Being a woman is difficult, but it’s not so difficult that I want a lot of organizations to applaud me for it as if I were a three-legged dog at a race.
I’m neither feminist nor “trad wife.” As a career person and a mother to four school-age children, I’ve got one foot in each world.
I’m emailing the governor while baking cookies.
Society pushes to get women into high-consequence STEM jobs, women into combat, women into the Oval Office. That’s all fine. There are plenty of Joans of Arc out there.
Law, science, and other fields all stand to benefit from our influence. We rock at multitasking; we’re good at considering multiple perspectives. We can weather incredible pain for others’ sakes.
But it’s cringey when groups try to promote us to power purely on the basis of our sex. As if placing women in control is going to cure all the evils in this country. As if virtue and intelligence were strictly female traits, concentrated in our fickle uteruses like magic talismans.
Of course, we got here because we were compensating for something. That is, the ultra-masculinized American culture of the 1950s and ’60s, in which ornamental women fed casseroles to male decisionmakers ensconced in cigar smoke.
Had I been hired to a newsroom then, I may have become some man’s assistant, like Harper Lee was to Truman Capote.
That would have sucked the life out of me.
(Still, it’s noteworthy Lee became a roaring success anyway.)
When Cowboy State Daily hired me, they said, “You’re good at this. Come work for us.”
They didn’t say, “Hey, we’ve got a male reporter who needs a typist, whaddaya say, toots?”
But they also didn’t say, “Hey, we don’t have enough women on staff, and having you would make us look sensitive to your shameful historic plight. Can you ever forgive us for all the cigar smoke we blew in your face 70 years ago, before you were even alive?”
I’d be likelier to spring for the typist pitch. That’s a flawed but more-sincere attempt at getting stuff done in this rickety world — which makes it better than some self-loathing drivel about how all the good men should castrate themselves to make up for the failings of bad men.
And there are loads of bad men out there. I know. I’m a crime reporter.
My theory (you can disagree with this and send me hate mail later) is that men are made for competing and conquering. Their wily aggression is innate. The best of them distill that to provide for and elevate others.
And we’re figuratively castrating them by telling them that their aggressive traits are evil and their appreciation of beautiful women is sexist and their knuckles are hairy and they’re just gross.
“Well,” says the Western man, “I’ve got no fields to harrow and no evil to vanquish; no sweet woman who needs my provision. I guess I’ll develop some perverse habits that will land me in prison, where finally I’ll be able to fight and strive against other men.”
That is not to say that all men who lack for competition grow perverse. Plenty of mild-natured men are still noble: because they never stopped seeking goodness and helping others. The fight for good is the noblest aggression.
Now women, we’re in a tricky situation.
On the one hand, we should not be excluded on the basis of our sex from professions at which we can excel.
On the other hand, now that we’re occupying virtually every formerly male-dominated job in the nation, we’ve remade the economy so that we can’t (many of us) stay home with our babies, because so many families now require two incomes instead of one.
For some women, that’s no problem. They unsheathe their mighty brains in courtrooms and laboratories. They’ve found purpose in helping all of society, rather than two or three tender little souls.
But for others, it’s a tragedy. They want to be home with their babies and they can’t.
I can’t speak for either group, and I certainly don’t have an economic solution. I can only speak for myself here.
Being a stay-at-home mom when my kids were babies and toddlers was the best experience of my life and I would not trade it for a cheesecake kingdom - or a CEO position.
I would time-travel back to it in a nanosecond. I would wheel my babies through spring puddles in their giant four-person stroller and beam at the neighbors as if I’d just conquered Rome.
When my sons entered public school, I went to work. That’s because we have excellent schools and teachers in my hometown. If we didn’t, I’d quit my job and homeschool them — and we’d survive on potatoes instead of steak fajitas.
Still, I love my job. It too lends me purpose. I get to spur the First Amendment into motion and watch it empower people to make up their own minds and live their own lives. I consider myself one of the luckiest women ever to have lived.
Shouldering both work and motherhood can be tough. There are days when I question whether I can do it at all.
But I am doing it, thanks to a great husband, family and employer.
I write because I love to write, because I think I can do some good with it, and because I like steak fajitas.
I don’t do it to perpetuate some second-grade, boys-versus-girls game of capture the flag.
So don’t ever applaud me just for being a woman.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
