Articles in this series:
The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)
This article will present other techniques that women (who usually experience gender stereotyping or/and are caregivers) choose to follow in their work aspirations. As in the previous article, most of this research is based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.
Hidden in plain sight
Costume designer Edith Head created the costumes for hundreds of Hollywood movies. Her trademark dark blue-tinted glasses were initially worn so that Head could see how clothes would look in black and white. She kept this look even after colour movies appeared. Head also wore simple outfits in beige, black or grey. As she remarked:
Stars don’t like to look past the mirror and see a designer in a brightly coloured dress. When I’m at the studio, I’m always little Edith in the dark glasses and the little beige suit. That’s how I survived.
And the woman with the most Oscar awards? Edith Head with eight Oscars, all for costume design.
The Mother
Ida Lupino, widely regarded as the most prominent female Hollywood filmmaker working in the 1950s, adopted a maternal role on set to battle sexism. She was quoted as saying:
Keeping a feminine approach is vital. Men hate bossy females. You do not tell a man; you suggest to him. “Darlings, Mother has a problem. I’d love to do this. Can you do it? It sounds kooky, I know. But can you do this for Mother? And, they do it. That way I got more cooperation. I tried to never blow up. A woman cannot afford to do that. They’re waiting for it…As long as you keep your temper, the crew will go along with you. I loved being called Mother.
Marriage
Oftentimes, women were/are pressed by their husbands to drop their work aspirations and focus on their family duties.
Australian painter Stella Bowen married novelist Ford Madox Ford. While Ford wrote fiction,
Bowen was the “shock absorber” in their relationship: She paid the bills, prevented Ford from learning the full extent of their debts, and shielded the sensitive writer from interruptions; when Ford was finishing a book, he required that no one speak to him or show him the mail until after he had finished his morning’s work. Despite all this, Ford wondered why Bowen could never work as steadily as he did. She wrote in her memoir, Drawn from Life:
Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs…Later on, when I had actual more free time, I was still very much enslaved by the terms of my relationship with Ford, for he was a great user-up of other people’s nervous energy…I was in love, happy and absorbed. But there was no room for me to nurse an independent ego. ”
Mason Currey Daily Rituals: Women at Work
There is an undeniable tone of bitterness coming out in her memoir:
It is platitudinous to say so, but being a woman does set you back a great deal.
Perhaps you never intended to devote your life to his kind of specialization [homemaking], but society, and your own affections, and the fear of loneliness that besets us all, may keep you at it…. But beware: unlike other specialists, you will receive no promotion after years of faithful service. Your value in this profession will decline, and no record of long experience, or satisfaction given, will help you if you want to change your job.
In a letter, composer Gustav Mahler told his future wife, Alma Schindler, a composer in her own right, that there can only be one composer in the family. So, Alma had to drop her composing aspirations.
How do you imagine both wife and husband as composers? Do you have any idea how ridiculous and subsequently how much such an idiosyncratic rivalry must end up dragging us both down? How will it be if you happen to be just “in the mood” but have to look after the house for me, or get me something I happen to need if you are to look after the trivialities of life for me?
After Alma accepted the deal, she struggled with depression. Mahler discovered his wife had an affair, and he started to encourage and help Alma’s compositions. He died soon after this reconciliation effort.
Child prodigy pianist Clara Schumann (featured on the 100 Deutsche Mark banknote until the adoption of the euro) also had to renounce her composing dreams by marrying composer Robert Schumann. She said:
I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?
She wasn’t allowed to practice the piano on the days or weeks her husband had the inspiration to compose. Eventually, she managed to practice from 6 pm to 8 pm when her husband was at the local pub. Nevertheless, Clara was the breadwinner in the family. She sustained over 130 concerts during her fourteen years and marriage while taking care of her seven children (the eighth child died aged only one).
In other cases, women felt that the only way to reach their dreams was to leave their families behind.
Sculptor, painter, filmmaker and author Niki de Saint Phalle had a decisive moment in her life when painter Joan Mitchell said to her, “So you’re one of those writer’s wives that paint”. At that time, Saint Phalle was married to writer Harry Matthews and had two children, ages nine and five. She decided to leave her family to “live her artistic adventure to the full.” This decision tormented her as she wrote:
I felt that I had done such a terrible thing in leaving my family that I buried myself 100% in my work for the rest of my life to make up for it. I needed to prove that what I had done had not been in vain and had been worthwhile. It was like a motive force for my work, like being propelled by a canon… into total slavery to my work, which became number one and remained so after Harry and I separated.
At 62, de Saint Phalle published Mon Secret, where she revealed that her father raped her for several years, starting when she was 11 years old. She suffered numerous nervous breakdowns throughout her life.
Later, her daughter recounted that:
It was quite dramatic to have her leave at such an early time, but throughout the years, I came to understand, share and enjoy her need for creative power and freedom. She was a terrific mother.
There are also cases when the wife had the husband’s support. As I wrote in the previous article, this was also the case of poet Edna St Vincent Millay.
Writer Carson McCullers made a pact with her husband, Reeves. As they both were aspiring writers, they would take turns as one would be the writer and the other the breadwinner. Carson already had a manuscript in the works, and her husband had a job offer, so she started her literary aspirations first. After a year passed, Carson had a contract for her novel, and so Reeves continued working while Carson continued writing. Despite the pact, Reeves never managed to become a full-time writer. Their love story was, unfortunately, a tragic one.
Other times, husbands become more supportive of their spouses’ endeavours once the wives prove themselves in their work aspirations. After Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became an instant bestseller, her husband wrote to Beecher Stowe’s publisher:
we shall do everything in our power to lighten her domestic care.
