The lizards were anti-climatic.

When you pine for a “simpler” time, I want to scream

Sometimes I overhear/read women discussing a “simpler” time when “all they had to do” was housework, child-rearing, and wifely duties*, and it makes me want to scream.

Maybe this pining partially happens because this country has still maintained a deeply patriarchal relationship between women and “women’s work,” despite creating a climate by which women work outside the home. That, as a woman, you are still expected to do a majority of the in-home work and childcare in addition to earning a substantive income is rarely discussed as a cultural issue that needs to be addressed in any fundamental way. That discussion needs to be happening, it should have been happening all along.

Maybe it’s just emotional and intellectual laziness at work. Is it attractive to sublimate your problem solving and decision-making skills to those of another person simply because of their privileged position? Is it something you find yourself wanting to do when that privileged person is another woman? These are the questions you should be reflecting on, but I sure as hell don’t want to live in a world where I’m not rising up to answer every question life asks of me.

Maybe this daydreaming just serves to create an elegant, whitewashed fantasy past where elements of class, race, and sexual orientation privilege don’t have to be considered when exercising your agency. We’re so prone to not just avoiding the uncomfortable question of “Why do I have this while you have less?” but actively antagonizing those we don’t identify with. I don’t want to live in a world where the plight of women of color or those who weren’t born as biological women aren’t considered in the answer to the greater question of “What do women need to be equal?”

We’ve been stuck at the inflection point of understanding women’s rights as human rights for 20 years, and when you long for a time that didn’t even give you permission to want something more or different, you undermine the agency of all of us. That there are even women who daydream in such an intellectually dishonest way reminds me that every day how much further we need to go.

* And don’t even get me started on when a man says something like this about being a “house husband.”