Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I’m McPhie Allebest. Today we will be discussing Part 2 of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and  I’m joined again by my brilliant reading partner, Fyza Parviz. Hi Fyza! Fyza: Hi, Amy!

Amy:

One thing I reflected on after our last conversation was our different perspectives that we bring to this text. I hope it’s ok that I share this: right before we started the previous episode you texted me “can we start a few minutes late? My baby is sleeping on me.” It was this interesting moment when the lines were blurred between what we were reading and what we were living, and I thought of that quote from 1970’s feminism that says “the personal is political” - the stuff we’re talking about in Beauvoir’s book is important not just because she’s a brilliant theorist but because it describes real people’s lives. I could so remember that magical feeling of having my baby sleeping on me, and I see the huge, consuming love that you have for him, and that’s the same love I have for my children. But there’s this huge difference between us: you’ve mentioned that he joins you for your work meetings and your grad school zoom calls, and I can see you continuing to pursue your own goals, while bringing him with you.

When I had my first baby, I quit my job and completely abandoned all career pursuits, completely ended my participation in academia, in the workforce and economy, basically in the entire adult world outside of family life, and to be honest at the time I was really happy to do it, because I believed that that’s what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t even entertained any other option.

I think it’s useful to remember what a huge range of beliefs and practices there are between different communities and families in the way they view men’s and women’s roles, even women living in the same time period in the same place. My own sister grew up in the same religion as I did, in the same schools, in the family, went to the same college, etc.… and she is married with three kids. Yet she is a labor and delivery nurse, and she has continued to work all this time - in fact she was saying recently that she feels guilty not working. And I said, how is it that we had the exact same upbringing, but you feel guilty not working, and I was so indoctrinated to not work outside the home that I didn’t even consider it, and would have felt guilty if I had worked?? And we finally figured out that even though we had gotten the same messages at church, she had majored in a subject that was geared toward a profession. Even at super-conservative BYU, there were female professors in the nursing program, and many female students whose college education was purposefully training them for careers. So she got job training, and she had other women in her cohort entering the workforce, and she had older female role models who talked about balancing work and family. So all of that experience mitigated the messages that we were both getting in other places. I was an English major, so my classes were all just reading books and writing papers, my professors were almost all men, and no one talked about what jobs we would get after college. 

So anyway… I think these conversations are really important to have with each other when we talk about these topics - we can sometimes assume “it’s 2020, all women are on the same page about x.y, or z…” assuming that when we read Beauvoir we’re all coming at it from the same place. But women - and men - are still having vastly different experiences and we need to ask each other questions to understand each other so we don’t talk past each other.

So Fyza, as we get ready to discuss Beauvoir’s observations about women’s lives today, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about the way you were raised - what expectations did you have for yourself as a woman? What example was set for you, and did you follow that example or deviate from it? How does that