Double Bind
It’s January 3rd, and I’ve officially resumed real life. A few days ago, I grudgingly traded pajamas for clothes and caught a flight home to New York. On Monday, I replaced afternoon naps and pumpkin pie lunches with an exercise class and $160 worth of vegan groceries. And yesterday, I went back to work.
This transition – from cozy Christmas chilling to the rigors of the real world – is tough every year. While the Justine of my idealized imagination leaps into each new year with guts and gusto, the Justine I am clings to the slothful season, wishing for just one more day to curl up with a couple of chapters of something soothing.
So this year, I decided to preempt my pouting by reading Double Bind, an essay collection about female ambition. It's edited by Robin Romm and includes contributions from two dozen women ranging from Roxane Gay to Molly Ringwald. I hoped it would serve as a shot of ‘go out and conquer the world’ adrenaline – that I’d be inspired by accounts of thriving in male-dominated industries, discussions about what it means to “have it all,” and stories about knowing yourself. But while I did get inspiration from Double Bind, I also got a big dose of depressive introspection. This book is both an incredible body of work and an incredible body blow: the former because it humanizes women of astounding talent and tenacity, the latter because it highlights how many female success stories are shot through with angst, injustice, and sacrifice.
While the essays in this collection vary wildly, several themes course through them all: the ways women are discouraged from openly declaring their drive and desires, the Lean-In-ification of female striving, and the eternal competition between the professional and personal. Like many of this book's contributors, I feel a tug-of-war between my work and home selves. In my case, it’s between the contemplative introversion I was born with and the sharp-tongued extroversion I’ve learned to perform at the office. And, surprise surprise, this fracture apparently worsens when you have kids. In “No Happy Harmony,” Elizabeth Corey argues that the pursuit of excellence and the delivery of care are two fundamentally different activities, and that it can be hard, maybe impossible, to truly do both simultaneously.
Above all else, the predominant theme of Double Bind is the reluctance – even among accomplished, feminist women – to identify as ambitious. Just about every contributor had something to say about the word and its connotations:
“It was only a word, but I kept dancing around it. If someone had asked, I might have said I was tenacious, or that I worked hard, or that I was diligent, or determined, but I never would have said I was ambitious. I had wanted things out of life, but simple desire doesn’t necessarily mean a person is ambitious. Ambition, it seemed, was something that other people possessed – men, mostly, or Hillary Clinton – but it wasn’t something that felt quite like me. But why not?”
“I have always been terrified of the word ambition. I find it distasteful, menacing, as though it was always pursued by its invisible compound partner “blind” – blind ambition. If someone asks me “Do you like him or her?” and I answer, “He or she is – ‘ambitious.’” I am making a polite backhanded insult.”
“The word ambition is built to cover some pretty wide territory, from insidious social climbing to nose-to-the-grindstone dedication to flights of artistic, or even capitalistic, vision.”
And, beyond being difficult, ambition is highly personal. In my favorite essay of the entire collection, “The Snarling Girl,” Elisa Albert writes:
“Trying to generalize about ambition is like comparing apples and oranges and bananas and flowers and weeds and dirt. Wanting to be first in your class is and is not like wanting a Ferrari is and is not like being the first in your family to go to college is and is not like wanting to get into Harvard/Iowa/Yaddo is and is not like wanting to summer on Martha’s Vineyard is and is not like wanting to run elbows with fancy folk is and is not like wanting to shatter a glass ceiling is and is not like wanting to write a lasting work of genius with which no one can quibble. Our contexts are not the same, our struggles are not the same, and so our rebellions and complacencies and conformities and compromises cannot be compared. But the fact remains: Whatever impresses you illuminates your ambition.”
Just as Little Fires Everywhere awakened me to the richness behind every suburban door, Double Bind has left me more attuned to the inner lives of women all around me. This collection made tangible what I suppose I’ve always known to be true – that every woman is clamoring, compromising, and charging forward in her own way (cue the mawkish metaphors about onion layers and Walt Whitman quotes about containing multitudes!). In terms of tenor, this book was more Joni Mitchell than the pump-up jam I was seeking, but it did deepen my determination to keep pushing. As Ayana Mathis puts it:
“How one’s life might turn out, even after heroic effort, is anyone’s guess. It’s like this: A door opens, perhaps just a fraction of an inch. There’s no telling if the door will open at all, or for whom, but if it does, you push push push until it is wide enough for you to squeeze through.”