Women Who Leave.
Has this internet squabble about Honor Jones’s essay in the Atlantic, “How I Demolished My Life,” grabbed your attention? I subscribe to the Atlantic and marriage is kind of a pet interest, so I would have stumbled upon it anyway, but before I saw it a friend sent it to me and asked my opinion. I read it once quickly, found it kind of slight, but when I read more and realized how starkly polarized the reaction to it was I gave it a closer read and had a very different response. (Much of this post is recycled, edited, from an email exchange with a friend and a comment I left on another friend’s Facebook page yesterday.)
Most of the negative critique of the essay seems to be about Jones’s avoidance of moral questions, as if she hasn’t grappled with them, but it’s hard to imagine that was not her intention. We don’t know because she doesn’t tell us much of what she feels about her actions. Why do people assume she’s cavalier? That she doesn’t care about anyone but herself? Do people want her to judge herself? She doesn’t need to. Women who make decisions based on what they want will be judged.
Literature is full of stories of unhappy women who abandon their families, their children — the most recent example: just last night I watched the new movie by Maggie Gyllenhall, The Lost Daughter — because it’s a powerful taboo. Our notion of what motherhood is and means is so deeply rooted we can’t help but find women who reject it to be unnatural and deeply flawed, immoral, wicked.
It is still the default that a woman take her husband’s last name and not uncommon that she take his first name as well (Mr. and Mrs. John Smith). It is unusual for a man to follow his wife’s career, for a man to manage the house and kids. Fifty years after the battles of the 2nd women's movement (and some victories, though we're seeing how fragile they are now) a woman still faces a giant wall of cultural resistance to the slightest even symbolic recognition of her desires, her individuality, her entitlement to fulfillment outside of pregnancy and subservience. I think in that context, for Honor Jones to write about her divorce this way, to refuse judgment, is a radical act and my guess would be, considering the writer, intentionally unsettling and maddening. The reactions and debates it provokes are not accidental.
I went to a big family wedding last week, so It's fresh in my mind how vaguely and breezily people speak about marriage as if its only component is love. That beginning passage in the Jones essay about the kitchen is, maybe too obliquely, about the too-late realization (which is a much bigger deal for women) that you've been sold a bill of goods, that love doesn't just make your life magically fulfilling. For most people, the realization that you’ve made a mistake and you want something different is not a valid reason for divorce. As a married man, I have a hard time not looking askance at her decision to get out. But I didn’t have an expectation of subordination lurking in the background when I took my vows.
(Here’s Jill Filipovic, basically in accordance with my view but with a much deeper look and with authority and standing that, obviously, I don’t have.)