And as we watch, I will point out to you that these shows — like commercials for laundry detergent or diet products — present a world almost entirely free of men. The wedding, and by extension the marriage, is seen as women’s work. Only she would be invested in the emotional labour of making sure the day is perfect, in its million expensive details, from the cake to the photographs. She is the successful hunter, and he is dragged, like a shot deer, from one ridiculous appointment to the next. Occasionally he is prodded to life so that he can mumble, “Sure, honey, teal works for me.”
But there is one universe where the men are equally involved, isn’t there? We watch far too much of The Bachelor, in which dozens of women with the finest hair and bodies that science can produce compete for the attention of one man. Its sister show, The Bachelorette, reverses the genders. Both shows are draped in the filmiest of modern camouflage but might as well take place five hundred years ago, lit by the flicker of a tallow candle: There is always the expectation of a proposal at the end, and it is always — always — the man who proposes. But she is the victor; the ring the spoils.
Okay, I’m being a bit hard on The Bachelor. It’s been fun and educational for the whole family, hasn’t it? Remember when we tried to make Granny watch an episode, and she looked at the bachelor — his teeth much brighter than his eyes — and said, “Do you think he has all his wits about him?”
At every opportunity, I’ve outsourced life lessons to The Bachelor. There was the time when I used the Fantasy Suite episode to explain human reproduction, and you turned to me and rolled your eyes and said, “I know how it works.” I know, I’m terrible. I fully expected Children’s Aid to show up and take you and your brother away.
You’ll notice I’m not addressing this letter to your brother, by the way. That’s because society has broader and more interesting ambitions for him than the precise shade of pewter in the centrepiece or whether St. Bart’s is the hottest spot for a destination wedding. Perhaps I am unwittingly feeding into the stereotype as well when we watch these shows together.
But then, life is full of contradiction and complexity. You will find this out. You’re probably already starting to discover it. For example, you may point out that Dad and I got married, and made our peace with societal convention. And that is true. Except that none of it was conventional, and the only place our wedding would have been featured is Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
I could have proposed, like a good feminist, but I didn’t. Dad proposed, if you can call it that, as we were driving back from IKEA in our decrepit K-car, which leaked fuel and stalled during left turns.
“Maybe we should get married,” he said, startling me from my reverie about whether I should wash my hair for the first time that week.
“Sure,” I said. Or possibly “Okay” or “Why not?”
We both thought of ourselves as beatniks at heart. Even if we’d had the money — which we didn’t — our wedding would never have been about floral arrangements and flung garters. I’d been to too many that were joyless and artificial, the bride and the groom stressed and weary. I’d watched how weddings had become a status trap, a retrograde game show. Imagine being handed over from one man to another!
So we eloped instead. I wore a tiny red mini dress covered with Eiffel Towers. We got married on the site of an ancient fort in Nova Scotia, in the town where your great-grandparents are buried. The justice of the peace was not used to tiny, reckless weddings. She said, “Are you sure you want to get married outside? It’s twenty bucks extra.” The fellow who was supposed to be our best man couldn’t make it because he was planting turnips that day — a true story, ask your dad — so his name had to be covered with Wite-Out on our marriage certificate. Maybe that makes it invalid. Who cares? Your dad’s name is written on my heart. (Are you throwing up yet?)
The whole thing cost a couple hundred dollars. It left us enough money to throw a party for our friends in Toronto, where we danced to our first song, the dancehall classic “Murder She Wrote.” Do you know how much an average Canadian wedding costs these days, Maud? It’s $27,000. You could travel around the world for that amount of money. You could buy a racehorse!
I hope it doesn’t shock you to hear this, but your dad was not the first man I’d, um, “dated.” Nor was I the first woman for him, though I was certainly the first woman he’d proposed to in a car that was little better than a barbeque on wheels. We’d both been around the block. When we found each other, we were busy doing other things — working, travelling, and in your dad’s case inventing a new cocktail called the “Braino” (equal parts Pernod and Brio, it should have made him famous).
My point is that neither one of us was consumed with the idea of “the one.” The idea of “the one” is a pernicious myth propagated by Disney and The Bachelor, which, now that I think of it, belong to the same corporate empire. You notice how few of the matches on The Bachelor ended up lasting? I rest my case. There is no “one,” there are many — many people with whom you could share a happy life. Or your happy life may involve a series of matches, which worked for Elizabeth Taylor. Or it may be that your happy life involves you, alone, with a lot of cats. I think that’s your plan at this point, though it may change.
Anyway, sweetheart, you will make this decision for yourself. You may choose never to marry. You may choose to live in a commune, or on a mountaintop with goats. Or perhaps you will choose to have a lavish, splendid wedding with a white dress and live peacocks and a samba band. I doubt it, because it doesn’t seem like you, but I have no way of seeing into the future. And if that is what you choose, I will be with you every step of the way. And I will never, not once, tell you that your dress makes you look like a linebacker.
