament in negotiating
marriage and feminism: “Just as our present society is at best in a
transitional state between its past oppression of women and the realization of
feminist ideas, so do most feminists themselves live as individuals in transitional
state between their past upbringing and the goals they would like to achieve”
(p. 141). With this in mind, what am I supposed to do with a father—whom I’ve
always genuinely admired and respected for reasons aside from our shared
biological material—who is so unbelievably bound to these gendered conceptions
of how a marriage should function?
Even
though I’ve already addressed it to an extent, I want to bring in some outside
voices to help explain marriage as an institution rooted in gender norms and
expectations. Weinzweig (1986) argues that if a feminist woman has
dedicated herself to the idea of marriage, she must work to manipulate the
culture of submission that marriage encourages by continually standing up for
her beliefs and demanding equality in all aspects of her life. She even
suggests that women should live alone and learn to be independent. When I think
about common gender binaries between men and women that manifest through her
perspective, I think of “strong-weak,” “independent-dependent” (with of course,
the man occupying the role of the former in each binary). Weinzweig (1986) goes
on to say that “because marriage
has been the sole life style available to women, women have been denied the
freedom to exercise other options. In this respect they have also been treated
unequally to men, who have always been free not to marry without adverse
social, economic and sexual consequences” (p. 141). Thus, just as the binaries
I mentioned suggest, women are forced into positions of weakness and dependence
through the institution of marriage. Unlike men, if they choose to take up a
different life path that doesn’t involve a spouse, they run the risk of being
ostracized in many socially and financially devastating ways. Silvia Federici
(1975), who I’m planning to bring up again shortly, brings light to how housework
(which as I touched upon previously, is important to my discussion about
marriage as it is being shoved down the throats of wives all over the world)
has been socially constructed into a “feminine attribute”: “This fraud that
goes under the name of love and marriage affects all of us, even if we are not
married, because once housework was totally naturalized and sexualized, once it
became a feminine attribute, all of us females are characterized by it” (p. 4).
If housework has come to define women, it’s not difficult to then also
interrogate and question how marriage, as the cause of this housework, is also
defining us.
So at
the beginning of this podcast I addressed my parents and friends specifically.
They, above anyone else, are people I feel need to hear this. My dad got
remarried a few years ago, and my stepmother seems to embody every thought he
has ever had about how a woman should behave. She works unbelievably hard to
keep the house immaculate, she feeds everyone (I must say) delicious meals
every evening, and she also works full days five days a week in a nursing home.
I can’t be sure, but from what I’ve seen from her behaviour and how she talks
about it, she seems to think that this is what she is supposed to do. But does
she do these things out of obligation to conform to what she believes the
female gender should be doing? Does she authentically enjoy doing what she does for everyone? Could it be a mixture?
Regardless, I want my dad to rethink his approach to the home and these
ridiculous gendered responsibilities. In terms of why I have also targeted my
friends, I don’t want them to allow patriarchy (let’s call it what it is here!)
to run their lives and make them feel, like my stepmom, that being born with a
vagina also comes with cooking and housework. Kathryn Rickard (1989) makes an
excellent point for why adolescence and early adulthood are especially crucial
times to start negotiating and often renegotiating our approaches to
relationships: “[M]en and women gain personal power
differently in society, and over time learn to display those behaviors that
lead to a greater experience of their own personal power. In the early stage of
male-female relationships, these issues of roles, dominance, and power are
negotiated” (p. 218). She argues that relationships are the beginnings of the
establishment of gender roles, which inevitably lead to an unequal distribution
of expectations between men and women throughout their intimate lives.
So listen up, guys! And of course, I am
addressing both my female and male friends! My overarching message to my girlfriends
would be: hone your personal power. Take up lots of space. Be loud. And if you
never get married, or don’t want to get married, don’t sweat it! You’ll probably
be better off than those of us who do, anyways. To the boys, I say: don’t be
like my dad going into a marriage! Do some laundry and cooking, for the love of
God. I’m sure if you get married, your future wife will be able to handle these
“macho” fixer-upper jobs you so shamelessly pride yourselves in.
And
now I come to the part of the program that is, so to speak, the meat of my
little rant (but since I’m a vegetarian, I’ll call it…the chick peas instead
because those have a lot of protein like meat does). In terms of the
significance of geographical thinking to understanding this gendered issue, I
want to draw on two major scales of particular interest to feminist
geographers: work and the home. In the context of the home, I mentioned earlier
that there should be an even distribution of household tasks. This also ties
into how work is conceptualized within the home as well as outside of it: men
should not feel “emasculated” if their wives make more money or are the primary
breadwinners, nor should women feel discouraged to pursue work outside of the
home due to feelings of obligation to their family. In lecture we touched upon
distinctions between public and private space and how women have been
historically associated with the private while men are associated with the
public. The institution of marriage helps to keep women in the private and out
of the public due to the vast responsibilities that are placed on them in the
home. Interestingly, when you think about the roles men have in the home, these
roles tend to have connections to public space in that many of their jobs are outdoors
(like working on the car, cooking on the barbecue, mowing the lawn, etc.).
