The vision of female success it projected was far too narrow
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1980s Britain. The age of yuppies, shoulder pads, hairdos that looked like flocks of seagulls taking to flight and mobile phones as big as bricks.
Margaret Thatcher was at No. 10, showing all of us little British girls that if you had enough drive and hairspray (not to mention the kind of handbag that actually scared people), you too could run the country.
Over in the field of popular culture, Madonna was busting balls right, left and centre – imploring us not to “go for second best” and generally steamrollering traditional ideas of how a woman could look and act.
And, of course, it was the time of Nicola Horlick, the “City Superwoman”, who famously raised a large family while pursuing a stellar financial career in the City of London. She – or at least the image of her that the media put forward – embodied the idea that, as a modern woman, you could “have it all”.
On into the blazing 90s
Moving forward and the hard-nosed careerism of the 1980s gave way to the freewheeling 1990s. We girls traded in shoulder pads and aggressive technicolour eyeshadow for satin hipster trousers, brown lipstick and sparkly “butterfly” hairclips. The “supermodels” were defining fashion and beauty and supposedly ushering in “the age of elegance”.
As far as prominent female role models went, Nicola Horlick had long since become a parody. Our attention shifted to a whole new breed of woman born of this hedonistic age: the hard-drinking, hard-partying “ladettes”.
Beer in one hand, fag in the other, knickers, boobs and bum on show as she stumbled out of London’s most fashionable bars and clubs– these ladies took whatever was left of the demands on us girls to behave in a ladylike fashion and ground them to dust under her Manolo heel. Loud and boisterous behaviour was permitted, even encouraged. Because anything that the guys could do, we could too.
And, by golly, we did. Girlpower all the way.
Decision time
Then, at the end of the 1990s, sh*t got real and I had to decide what direction to take in life. Tony Blair was now PM and wanted as many school leavers as possible to go to university. With that as the dominant narrative, I never questioned that “uni” was where I was headed. I was getting the grades to get into more or less any one I wanted for any subject I wanted, so all options were open to me.
Having so many paths open to me was a luxury not everyone had, but it scared me. How was I ever going to choose which way to go?
Thinking about it now, this was the first time I felt what a challenge untrammelled freedom could be. In English, we refer to being “spoilt for choice”, although I think the Germans have the far better phrase: “die Qual der Wahl”. Literally translating as “the torture of choice”, it expresses so well that feeling of stress and pressure when you have so many possibilities but don’t know how to proceed.
I didn’t think of my situation in such structured terms at the time, of course. I was far too young and felt things more than I considered or analysed them. And all I felt was a mild confusion and an uncomfortable pressure to make the “right” choices.
Whereby that did not necessarily mean making the right choice for me.
I just wanted approval
Like many little girls, I had learned early on to make my self-worth dependent on the approval of others. Logical, then, that when it came to choosing a degree course, I gravitated towards status subjects which would be sure to please my teachers, my parents, society at large. Yes, it would have to be the kind of subject which said “success” and would garner applause from those I felt I needed to make happy.
On the other hand, I also knew that I wanted to gain a degree which would give me good earning prospects after graduation. I’d decided very early on that I never wanted to be dependent on a partner and that I wanted to have my own money. Only careers with good monetary prospects were worthy of consideration.
Oh yes, and I definitely wanted to pursue my study of the German language.
In the end, I chose to apply to University College London to study English and German laws; a direction which seemed to tick all the above boxes. It certainly mapped well onto the highpowered corporate visions of female success that I’d seen in the media and which I considered definitive.
I duly received an offer of a place on the coveted course and got the right grades in my A-levels to take it up.
In September 2000, I moved down to London to begin my new life.
Fast forward a quarter of a century
After I graduated from UCL in 2004, I moved to Austria and pursued a legal career there, specialising in banking and finance law.
Yes, reader: I went the full Nicola Horlick, emulating that vision of female success as it had been broadcast in my formative years. The degree from an elite university, the highflying career in a male-dominated industry (and country – just to jack the challenge up one more notch). I wore my Zara office suits and Thomas Pink shirts with total pride.
I felt certain that my cup of career and life satisfaction would runeth over.
Except it didn’t.
Now, I don’t regret of what I’ve done – in fact I’m inordinately proud of all of it. But I’ve been left with an abiding feeling that, with those visions of success that 80s/90s power feminism had projected, I’d been sold a pup.
It hangs onto all my degree certificates and achievements like an ache in a bone at the spot where it was once broken.
Enter the TradWives
I’ve got so used to that constant low hum of amorphous dissatisfaction at the back of my mind that I hardly even notice it anymore. It happened, it’s part of me, I can’t change it. Don’t cry over spilt milk and all that.
Then the Tradwives galloped en masse into my consciousness and started irritating the hell out of me, just by existing. The very thought of them made me irrationally moody.
