[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_37

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, 1963

“How did you sweep the kitchen?” My grandmother was looking at me with her hands on her hips and a sulky look. She noticed that I only swept the parts of the floor free of objects and didn't pick up the dirt. Moving the chairs was too tiring, andbending down to collect dust was out of the question! It was undoubtedly better to hide all the dirt under the furniture, as I had seen Snow White's animals do in the cartoon when they cleaned the Seven Dwarves' house. My grandmother was furious.

"At ten years old, you still don't know how to use a broom," and then, looking at me grimly, "At your age, I had already been working for two years!". From her tone, it almost seemed that the times in which she grew up were better than the present and that today's children didn't learn much going to school.

"What will your mother-in-law think one day when she sees that you don't know how to keep the house clean?" she asked me. Then, seeing that I didn't answer, she added pompously: "She won't tell you anything! And do you know why? Because you won't have a mother-in-law! No one will marry you if you don't learn to be a good housewife!" This sentence, which was supposed to be the needle of my moral compass and the engine of my motivation to become the perfect housewife, had an enormous resonance in my life. Unfortunately for my grandmother, it was not as she had hoped.

This phrase, in all its musical variations (“If you don't learn to iron, no one will marry you,” “If you don't walk with your back straight, no one will marry you,” “If you say what you think, no one will marry you”), became the refrain of my childhood and the main reason why I developed a visceral hatred of marriage and life as a couple. A part of me, that day, in the kitchen, in front of my grandmother, made a solemn oath; of those oaths that last a lifetime, unlike promises on the altars.

"I will never get married," I said to myself. As I grew up, I remained faithful to this part of myself, even though I developed greater flexibility regarding my vision of life as a couple. Betty Friedan's book tells how American women of the 1950s and 1960s chose en masse to undertake life as housewives and mothers, ending up being less emancipated and less independent than the women of the previous generation. The writer explains very well how a series of media and television messages made this type of life, of care and domestic service, attractive.

When I read this book, I immediately thought of the Snow White cartoon, when the protagonist arrives atthe house of the Seven Dwarves and finds a degraded, dirty, messy, almost unlivable environment; she immediately sets about cleaning and tidying up the space, giving it what in everyday speech is still called a "feminine touch." What a terrifying message has been given to generations and generations of children: men are not capable of being independent in their very homes if there is no woman to care about cleaning their mouths and shoes. Fortunately for me, what I took from the cartoon was not my role as a maid and carer towards men but the awareness that men were incapable of doing even the simplest things.

I recently rewatched the Snow White cartoon, and seeing the squirrels joyfully pushing the dust under the carpet made me think of how, even at the time, I felt more like the tragic Shakespearean Richard III than the faint-hearted Disney Snow White: "My kitchen-dom! My kitchen-dom for a horse!" I screamed inside myself every time I had to help my grandmother clean, iron, or cook.

However, unlike Richard the Third, I found my horse, and unlike Snow White, it did not have a prince on it. Luckily for me, I left the kitchen behind, and I galloped away.