Motherhood
Writer Alice Munro found a way to raise her children and write by focusing on short stories. As she declared in an interview:
I started with the idea of writing novels, and I wrote short stories because that was the only way I could get any time. I could take off housekeeping and childrearing for a certain amount of time but never for the amount that you need to write a novel. And after a while, I got as if the story form—actually a rather unusual story form, usually quite a long story form—is what I wanted to do. I could say what I wanted to say in that space.
In 2013, Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
English artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth told about the years when her four children were young:
I had to have a very strict discipline with myself so that I always did some work every day, even if it was only ten minutes. It’s so very easy to say: well, today is a bad day. The children aren’t well, and the kitchen needs scrubbing…
Thinking on the role of motherhood in her works, Hepworth remarked that motherhood was a powerful force that helped her grow artistically faster:
I think the ideas can go on developing behind the scenes if you keep in close touch with what you are doing even if you have interruptions. You actually mature faster. You may do fewer carvings, but they could be maturing at the same rate as if you had all the time to work.
Artist Agnès Varda admitted that for trying to have it all (a family, children, projects, etc.),
there is only a solution, and that is to be a kind of “superwoman” and lead several lives at once. For me, the biggest difficulty in my life was that – to lead several lives at once and to not give in and to not abandon any of them – to not give up children, to not give up the cinema, to not give up men if one likes men.
In 1974, Varda was in charge of delivering a film with a one-year deadline. She gave birth to her second child the year before, and she knew how much effort was to care for a small child on a film set. And so, Varda had the idea of creating her film without leaving her home.
I told myself that I was a good example of women’s creativity – always a bit stuck and suffocated by home and motherhood.
So I wondered what could come of these constraints… So I set out from this idea, from this fact that most women are stuck at home. And I attached myself to my hearth. I had a special eighty-meter electric cable attached to the electric box in my house. I decided I would allow myself that much space to shoot. I could go no further than the end of my cable. I would find everything I needed within that distance and never venture further.
The movie she made this way is a documentary, Daguerréotypes, where Varda filmed the daily lives of the merchants in her neighbourhood. A trailer of this documentary can be found here.
No children
Modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham considered adopting a child but chose not to go ahead.
I chose not to have children for the simple reason that I felt I could never give a child the caring upbringing which I had as a child. I couldn’t control being a dancer. I knew I had to choose between child and dance, and I chose dance.
Singer Dolly Parton explained in an interview that:
My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall – because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me? If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla… Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be. Now that we’re older? We’re glad.
Why? I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work, to tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.
No family
Unsurprisingly, women deliberately choose to remain single and focus on their own principles and aspirations instead of the traditional “double shift”.
Artist and teacher Alma Thomas said:
I never married, for one thing. That was a place I know I made the right choice. The young men I knew cared nothing about the art, nothing at all. And art was the only thing I enjoyed. So I have remained free. I paint when I feel like it. I didn’t have to come home. Or I could come home late and there was nobody to interfere with what I wanted, to stop and discuss what they wanted. It was what I wanted, and no argument. That is what allowed me to develop.
Remarks
Undoubtedly, women have to face more barriers than men to focus on their work: a lack of social support to recognize and support women’s work, spouses that deny their wives a right to work, continuing with childcare, mundane household chores, sexism, etc. And this is only for the “lucky” women that are white or heterosexual.
So, how did women persevere? Hiding in plain sight or becoming the caretaker to a team, sleeping for a few hours a night, postponing their works by years or decades, adopting a strict routine, strategically neglecting some of their traditional duties, adapting their work to motherhood, or refusing altogether to marry or have children.
But men suffer too when society uses traditionally gendered optics. A society that remains unchallenged on women’s traditional roles will also not accept that a man can be, perish the thought, not a breadwinner. Non-productive. Not ashamed to recognize his feelings. Vulnerable.
But so deeply entrenched is the mentality that women have to be the primary carer of their families that a recent UK study highlighted the impact of working women in older age on their caregiving responsibilities. The study tracked more than 7 000 women aged 55 to 65. Researchers argue that women working in their sixties significantly affect the £130billion-plus yearly value of care for the elderly. The study concludes that:
policies that increase retirement age may have unintended consequences on the provision of informal care, which may reduce the welfare gains arising from raising the labour supply of older women.
Optimal welfare may also require alternative policies such as work flexibility laws that enable women to combine demanding jobs with caring responsibilities.
As a woman, I am left with an aching taste that daughters are expected to pick up the tab to provide free care to their parents. I would gladly take care of my mother, but I also expect my brother to do the same.
There is no denying that there are cases where the sons, and not the daughters (there might be none), take care of their parents. Still, I couldn’t find a study that tracked thousands of men in their fifties and sixties and the gains the economy would have if sons provided much needed free care to their parents.
Is it any wonder that artist Alice Neel said
I felt women represented a dreary way of life, always helping a man and never performing for themselves, whereas I wanted to be an artist myself! I could certainly have accomplished more with a good wife.
This article concludes the series about work routines employed by men or women. What started as a review of Deep Work evolved into an analysis of what patterns women use to bring work into their lives.
Context and recognising our privileges are crucial. A work routine used by an upper-middle-class white father, working regular hours, with access to reliable childcare, healthcare, housing, will not be the same as the one used by a single parent of colour, working two jobs, with unreliable access to childcare, healthcare and housing.
We need stories about how other people lived their lives because we might believe that we all know how this messed world works, yet our own lives account for only microscopic parts of the world. Perhaps we might forget these stories. Perhaps they might plant a seed into us. And after that, who knows what can happen.