Mitt Romney and the Myth of Women's Work

Thanks Binders Full
of Women tumblr!

Last night, while driving back from dinner, David and I pulled up to a light.
D: "Oh no! Mitt Romney has been here!"
Me: "How do you know?"
D: "Look!" *points to papers and broken binder scattered on ground in middle of road* "Binder remains!"
Me: "But where are all the women?"
D: "This is the Pacific Northwest. They knew they could flee for safety here."
Me: "Run, women! Run for your lives!"

. . . . 

Okay, all binder hilarity aside (and there is some good stuff out there, my favorite being the customer reviews on Avery 1" binders for sale on Amazon -- Thanks to Carli R. for the link), there was something former Governor Romney said in the debates, something inaccurate and truly sexist, and it didn't have anything to do with binders full of women, or even a flexible work schedule being required such that working women can get home in time it make dinner. FN1. The moment that I keep returning to with fire in my belly got buried between those two more obviously tone-deaf moments, and because I can't let it go, dear reader, I'm going to talk to you about it.

Okay, here's the critical snippet of transcript, reader. Let's play a rousing round of "Spot the Sexist!"

Romney: "Now, one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two, because I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for -- making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you."

Did you catch it? It's probably all those logic puzzles I had to do in preparation for the LSAT, but ever since then, if/then statements really jump out at me. "If" implies a condition, something that may or may not happen. It's only a precedent possibility. It isn't a foregone conclusion. It's something that isn't necessary or inevitable.

"I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible."

"If."

If.

This is the torn in my paw, the splinter in my skin, the pea under my mattress, dear reader. And I'll tell you why this bothers me so much.

First, it offends me as a feminist because it implies the work a person - male or female - does at home (keeping a home, raising a family, cooking meals, shuttling kids around, etc.) isn't real work, that they aren't part of the 'workforce.' This argument is, of course, completely nonsensical, as we all know that housekeepers don't work for free, daycare isn't provided gratis, personal chefs don't volunteer their services. These are jobs that have market value. We've determined, even under the most mercenary capitalist calculations, that these services have a value.

This is an assumed benefit, you see. Like a hidden cost, it rides for free in the market place, never being thought of for its true value. However, if every person doing home care shifted one home to the left or right, did their neighbor's work, and submitted a bill to said neighbor who in turn paid them, these individuals would no longer be 'invisible' members of the "workforce." The idea that society requires this sort of task shifting in order to fully acknowledge the monetary value to this benefit is, in a word, stupid.

BUT, even if I set this feminist objection aside, the historian in me is appalled by the sheer willful ignorance of this statement. This historian, with her very expensive education in American women's history, is the yelling voice in my head, and her secondary objection actually gets to the far more problematic part of Mr. Romney's privileged point of view.

As far back as this country has existed, women have worked. Puritans like John Cotton and John Rogers remarked as they settled in Plymouth, Providence, and Massachusetts Bay on the work performed by women of the native peoples. Be they Pequot, Narragansett, or Mohegan, these women completed all agricultural work except the growing of tobacco. All the food stuffs planted and reaped and prepared in those times, you know the ones that kept the settlers from starving in those first rough winters? Women created those goods for gift, trade, or purchase.  These same Puritan men set about building a City on a Hill; meanwhile, their Puritan wives canned goods, wove cloth, dried meats, and preserved and created other goods to be traded, sold, and purchased between the colonies and with the natives.

During the American industrial age, women worked in factories and manufacturing from its beginnings in the mid-1700s all the way to its end in the 1900s. Women worked during both world wars. Poor women, immigrant women, and women of color have worked in domestic positions for white families for pay in this country virtually forever. FN3.

Women have always worked. They have always been part of the workforce, even when you limit the definition of "workforce" to work done outside one's own home. They have been paid teachers, nurses, factory workers, craftswomen, midwives, trade persons. Even during the Victorian period, wealthy white women worked as novelists and writers and educators.

National Women's Law Center's report
on pay inequity is available here.

This notion that there was a magical historical past where women did nothing but kept house and raised their children is a myth. If it has ever existed, it was only for the very, very wealthy white women of the Victorian era and for a handful of years to a select group of middle-class white women living in the suburbs in post-WWII America, a lot of whom had been forced out of jobs they enjoyed when the war ended and they  'went home,' giving their positions to returning veterans. And let's not forget, as documented in detail by writers like Betty Friedan, these women were deeply miserable, to the point that they inspired the second wave of the feminism movement and its efforts to obtain equal access to the sphere of public work and employment opportunities for women. FN4.