For the uninitiated, the TradWives are a social media trend where younger women openly pursue lives which conform to the traditional female stereotype: stay-at-home wives and mothers who cook, clean and raise the kids while the man takes on the role of breadwinner. So far, so 1950s.
It’s not like I want to pursue this lifestyle. The very thought that I could play the role of submissive housewife is the stuff of comedy and goes against every principle and goal I ever set for myself as a woman.
So why did this silly social media trend get under my skin so badly?
That isn’t how success is supposed to look
After letting the issue twirl in my head like a rotisserie chicken for several months, I located the irritant. The TradWives were selling as success a lifestyle which I had grown up thinking of as backward, a failure and something to be avoided at all costs.
It seemed perverse. It was throwing the thinking patterns I’d picked up all those years ago about what qualified as female success into disarray.
I want to be like HER
The successful “alpha” female of the 80s and 90s sat in a boardroom and wore snappy suits. She did not stay at home in comfy clothes doing housework and playing with the children.
In that unforgiving philosophy of modern female success, the elasticated waistband was the great dividing line of life.
On the one side were the slim, waspy women who had made it: no soft hemlines for them. But there again, they didn’t need them. They understood that a slim figure lay at the core of their female superpowers and had oodles of the discipline required to maintain it. How else had they advanced so far in their careers?
On the other side were the dowdy, frumpy housewives growing fat from scoffing raw cookie dough and the kids’ leftovers in the kitchen when no-one was looking; sadly watching their waistlines expand outwards as they watched Rosemary Conley from the couch with a packet of crisps. Their husbands were sure to be schtupping their secretaries on the side aswell because, frankly, how could you find such a wife desirable?
One woman was cool, fulfilled and in control; the other one was passive, frustrated and weak.
I knew which one I wanted to be.
And that’s the way I’d been thinking about it ever since.
It was a con
The kind of “new woman” I wanted to be balanced a job, a marriage and family all without breaking a sweat. At no point was the concept of opportunity cost of “having it all” allowed to cloud this vision of female glory, or that “having it all” involved tough choices, endless juggling and lots of sacrifice.
I am sure this is why so many Gen X and millennial women get such a shock when they become mothers themselves. It wasn’t meant to be like this – I thought it would be so much easier!
Since I made the decision early on to remain childless, I can’t contribute anything from my own experience here. These are not my stories to tell.
My own reality check was waiting for me in the office.
Boardroom or bust
According to my youthful understanding – if you weren’t wearing a suit in an office and climbing the corporate ladder, you hadn’t “made it”. Choosing to be a stay-at-home wife or mum precluded you entirely from the authorisation to label your life a “success”.
The vision of success on which my entire education and career path had been constructed simply didn’t take account of the possibility that attaining excellence in whatever field you chose to work in – cancer research, carpentry or child-rearing – could amount to “success”. Or that the satisfaction from doing something better than anyone else could function as a better marker for success than a powerful-sounding management job title or flashy business cards. I never thought (or felt entitled to think) of life quality or work-life balance as factors in the definition of my own success.
No wonder I ended up so dissatisfied with how my career turned out. And no wonder the TradWives pissed me off. More than anything else in recent times, they exposed the assumptions on which I had built my career, even my identity, for what they were: oversimplified, unfair, narrow…and completely wrong.
Moving forward
Realising that the whole foundation for your life decisions was wonky and that all of said decisions led you down the wrong path for half of your life? That’s some psychologically rough terrain, let me tell you.
I feel cheated and seriously misled by that narrow, heavily corporatised vision of female success that the 80s and 90s were so full of. It promised glory but collapsed in on its own flimsy foundations on impact with reality.
It would be easy to become depressed or resentful. But I must stop myself whenever I start to go down that path.
Even as a young person, it was open to me to look at the other career alternatives, reflect on what I was truly good at and enjoyed and pursue an appropriate path. As I said, I had the grades to do anything. I just didn’t have enough imagination or confidence to choose a route that might have appeared to others as unworthy of my academic ability but which would have been better for me. At the end of the day, it was my life and not anyone else’s.
It wasn’t all bad
But I’m going to go easy on myself. I was just a kid. I might have been churning out the A-grades but I was as dumb as any other teenager when it came to the big wide world. You have to get out and about in it to understand what works, what you need and what you can drop by the wayside. It’s called growing up.
And all is not lost. I got some stuff exactly right.
After 25 years, I can say with absolute certainty that – despite periods of illness, going self-employed and building up a business, losing that business to AI and building up a whole new career in my 40s – I have always been in a position to financially fend for myself. That goal, at least, has been achieved and maintained.
I’m awarding myself a grade A for that.
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Related articles:
Going back to Britain: the joys and frustrations of returning to the mother ship
British millennials and the stiff upper lip
Lily Phillips and her 101 men. What was the point?
Man! I feel like a woman! Or maybe I don’t…
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Photo: Brooke Lark auf Unsplash