To go
along with this, we also acknowledged the fact that the spaces where work takes
place has an impact on whether or not it can be classified as “work.” In this
way, housewives are at a supreme disadvantage. When it comes to work spaces in
and out of the home, work is never free of gender. When you think of a teacher,
which sex immediately pops into your head? When you think of a police officer,
who do you see? Gill Valentine (2001) tells us that “[s]tudies suggest that
when women are in paid employment they continue to do the lion’s share of
domestic work and childcare” (p. 67). Well, I don’t really need to tell you
that this is pure bullshit. You’re telling me that I could be working the same
hours as my husband, maybe more, and he’s still going to fall asleep on the
couch at the end of the day while I chase the kids around the house yelling at
them to do their homework? Yeah, no…that just isn’t going to fly.
In her
book advocating against housework as a “labour of love” and demanding pay for
household chores, Federici (1975) makes a compelling observation about why men
decide to get married: “It is not an accident that most men start thinking of
getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because
now they can afford it, but because having somebody at home who takes care of
you is the only condition not to go crazy after a day spent on an assembly line
or at a desk. Every woman knows that this is what she should be doing to be a
true woman and have a ‘successful’ marriage” (p. 4). As a result of the
oppressive spaces working men must often encounter in their occupations, women
are consequently oppressed in their marriages and in the home with the end goal
of this oppression to keep their husbands happy and sane. If this is true…then
who’s there to keep women happy and
sane in the oppressive space of the home?
And
what’s worse: being exploited every day for wages below what you actually
deserve in the public sphere, or being locked up in the confines of the private
sphere in a place where no one is paying you and no one can hear your screams?
Once
again, it seems I’m getting a bit dramatic. But only a bit.
By
thinking about gender roles in terms of public and private space, as well as
home and work spaces, the severe inequalities of the marriage institution, as
well as its oppressive impact on women in particular, becomes disturbingly
clear.
As a
final analogy for how geography and marriage connect, I leave you with Lara
Pascali’s (2006), in my opinion, problematic idea of the merits of the basement
kitchen for Italian immigrant housewives: “[Italian immigrant women’s] sense of
liberation is intricately linked to notions of comfort and convenience
associated with the physical qualities of the basement as well as the meanings
associated with upstairs and downstairs spaces” (p. 686).
I
just…don’t like it.
When I
think of a basement, I think of a dim and dank space with a few tiny windows at
best that is hidden from the rest of the world. The basement is the space, as
the article acknowledges, that people actually inhabit and are free to mess up
because it’s not what formal guests are going to see when they come over.
Coming from an Italian family myself, based on this article and from my own
experience the basement seems like more of a family space, which of course is
closely tied to women. While the men are, for example, entertaining guests that
are outside of the family circle, the women are stuck downstairs dealing with
the children or cooking. How is that liberating? To me, (and this is where my
English brain comes in) the basement seems like a metaphor for female
oppression: it’s invisible to the public, no one really cares about it (it
never looks as nice as the upstairs) and it keeps wives close to the stove.
Pascali (2006) goes on to say that “for these Italian women, who often not only
took on menial jobs as seamstresses or factory workers to generate extra income
for the family, but were in charge of cooking and cleaning the home, the
basement is a liberating space; a place in which women can move and cook as
they please without having to feel constrained or worry about appearances” (p. 692).
I take
a lot of issue with the part where she says that “women can move and cook as
they please without having to feel constrained”: she’s pretty much saying that
women are being freed to perform their oppressive domestic tasks without fear
of disruption. How can you possibly call this freedom?
Now
that I’ve completely exhausted all of the information I have on this issue, I
have a few concluding thoughts (or maybe they’re more like questions? I don’t
know):
I
don’t want to be a housewife. I hate cleaning. I’m not into cooking. And I’m a
generally messy person overall. So does that mean I shouldn’t get married?
I’m
also education- and career-focused. I want to publish books someday. I want to
change the world, in one way or another. So does that mean I shouldn’t get
married?
What
do you suggest I do, father? Do you want me to be like my mom, or my stepmom?
Is it possible that I can still get married like I’ve always wanted without
being confined to the domestic space my whole life? Is feminist marriage really
possible, or are we all just kidding ourselves here?
If you
talk to me twenty years from now and I’m living alone with six dogs and nine
cats, you’ll have your answer.
This
has been the Geography Wife podcast! I’m Katelyn Pierce, thank you for joining
me this evening. Tune in next week when I explore feminist parenting! Is it
possible? Is it a joke? Find out next Thursday night at eight!
I know I already have this picture in my background collage, but it's just too good. It speaks to me on an emotional level...
I found it here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/snapyappy/6950174312/in/photolist-2qs3ju-pzvTfU-mgikD9-gD269h-bsGDUw-bsGDiU-eb9uCW-bsGG9y-bsGFZ1-8pJxFH-bAasFA-bFBwvD-rApMHP-bsGFBW-7K2MWC-bsGE91-bFBwin-bsGEZj-bsGEJS-bFBxmr-bFBx8x-bFBxYa-bFByeR-7Ntdah-gD3dhn-55Up6H-dgYmNc-861ZPr-de8iJX-9oWEbM-dLw5tR-e6GsH1-dViuEM-CBmYb-212aFY-dUga2Y-9HiFpa-dUfNsS-dUa3MM-5qeoPV-7TZ15F-62dMz1-4zR2W8-dUmDZg-6wtw7R-ehaBJN-drcKC8-oUaH4-dxpHzk-dUbwFt
