JUL - Double Bind

July review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: Double Bind: Women on Ambition ed. by Robin Romm, 2017. [essay collection category]

Double Bind: Women on Ambition is pretty self-explanatory as a collection title. Robin Romm has commissioned a series of essays from women in wide-ranging fields, from literature to butchery, Hollywood to dogsled racing. Romm starts with an intro that examines her impetus to collect these women's stories and what the word ambition meant to her personally. As a writer, clearly I resonated with the writer essays, but I was interestingly struck by some of the other ways in which I related, and some of the questions these essays raised in me.

I currently don't have my copy of this book on hand as I write, since I lent it to my mother--isn't that what you do with books about women? Lend them to the other women in your life?--and this writeup is long overdue so it is going to be a little more overview than specific, but I think I've got the important points jotted down. To begin at the beginning, this is an essay collection about ambition. What does ambition mean? Romm and her contributors talk about the difference between an ambitious man (seen as positive) and an ambitious woman (often seen as overbearing, out of place, unattractive), and there was another interesting thread about the word itself running through these essays. Many of the women asked the people in their lives if they thought the woman was ambitious; few claimed that word for themselves, citing discomfort with the aforementioned undesirable nature of an ambitious woman, impostor syndrome, and myriad other reasons.

A lot of the responses also dealt with the "have it all" mentality, the perennial question plaguing working moms and stay-at-home moms alike: how do career ambition and home life ambition coexist? These essays covered women with kids: women who adopted children, women who had children and left their careers, women who compromised and devoted a lot to their careers but still missed their children. My partner and I have talked about kids vaguely, in some future era when we're both done with our sports, talked about who would have them or if we would adopt, etc, but this book gave me a little pause. I guess I had painted standard children desire over my own thoughts without ever outright asking myself about those desires. Don't get me wrong, I still want kids, but I need to reexamine the hows and the whens and I am lucky to have a partner who is open and honest and supportive of those discussions.

Reading this book in the midst of my sports season made me question whether you can be ambitious in some areas of your life but not necessarily others. Can I strive for a top slot on the charter team but also resign myself to an under-paying job because it's easier to deal with at the moment? Can I be ambitious but lazy, so my ambitions never bear fruit because I don't allow myself enough time on them? Is there something self-sabotaging about that, something inherently misogynistic about a creeping doubt that maybe I should just be happy with what I have? Don't get too big for your britches, my dear, you might regret it. And the answer I came up with is, I don't know. I think that is the point of this essay collection too: no one really knows. It is the asking that is important, the self-analysis that is expected of women categorically more often than men, the constant weighing of our lives against various other shining stars or gutter flops. What does it mean to me? Well that's the question, now isn't it?