Your loving Mum
AMBITION: THREE LIFE LESSONS
AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN, I went with my friend Bonnie to see a movie that would change the way I thought about my future. The film remains my favourite to this day, a bright and flickering constant when my life shifted in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Bonnie was a decade older than me. She existed on a plane of impossible sophistication, living in an apartment on College Street and making black bean soup that she served in hollowed-out pumpernickel loaves. She was sardonic, cool-eyed, ardently feminist. We worked together at the Eglinton movie theatre, where every night, dressed in brown polyester uniforms reeking of old butter, we would mouth the dialogue to Octopussy as we cleaned the popcorn machine.
One night Bonnie took me to a repertory cinema to see My Brilliant Career, an Australian movie directed by Gillian Armstrong that had been released a few years earlier, in 1979. Rep cinema! Foreign film! These were gateways to adulthood, and I worshipped Bonnie for taking my yearning seriously. I watched it open-mouthed, tiny explosions going off in my brain. It was a movie set near the beginning of the twentieth century, in rural Australia, but every line of dialogue could have come from my own journal, with its pages alternately tear-stained and hunger-filled.
“Bad enough to be born a girl,” says the main character, Sybylla Melvyn. “But to be born ugly and clever!” Sybylla, played by the inimitable Judy Davis, wants something more from life. The ambitious daughter of a dirt-poor farm family, she reads to her grubby siblings from the pages of novels that paper the walls of their shack. She is fierce and rebellious, mischievous and prickly. (The film is based on a famous 1901 Australian novel written by a sixteen-year-old girl called Miles Franklin, who would become an influential feminist and writer, though she never recaptured the success of her first book.)
Prickly doesn’t work for girls, not even in the bush. Sybylla must be made smooth, her ambition sanded down. To that end, she is sent to live with her rich grandmother, who will tame her wild hair and spirit, in preparation for marriage. But Sybylla does not want to be married.
“I’m going to have a career,” she announces to her grandmother, who nearly expires of shock.
; “A career,” intones the grandmother, deadly quiet. “What in?”
“I don’t know,” says Sybylla blithely. “Literature, music, art. Maybe the opera! I haven’t made my mind up yet.”
The grandmother glides away, to seek smelling salts, perhaps, or a knife.
There is a complicating factor, a spanner in the works of Sybylla’s ambition. A local landowner’s son, Harry Beecham (played by delectable young Sam Neill), has fallen in love with her. Unfortunately for Harry, Sybylla’s heart longs for the world more than it lusts for him. In a truly heart-wrenching scene, she tells him that her ambition will crush him if they remain together, and she leaves. We see her, at the end of the film, sending the manuscript of her novel off to a publisher in Sydney.
“But why,” I said to Bonnie, as we left the theatre. “Why couldn’t she have both?” I was alight with thoughts and feelings. Like Sybylla, I burned to do something in the world, though I wasn’t sure what. Would my ambition crush or liberate me? Why could Sybylla not desire worldly success and Harry? Sam Neill had ignited my teenaged hormones. I couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning him for a pen and inkpot.
Bonnie sighed, exhaling the Weltschmerz of her twenty-five years. “It’s harder for women,” she said. “The world is afraid of what we want.”
The world is afraid of what we want. Why wasn’t the world afraid of what men wanted? I refused to live with such a double standard. I would write books and have a husband, I told Bonnie, or possibly just many, many lovers, all of whom looked like Sam Neill and brought me coffee while I typed, before reading my pages and marvelling at my genius.
Soon after Bonnie and I went to see My Brilliant Career, I bought a copy of the movie on VHS and played it to wheezy death. Then I bought it on DVD, and its rainbow surface became marred with fingerprints and spilled drinks. Finally, I watched it on YouTube, for free. Technology expanded, but the world did not progress alongside it: Sybylla’s struggle to reconcile her inside and her outside, to maintain her essential Sybylla-ness while doling out pieces of herself to the world, is still the struggle of women today. Our ambition remains a minefield. The world is afraid of what we want. Or perhaps we are afraid of what we want.
It’s possible, at this moment, that we’re even slipping backward when we consider the full potential of women’s lives. Early in 2017, social-science data from the United States showed an alarming trend toward millennials favouring a retrograde vision of a domestic partnership, with the man providing the main income support in a partnership and the woman working inside the home. In a survey of high-school students, the Council on Contemporary Families revealed that 58 percent of high-school seniors preferred that “traditional” model; twenty years before, only 42 percent of seniors favoured the male breadwinner model.
As the New York Times reported, looking at related studies around millennials’ attitudes: “Overall, Americans aged 18–34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or Boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes necessary to create equality in the workplace.”
Another academic study from 2017, “Acting Wife: Marriage Market Incentives and Labour Market Investments,” demonstrates how even highly educated young women will lessen the scope of their professional ambitions when in the presence of dateable men. Not for their own sake, but because men find their ambition frightening. As the study’s authors write: “Even in the 21st century, men prefer female partners who are less professionally ambitious than they are . . . Men tend to avoid female partners with characteristics usually associated with professional ambition, such as high levels of education.”
In the study of female MBA students, those who were single were found to have participated less often in class and to have asked for raises less often. In a questionnaire outlining their professional goals, they were more likely to say they’d work harder and travel more if they knew the questionnaires wouldn’t be shared among their classmates. In other words, they wanted to look less ambitious among men they might want to have relationships with.
