“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Betty Friedan wrote in “The Feminine Mystique,” in 1963. Taking a new role as a productive worker is “the way out of the trap,” she added. “There is no other way.”
On the final page of “This American Ex-Wife,” her 2024 memoir and study of divorce, Lyz Lenz writes: “I wanted to remove myself from the martyr’s pyre and instead sacrifice the roles I had been assigned at birth: mother, wife, daughter. I wanted to see what else I could be.”
More than 60 years after Friedan’s landmark text, there remains only one way for women to gain freedom and selfhood: rejecting the traditionally female realm, and achieving career and creative success.
Friedan’s once-provocative declaration resounds again in a popular subgenre of autobiography loosely referred to as the divorce memoir, several of which have hit best-seller lists in the past year or two. These writers’ candid, raw and moving exposés of their divorces are framed as a new frontier of women’s liberation, even as they reach for a familiar white feminist ideology that has prevailed since “The Problem That Has No Name,” through “Eat, Pray, Love” and “I’m With Her” and “Lean In”: a version of second-wave feminism that remains tightly shackled to American capitalism and its values.
Lenz, for example, spends much of her book detailing her struggle to “get free,” but never feels she needs to define freedom. It is taken as a given that freedom still means the law firm partner in heels, the self-made woman with an independent business, the best-selling author on book tour — the woman who has shed any residue of the domestic and has finally come to shine with capitalist achievement.
It is not the freedom for a woman to stay home with her child for a year, or five. The freedom to stop working after a lifetime toiling in low-wage jobs. The freedom for a Filipina nanny to watch her own children instead of those of her “liberated” American boss. The freedom to start a farm or a homestead or engage in the kind of unpaid work ignored by an economy that still values above all else the white-collar professional labor long dominated by men — and in fact mostly fails to recognize other labor as valuable at all.
One of the paradoxes the divorce memoir highlights is that women’s work is made invisible by a society that disparages it, and the only way it becomes visible is through the triumphant narrative of a woman’s escape from it — which only reinforces its undesirability and invisibility.
In Maggie Smith’s 2023 memoir “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” Smith details the critical inflection point when her poem “Good Bones” goes viral, her career takes off and her marriage begins to implode. She tells a reporter from The Columbus Dispatch: “I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.”
Nothing threatening, nothing meaningful. Just a mom pushing the stroller in the meager labor of women — until she slips into the phone booth and transforms into an achieving superhero.
This is not to diminish Smith’s work, a unique and highly refined series of linked essays that build into an emotional symphony about marital breakdown. Her intention is not, like Lenz’s, to condemn the institution of marriage or to rejoice in her release from hers, which is complicated, excruciating and tender. Her depictions of divorce clearly resonate with readers and offer solace and insight into a common experience of heartbreak. But it’s worth asking what exactly is being celebrated in the huge cultural reception her memoir, and other popular divorce memoirs, have received.
Leslie Jamison’s book “Splinters,” published the same day as “This American Ex-Wife,” is an exquisite, textured and precise articulation of the collapse of her marriage, all nuance and interiority where Lenz’s writing is blunt and political. But here, too, we get a female narrator for whom freedom and acceptance ultimately signify professional success. Jamison is much more vexed about this formula, but in the end she settles for lightly querying rather than assailing it. She jokes about how her editor is stressed about book sales while she’s stressed about her baby sleeping on airplanes, and mocks this as a “humblebrag”: “I don’t care about ambition! I only care about baby carriers!” She rushes to clarify in the next sentence, “Of course I cared about book sales, too.”
Herein lies the ultimate paradigm, the space no woman wants to explore: What if the modern woman didn’t actually care about book sales? About making partner? About building a successful brand? That would be unthinkable. Embarrassing. Mealy, mushy, female.
But later in “Splinters,” Jamison skewers the cult of male, capitalist achievement: “My notion of divinity was gradually turning its gaze away from the appraising, tally-keeping, pseudo-father in the sky who would give me enough gold stars if I did enough good things, and toward the mother who’d been here all along,” she writes. I felt an electric optimism reading this. If feminism wants to tackle patriarchy, it needs to start with that pseudo-father and his metrics of a person’s worth.
Jamison struggles toward this in “Splinters.” She wants so badly to be remarkable. To banter about the Russian G.D.P. while she spoon-feeds her toddler, or to impress arrogant lovers who critique her conversation as only “85 percent as good as it could be.” At the same time, she yearns “to experience the sort of love that could liberate everyone involved from their hamster wheels of self-performance,” a love that will “involve all your tedious moments.”
Yes, I found myself saying, I want to read about this love. A mother love that is radical, creative, affirming, even and especially in its difficulty and tedium. Jamison almost gets there, but returns ultimately to the affirmation that it’s OK to want more: “quiet mornings at my laptop, tap-tap-tapping at my keyboard.”
It is certainly OK, and natural, to want more. But what I find most exhilarating in this beautiful book is the possibility that it’s also OK to let go of wanting. It’s OK to not write a best seller, to not hold a prestigious title, to not start your own brand. It’s OK, even, to not try to find yourself, that most American of quests.
Divorce, sure. Ditch the toxic men, strike out on your own. But there’s nothing new or radical there. The radical is in a feminism that examines care as profound, powerful work and centers rather than marginalizes mothering, as both a lived act and a metaphor. We must let go of this half-century-old notion that the self can be “found” only after the roles of “mother, wife, daughter” have been rejected.
With friends, Jamison recounts lively anecdotes from a trip to Oslo with her daughter in order to prove that her life had not “‘gotten small,’ a phrase I put in quotes in my mind, though I did not know whom I was quoting.” Yet in this phrase lies another way of living: letting things get small, in a world that sees and celebrates mostly superlatives, and getting down to the level of the local, the intimate, the granular, the home.
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