David and I went up to the library so we’d have somewhere to sit that wasn’t the floor. I picked up a book from the new-book shelves that I didn’t quite get to finish and am going to pick up again at my earliest opportunity.
I also recommend that all of you do the same. All of you. And if you do, and you have a blog, please post your reactions to it therein. This book sheds enough light on some of our more tendentious blogsphere debates that I think it needs to be widely read.
The book is by Anna Fels, and is called Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. (Random WorldCat question: why don’t new books seem to be fast-tracked onto Open WorldCat? We’re missing a trick here, librarians. I shouldn’t have had to use a Powell’s link.)
If you’re female and went “eewwww” when you saw the word “ambition,” join the club. I resisted this book something awful. It just kept right on jabbing me in tender spots with behaviors and phenomena I recognized—female distaste for the word “ambition” being a case in point, of course.
Thesis, in brief and probably misstated: Ambition consists of desired mastery of a domain plus recognition of that mastery. While women have made great strides in actually mastering domains, we’re still frozen out of the recognition business for many and varied reasons, and it hurts us.
Oh, did I resist that thesis. Bitterly and hard. Mastery is supposed to be enough, don’t you know (and that’s another one Fels takes apart at the seams). But doesn’t this begin to explain why the women-blog-too arguments get so acrimonious? Why the Ivan Tribbles and Michael Gormans and Blaise Cronins of this world single out blogs for derision? (My read on Fels’s read: because blogging offers a decentralized recognition and validation system that the Ivan Tribbles et cetera of this world don’t control.)
That said, I skipped ahead to Fels’s conclusions, and thought they were weak. If there’s another edition of this book (and I want there to be!), I hope she rewrites the final chapter. For one thing, Fels joins the chorus of people pointing out that women’s unequal share of the unrecognized work of childrearing is a serious psychological and economic burden. Her fix, however, lies purely in making sure mothers get their fair share and fathers do their fair share. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I do wish we could expand the concept to “reducing the burden of childrearing on women,” which most definitely includes “eliminating the tremendous social pressure on women to have children in the first place.” Hello? Dr. Fels? We’re here, we’re childfree, and we’re not going away!
In that same concluding chapter, Fels claims to have no advice for women navigating the uncertain shoals of ambition. She missed the cryingly obvious: if recognition is so important, offer it to women, don’t just seek it! We can all do that. We should. (If you think this post is partly motivated by getting Fels some of her due, gold star for you. It is.) I’m convinced enough by Fels’s argument and the evidence she marshals for it (some of which I do think is weak, but much of which is quite strong) to start making extra effort to get women some recognition.
I hope others will do likewise.