There is no "if." This fabled "if" has never existed. Women are an integral part of "the workforce," both in the public and private spheres. The work they have done and continue to do remains underpaid, under appreciated, and often unnoticed, but make no mistake: it is WORK. We are part of the workforce. We have always been part of the workforce. We will always be part of the workforce.

That former Governor Romney believes that this fact is at present -  or has ever been - conditional demonstrates how completely out of touch he is with the reality of the vast majority of women's lives. He also seems crazily uninformed about American history for someone who seeks our highest office.

And that, my friends, is what makes me most afraid. How can we expect someone to govern our country with our best interests in mind when he truly does not even see half of us? He is blind to the lives of all but the most privileged women, and he presumes that the work they do is both inherently less valuable and should come second to their familial obligations, as though men do not have to and should not have to share these same responsibilities. He is fundamentally blind to women and to his own male privilege, in the same way he is blind to poor people and his corresponding wealth, to working class people and his corresponding family purchased opportunities, to people of color and his own whiteness.

No wonder then-Governor Romney and his male cohorts 'could not find' any qualified women to join his cabinet. He never saw them in the first place. FN5. And in his own words, as recently as just this last week on prime time national television, Mr. Romney has revealed that he still doesn't.

"Through their own words
they will be exposed. 
They've got a severe case of 
the emperor's new clothes."
~ "The Emperor's New Clothes," Sinead O'Connor

_______________
FN1. Though don't mistake me, all of that was some heinously sexist b.s.

FN2. Yes, a historian, professional feminist, and attorney all sit around, yelling different arguments at me /the world in my head, while the 'fumie just sits in a corner, sniffing at her wrists and muttering, "pretty!" Doesn't everyone's head work like that?

FN3. Well, you know, after we stopped enslaving them.

FN4. Again, it is worth noting here that this 'workplace struggle' was largely lost on their impoverished sisters in arms as well as women of color and immigrant women, all of whom never had the luxurious option of staying home and remaining outside the public sphere of work in the first place.

FN5. And in case this whole binder business wasn't offensive enough, it turned out to contain an incredible amount of spin. The real story involves being approached by a women's group in Massachusetts with a request to include more women in government, not a concerted effort on Mr. Romney's part to find women for his cabinet.

Is there room for more perfume writing?

Blogging: A Mission Statement

Pat at OlfactaRama had a great post about the general rumbling among fragrance bloggers regarding the 'glut' of new perfumer reviewers/writers/bloggers. I've seen this rumbling around for a bit now, most recently in sort of warning piece/guest post by Vanessa Musson of Bonkers for Perfume, at Now Smell This! entitled "5 things to think about before you start a perfume blog," and then a follow-up post, "The Sequel: 5 Things I Have Learnt From Perfume Blogging."

A mission statement?
You know that's right!

Now I don't want to pick on Vanessa. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to talk about perfume bloggers or the number thereof or what makes a good/bad blog. Also, I think she had some interesting and useful things to say. FN1. But I do want to talk about this whole "why are you blogging/should you be blogging" thing because I've been wanting to comment on it for a while, and I didn't want to write a thousand word manifesto in someone else's comments section.

Okay, maybe not a manifesto.  It's more like...

A mission statement.

That's right people. I'm about to go all Jerry Maguire up in here. FN2. In fact, let's run with that as a theme, shall we? FN3.

I hated myself... no, I hated my place in the world.

Let me tell you why I started Feminine Things. I was in law school. I was miserable. I had leveraged my future to the hilt to earn my degree, only to find out that I hated my classmates/future colleagues and my industry. FN4. I hadn't written anything fun or interesting in a while. I felt as though my logic-driven studies was literally sucking the creativity out of me through my pores.

At the same time, I met Angela from Now Smell This! through our respective jobs. I told her I was thinking of buying myself a bottle of perfume for my thirtieth birthday. She brought me some samples.

So that's what oakmoss
looks like...

I summarily lost my mind and began buying tens of samples. FN5. I kept trying to keep straight what I'd tried and hadn't, what I liked best, why I liked one thing more than another. I didn't know anything about perfume.

 I had never heard the word "chypre." I couldn't tell a gardenia from a jasmine, a leather rose from a powder rose. I couldn't pronounce most of the perfume house names. I didn't even know what the big houses were.

