Original link: https://sehseh.substack.com/p/15e
Text / Liu Yiwa
What kind of life will a woman, who is familiar with Beauvoir, graduated with a Ph.D. in gender studies, and teaches at a university? What if she got married and had children while she was studying? What if her husband is a stay-at-home dad and wants to take the kids to 18?
I grew up watching how my mother “became” a “good wife and mother”. My mom has to work full time and do housework, and my dad prides himself on not doing housework. The reason for this is mainly because my father is highly educated, and my mother gave up repeating for her two younger brothers.
Unequal family status, coupled with disparate income, determined that my mother had to put the status of wife and mother before her own. I feel sorry for my mother from the bottom of my heart, but I don’t know how to help her. My resentment for my dad and my sympathy for my mom finally found a resonance until I read Beauvoir’s calm and restrained words:
“Few jobs are more like the torment of Xerxieverse than the perpetual repetition of housework: the clean gets dirty, the dirty gets cleaned again, again and again, day after day. Housewives stay where they are. consumes herself in the middle: she makes no progress, she is always just maintaining the status quo. She never feels like she is wrestling the positive good, but rather in an endless struggle against the negative evil.”
I swear I can’t be my mom, but I don’t want to be my dad either. My distaste for my dad even made me shy away from powerful men.
Six years of marriage and three years of being a mother, I’m still not good at being a wife and mother. As someone who studies intimacy, this seems ironic. After taking this intimacy class, I often reflect on myself or am I a qualified feminist?
Most of the feminists I admire choose not to get married or have children, and even refuse to do housework. I can’t find a role model to follow. In gender studies, no one taught you how to practice a feminist love and marriage in reality, and the critique of patriarchal society and the dissection of the institution of marriage did not teach me how to live well in marriage and family. Life. ⋯? Go to the official website to continue reading the full text of 14,000 words
(This article was first published in the new media “Positive Connection” , and was reproduced in “Walk the World” with the authorization of the author and the media platform.)
Author: Liu Yiwa (Chinese feminist scholar)
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This article is reprinted from: https://sehseh.substack.com/p/15e
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