If you asked those MBA students the same question at a different point in their careers, you’d probably get a different answer. Our ambitions ebb and flow with the years. They expand and contract to fit the contours of our fluid lives. The size and scope of these ambitions will depend on how supportive our work environments and social networks are. The very nature of the things we want to achieve will likely change. I didn’t know any of that when I was fifteen.
All I ever wanted to do was to write a book. I didn’t publish one until I was forty-seven. What was I doing in those intervening years? Shooting two babies out of my birth canal, for starters. I was working as a journalist. Chasing the wrong men. Drinking. Idling. Being productive and being fallow. Climbing ladders, descending ladders, choosing different ladders. Living in three different countries.
I’ve been fortunate enough to reach the age of fifty, which means I’ve had a lot of time to think about ambition, mine and other women’s. It is a topic as vast and deep as the ocean. You can really only understand the patch you’re currently sailing in and the bits you’ve made it through, sometimes with your sails tightly furled, sometimes with them gloriously open to the winds. It is almost impossible to chart someone else’s path. All I can share with you are the three lessons I learned along the way.
THE PATH DOESN’T GO STRAIGHT UPWARDS
I said yes to the first book contract that I was offered, and immediately regretted it. That was in early 2001, when a publisher wanted me to write a book about bad girls in history. I was excited. As I talked with the editor on the phone, pacing my balcony in Los Angeles, I contemplated my empty work life suddenly filling with research about Lucrezia Borgia’s taste in poison. I hung up and was overcome by terror: Who was I to write a book? Where would I even begin? I envisaged, years down the road, savage reviews in newspapers. The asshole voice in my head was on his game that day.
Shortly after, I discovered I was pregnant. I begged off the book project with a shameful sense of relief. Now I wouldn’t have to write the book, which meant I wouldn’t have to be found out as a fraudster of the highest order. My unborn son became an excuse to turn the world away.
I lay awake at night, thinking of the telegram that the great screenwriter Henry Mankiewicz had sent to his friend Ben Hecht in 1925, urging him to move to LA: “Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots.” From the window by my bed, on a clear day, I could see the Hollywood sign in the distance, as tiny as the last line on an eye doctor’s chart. In 1932, the starlet Peg Entwistle had hurled herself from the H in a fit of despair over her floundering career.
Los Angeles is a city built of ambition, the way other cities are built of bricks. Everywhere I went, people burned for success: Our cat-sitter was a strip-club DJ who longed to be a famous musician; our building superintendent never doubted that his destiny lay in hip-hop greatness; a budding filmmaker dragged me onto the beach at Santa Monica to be part of his Apocalypse Now re-enactment.
Other women would have written the book while pregnant, finishing the last edits as the C-section scalpel descended. I was not other women. I felt tremendous guilt at my own lack of reach, shame at my failure to take all that was offered. Wasn’t I supposed to reach higher, and higher? Professionally, I had climbed with determination since I left journalism school at the age of twenty-one: By twenty-four, I was the books editor of Canada’s national newspaper; by thirty-two, I was second-in-command of a national woman’s magazine.
What a self-satisfied idiot I was. The ladder did not work that way. I climbed a few rungs, and found the next one was rotted. Or I climbed behind my husband for a few years, because his ladder was sturdier. Sometimes there were snakes instead of ladders, and I tumbled downward quickly, my hands grasping for purchase.
Later, when w
e were living in London with a second baby, my neighbour Jo would describe the in/out predicament better than I ever could. Jo was a barrister who also had a doctorate in history from Oxford. She slacked not. Yet she, too, felt the terrible pull of the current, dragging her toward home, dragging her away again. When her third child was born, she asked to work part-time at the law firm, and ended up irritated and unfulfilled whether she was at home or at the office: “I resent them when they ask me to do something,” she said, as we stood in her garden watching our children play, “and I resent them when they pass me over and give the work to someone else.”
YOU’RE NOT THE PROBLEM. YOUR OFFICE IS.
Too often the issue of ambition is framed as a personal one. (I’ve done it here, in this essay.) The truth is, women’s ambitions are constrained by systemic forces beyond our control. They include, but are not limited to, inherent biases that favour the promotion of people already in power, that is, non-racialized men; lack of access to affordable child care; inflexible managerial systems that do not encourage different modes of working; and lack of professional networks that would aid women’s ascent to power.
I was a mossy old river stone before I realized any of these things, despite the fact that I’d written about the exclusionary aspects of male power dominance for decades. I knew about the paucity of women in boardrooms, which my newspaper colleagues wrote about every year. (In Canada, women fill 12 percent of the seats on corporate boards, and 45 percent of boards contain no women at all. While I was writing this book, a non-profit group that aims to promote women in the workplace, Catalyst Canada, named the new chair of its advisory board. They chose a man. He was the second man in a row to fill that role.) I could see the repressive power structures that kept us out of the corner office, but when I looked at my own career trajectory, I saw it through the lens of my own personal strengths and weaknesses, and not as part of a larger framework constructed by forces beyond my control.
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