But I had some free time. And I needed to keep track of what I was smelling. And I needed a writing prompt to help me begin writing again. I figured, "What could be harder than writing about the way something smelled for people who couldn't actually be present to smell it?

So I started this blog.

If this [points to heart] is empty, this [points to head] doesn't matter.

Let me tell you how little I had to go on. I didn't own any non-Body Shop/Bath & Body Works perfume when I started. No one linked to me. No one. My friends didn't even read my blog. You know how much I cared? Not even a little.

Those sunglasses are to hide
my tear-filled eyes.

I didn't start the blog to get readers. I needed a place to think and reflect and write. I needed, some days, a place to scream.  I needed a place for me.

Perfume inspired me. It was overwhelming at first.  I would put something on, and BAM! The perfume I was smelling made me feel...everything.

I would smell a scent and it would remind me of my deceased grandfather, and I wept. Another would remind me of the smell of gardenias in my grandmother's backyard...and I blubbered for an hour. A scent reminiscent of my old high school boy friend? More tears.

Basically, I cried a lot.

But I also wrote a lot. I remembered how much I liked words, liked the texture and feel of them in my mouth as I read my writing back to myself. I loved the vivid images perfumes evoked, the random pop cultural connections that would spring into my head when I sniffed at my hand, and just how damned happy I was. My perfume made me so happy. Still does.

First class, that's what's wrong. It used to be a better meal, now it's a better life.

They get free samples in first class?

Even over a year later, I didn't have anyone sending me samples. FN6.   I didn't have any awards. I didn't have any invites to be part of special blogging events. I still didn't have any links to other bloggers. I didn't even have someone to swap with because Angela and I had both left our positions and, sadly, didn't see much of one another.

 I was spending all my disposable income and then some on samples, but there was no way I could keep up with blogs like Now Smell This! or Perfume Posse. So I didn't bother trying. I bought sample sets from The Perfumed Court so I could learn the difference between a candied violet and a soapy violet, if anyone could make a decent orange scent, what constituted a boozy scent, whether I'd ever like anything other than a rose. New releases - who cared? I hadn't even tried Patou Joy or Guerlain Mitsouko yet.

I read a few books about perfume, but mostly? I just smelled, and then I wrote about it. Then I'd smell some more, and write about it. I'm not promoting blogging with blind ignorance.  I'm just saying, everybody has to start somewhere, and you should never be so afraid of looking stupid you miss an opportunity to learn. As I blogged, I trusted my instincts and my own impressions of the scents. You know why? Perfumes smell different to and on different people. They evoke different memories. They elicit different connections. What smells like a funeral to me may smell like heaven to you.  I think both reviews are probably correct.

Was I writing what my esteemed colleagues were? Nope. As far as I could tell, everyone else had a lot more knowledge of the industry and a lot fewer pop references, no one else was using song lyrics for titles, and I didn't see anyone else occasionally freaking out about feminist politics. Did I have "a new perspective to offer"? Ha! Who cared? I was writing again. It felt terrific.

This April 15 will mark four full years of blogging about perfume. I haven't stopped yet, and I have no intention of doing so.

The key to this business is personal relationships.

One thing that keeps coming up in posts about the 'crowded field' of perfume blogging is the idea of "lost readership" and " fluctuating traffic" and "shouting into the void."

Largely these things seem like nonsensical concerns to me. I admit to being flattered by readership. Who isn't? I admit I like comments. But mostly, I write this blog for me. Maybe it's the writer in me that thinks it's a good idea, but I prefer to give credit to the historian.

When I was in college, I read A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 for a class. This work by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is one of the best books you can read about American life in the period in large part because it reflects the thoughts and feelings of the daily life of a real person as they were living it. This is history gold, people! It doesn't get more primary source than that.

 Do I think I deserve to be the speaker for our times? No, I do not. But I suspect Martha Ballard didn't think she would be either. Part of the reason I write this blog,  and part of why I write and document my life to (quite frankly) an absurd degree (you really should see my scrap books of movie tickets stubs - not even joking), is because part of me thinks, "What if I end up the Martha Ballard of the early 21st Century?" You never know who the Angel of History's eye will fall upon in the rubble. If it's me? I'd like there to be plenty of material for that intrepid historical scholar to work from.

And to that end, I try to document the work I've enjoyed reading around the internet here, and on twitter, FB, G+, and the like. I like to share things with people, to talk about them and read them. And I like to give inspirational credit where credit is due, even if the inspiration is to blog at length about how I disagree, whether that be related to perfume or not. Discourse is intensely valuable and immeasurably rewarding, particularly when it challenges us to (re)consider our own assumed postures. I am grateful to those who prompt me to bring pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.

