Controversial women making controversial statements from another time

Yesterday, Barnard’s new campus news-monitors (which apparently are still welcoming the Class of 2015) proudly paraded a new happening on campus. On behalf of Newsweek, the Daily Beast published DSpar’s latest musings on “Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect.” Bwog’s Barnard brigadier Renée Kraiem writes…

Responding to perhaps equally controversial assertions in the media about whether or not women can and cannot “have it all,” DSpar’s answer is, most plainly, no—even if you’re strong,  bold and beautiful. The worst news, ladies, is that right now it’s all the (single, and these with a ring on it) ladies that are making it harder on themselves.

Indeed, rather than leaping with glee at the liberation that has befallen women since the 1960s, we are laboring instead under a double whammy of impossible a expectations…The result? We have become a generation desperate to be perfect wives, mothers, and professionals—Tiger Moms who prepare organic quinoa each evening after waltzing home from the IPO in our Manolo Blahnik heels. Even worse, we somehow believe that we need to do all of this at once, and without any help.

Is this you? Doesn’t matter, says DSpar, because the way to move forward is for everybody to do it together (aww).  Through what she refers to as “the bleak roster of numbers that tell this story,” DSpar has some answers for all of us.

So what, then, are we to do?…We must instead forge partnerships with those around us, and begin to dismantle the myth of solitary perfection.

To begin with, we need to acknowledge that biology matters—not that it determines everything, but that it’s one of those areas of life that probably shouldn’t be ignored.

And what about the ladies?

Rather than wishing [the differences between men and women] away, or pretending they don’t exist, we need to analyze them, understand them, and then talk to one another about how to create a world shaped by a women’s skills and interests and passions as much as by men’s.

Wish that DSpar could make those choices for you? There’s good news and bad news. She did, but only in that way where your mother told you you could stay out the night before your final, if that’s how you evaluate your priorities, and everything…

Today, women have choices that their grandmothers could not have imagined. The challenge lies in recognizing that having choices carries the responsibility to make them wisely, striving not for perfection or the ephemeral all, but for lives and loves that matter.

Women wanting choices via Wikimedia Commons