The philosopher Michela Marzano returns to the problem of female behavior again.
Women of my generation can’t do anything else! Many of them break. But it is believed that they have everything! Maybe it’s because they have “everything” that they don’t want to go anywhere else. And it is no coincidence that they often give up their positions in power – for example, did Louise Mensch, a member of the British Parliament, who resigned to devote herself to a small family, or Anne-Marie Slaughter, an adviser to Hillary Clinton, who recently put an end to her career . Why is this happening? Many commentators, explaining this wave of renunciations, once again remind us of the problem of the unstable balance between private and public life. I do not think so. The question is much more difficult.
Who argues, it is difficult for a woman to combine work and raising children. Despite the progress in relations between men and women, the latter still have to work “two-time”: barely returning from work, they are forced to do shopping, home, children … With the exception of a few happy exceptions. But that’s not the real problem with 40-year-old successful women dropping everything. It is rooted in what I would call the “perfection trap.” A trap that they have built for themselves that forces them into an all-or-nothing logical destruction: if I can no longer be the first in everything I do, it would be better to quit. That is, when they try to combine the incompatible – to be the best at work and at home at the same time – they break down because they cannot accept the simple fact that they cannot be the best everywhere and at all times.
Michela Marzano – Italian politician and philosopher, professor at the University of Paris V, regular contributor to the newspaper La Repubblica. Her research includes the concept of the body in contemporary culture.