Plus, being nice? Kind of the golden rule.

Hey, I don't have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I failed as much as I have succeeded.

This isn't my first blog. I started a livejournal back in the late 1990s, then I had an independent blog I designed myself that was hosted on a friend's server for a few years. Before that, I wrote in spiral bound notebooks. FN7.

Can I be your ambassador
of perfume kwan?

I'm not really in the beauty industry, and I doubt I ever will be. I still don't know as much about perfume as a lot of other bloggers. You know what I learned on Castle two weeks ago? How to properly say the name of a perfume I actually own. FN8.

I keep going anyway, learning and trying and collecting. Will I keep writing Feminine Things for a while? I like to think so. I see no reason for stopping. And even though I do have all those things now - awards and event invites, links and followers and commenters and even, yes, the occasional free samples to review - I would still keep writing here if I didn't.

Most flattering to me, though, is that you keep reading, and others find my work valuable.  This blog ended up on a couple of Women's Studies syllabi in courses on feminism and the beauty industry in the last couple of years.  I actually got to send a message to one of the classes that used my blog.  As someone who has made a life of studying sex and gender in popular culture, it touches me to think I might help someone else learn and grow.

Truthfully? I never track my traffic. I didn't even know about this wikio/Ebuzzing thing until I read Vanessa's follow-up piece. Google ranks sites? News to me. I like it when people post on my drawings, because I like to give pretty things away. Other than that? I might as well be writing letters to myself.

When I went back to look at my very short initial post today, there was a comment on it, one I never even replied to. How great is that? Three days in and I had a reader. One reader. Perhaps it's her I'm still writing to.

When I write the words, dear reader, I am literally imagining you out there, reader, and I hope you will hear me when I say the following:

Words are tools; writing, a learned skill. The more you use them, the better you get at writing. Whatever inspires you to write, write about that. If it's wine? Start a w(h)ine blog. If it's shoes, go with that fetish. If it's making up funny, misspelled statements to apply on photos of cats, I hear there's a market for that. It's a big old internet out there, and I am not in any way afraid of losing my reader to you. I can't. They live here, in my head.

You complete me, dear reader!

So if you've got something to say about perfume, I want to hear it! If you've started a scent blog you don't see listed in my sidebar of bloggers, tell me. Provided you aren't a spamming troll, I'll be happy to add you. I can't promise I will always have time to read everything you write and comment on it, but if you inspire me to think or talk or write, I will give you the internet love you deserve. And I truly hope you do it better than I do, even if you start your very first post tomorrow.

Who knows - I might even learn something.

Leave a comment to be added to the blogroll.  Or just to say you love/hate/indifferent me, sweet reader.  For deep down in the spidery corners of my ventricular chambers, I feel the same about you.

But I love my wife husband. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success.
______________
FN1. For instance, I, too, regret not going with Wordpress. Though if I move now, I'm probably going to Drupal Gardens. Because this Bitch? She hearts the cutting edge technologies. (Given that, I still don't know why I ended up on Blogger. I think because I was broke and it was free. Thanks for asking.)

FN2. Dorothy: "I loved your memo, by the way."
Jerry: "Thanks... actually, it was just a Mission Statement."

Bonkers!

FN3. Also, if you all don't like this post, please don't golf clap me off stage left with my sad little fish in hand. Plus, Tom Cruise is actually bonkers, so I think it works thematically. Also, I love Cameron Crowe, so you can all suck it.

Wait -- am I not supposed to be telling readers to suck it? Damn, I'm bad at this.

FN4. Loved my coursework and my profs, though. Holla to my Lewis & Clark faculty, what? What! Seriously, though. I really should have just gotten a Ph.D. in Legal History or Legal Philosophy.


FN5. Yes, tens, not hundreds. I was broke, remember?

FN6. I actually don't mind paying for samples.  I appreciate that materials are expensive and most of the perfumers I buy from are independent small business owners who need to recoup/cover their costs.  I'm just happy they let me have the samples, instead of selling by full bottle only.  I couldn't afford to try much perfume if I had to buy full bottles just to try them.

FN7. I still write long hand in notebooks.

FN8. Seriously. It isn't fracas? As in "to cause a"? I am terrrrible with French. Ah well. I might sound like a stupid culturally-illiterate American, but at least I don't smell like one.