The #MeToo Movement Isn’t About Women’s Frailty. It’s About Women’s Labor.
By Sara L. Maurer
January 7, 2018
In Friday’s New York Times, Daphne Merkin suggested that the #MeToo movement consigns women to a “victimology paradigm.” Merkin accuses those of us seeking to be free of sexual harassment of acting “as frail as Victorian housewives.” In the end it is her column that is oddly Victorian.
After all, the historical record is clear. Victorian housewives weren’t frail. They managed large households, had babies without anesthesia, nursed the sick and dying, wrote books, ran charities, mounted campaigns for political reform, coordinated their husbands’ social lives, and had quite a bit of sex with them as well. Victorian housewives’ problem was not that they were too frail to handle life. It was that they were required to perform prodigious amounts of labor while being asked to appear as if they were not working at all. To reassure men that women were not the competition, the ideal Victorian woman was expected to act fragile, regardless of how much drudgery she was performing.
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In Friday’s New York Times, Daphne Merkin suggested that the #MeToo movement consigns women to a “victimology paradigm.” Merkin accuses those of us seeking to be free of sexual harassment of acting “as frail as Victorian housewives.” In the end it is her column that is oddly Victorian.
After all, the historical record is clear. Victorian housewives weren’t frail. They managed large households, had babies without anesthesia, nursed the sick and dying, wrote books, ran charities, mounted campaigns for political reform, coordinated their husbands’ social lives, and had quite a bit of sex with them as well. Victorian housewives’ problem was not that they were too frail to handle life. It was that they were required to perform prodigious amounts of labor while being asked to appear as if they were not working at all. To reassure men that women were not the competition, the ideal Victorian woman was expected to act fragile, regardless of how much drudgery she was performing.
This is how the ideology of separate spheres works. In the male sphere, men do work, battling one another for limited economic resources. Meanwhile, in the female sphere, women’s different and more fragile nature leads them to care and nurture, lavishing their emotional and spiritual resources on men who deserve it because of the work they do. Under these conditions, nothing Victorian women did — and they did a lot — could ever count as labor. The category simply did not apply.
We also don’t want advancement at work to depend on labor not required of men.
Merkin’s analysis repeats this split. The men she lists by name have specific careers in the public eye. The unnamed women she professes to speak for ostensibly have careers too, but Merkin locates the truth of their experience in their conflicting private emotions, which seem to center entirely around flirting and conducting elegant courtships untrammeled by awkward requests for consent.
Merkin may be faithfully representing the women she knows, but her picture does not reflect the concerns of most American women, almost all of whom work because they need the money and not because they are seeking sexual partners. I would like to suggest to Merkin that this majority of women sees the #MeToo movement not as about fragility but about labor.
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After all, the #MeToo movement has made visible the amount of labor women do each day when they show up at work and redirect the conversation away from their bra size, tactfully pull hands off their body, or repeatedly find new ways to avoid the male supervisor who wants to discuss his sexual problems. That’s work. We don’t get paid for it, we don’t get credit for it, and we don’t want to do it.
We also don’t want advancement at work to depend on labor not required of men. Did male comedians have to sit in a room and watch Louis C.K. jerk off in order to network? If they didn’t, why should female comedians have to do that work? Did any man working for or with the radio host John Hockenberry have to deflect multiple obsessive email solicitations, unwanted physical contact, and declarations of love? Did male graduate students of David R. Marchant have to put up with barrages of sexual insults to do field work with him?
Why should women have to do that work to get the same results? Why should we have to pretend that we don’t mind? Why should we have to be the ones to get over it? Couldn’t men just as easily self-monitor? Why not make men responsible for that labor?
It may be that for Merkin, warding off unwanted physical contact, redirecting sexualized conversation, or repeatedly turning down propositions from co-workers does not feel like work, just as some women do not find that gardening, alphabetizing files, or baking cookies for the classroom party feels anything like work. I think feminists can agree that all women do not uniformly find any one activity pleasurable or onerous. And yet, feminists can also agree that some endeavors which objectively take energy and occupy time are required of women without being equally required of men. And that’s not fair.
Perhaps no profession is more in need of recollecting this than academic teaching and research, where genuine joy and gratification often — but don’t always — mingle with activities that take prodigious amounts of energy and time. There the fingerprints of the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres are still visible on the day-to-day activities of female academics, whom students perceive to be more naturally caring and thus more likely to perform “favors” that don’t seem to count as actual work. The #MeToo movement is one more wave in a long line of feminist calls for careful attention to how women spend their time and energy each day, and one more reminder that women’s expenditures should not be significantly larger than men’s.
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Not wanting to do the extra work of managing harassment doesn’t make us fragile. It certainly doesn’t, as Merkin suggests, rob us of our agency. Choosing what work we will and won’t do is the essence of agency. We’d just like to exercise ours.
Sara L. Maurer is an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she specializes in 19th-century English and Irish literature.