Oriana Fox interviews Jo Van Every, the sociologist and coach who wrote the book Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a wife. The research that informed the book was prompted by the kinds of personal questions that come from being disillusioned with ‘little girl’s dreams’ about love, marriage and family. Although the book was published in 1995, the research contained therein about anti-sexist living arrangements informed Van Every’s commitment to do feminism in her daily life, not just theorise about it. In other words, it’s been her durational project for the past 26 years! So Oriana is catching up with Van Every because she’s got some questions (not to mention disillusionment) of her own about living a feminist life. For example, does being financially dependent on a man render a woman a bad feminist? Must imbalances in earnings be made up for by doing a bigger share of domestic work? Perhaps most importantly, how can women value their labour when society doesn’t? And finally, can Jo's advice actually resolve the one fight that Oriana and her partner continue to have ad infinitum? Listen and find out the answers to these and many more questions because the personal is as political as ever.
Oriana Fox is an artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show.
Jo Van Every is a feminist sociologist; an academic writing coach; a parent (to a grown kid) and a partner to her unmarried spouse of thirty years.
Credits:
Would you like to see your name in the credits list? In a couple of short steps, you can make that happen by supporting this podcast via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/orianafox
Visit www.theoshow.live for regular updates or follow us on Instagram.
Oriana Fox interviews Jo Van Every, the sociologist and coach who wrote the book Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a wife. The research that informed the book was prompted by the kinds of personal questions that come from being disillusioned with ‘little girl’s dreams’ about love, marriage and family. Although the book was published in 1995, the research contained therein about anti-sexist living arrangements informed Van Every’s commitment to do feminism in her daily life, not just theorise about it. In other words, it’s been her durational project for the past 26 years! So Oriana is catching up with Van Every because she’s got some questions (not to mention disillusionment) of her own about living a feminist life. For example, does being financially dependent on a man render a woman a bad feminist? Must imbalances in earnings be made up for by doing a bigger share of domestic work? Perhaps most importantly, how can women value their labour when society doesn’t? And finally, can Jo's advice actually resolve the one fight that Oriana and her partner continue to have ad infinitum? Listen and find out the answers to these and many more questions because the personal is as political as ever.
Oriana Fox is an artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show.
Jo Van Every is a feminist sociologist; an academic writing coach; a parent (to a grown kid) and a partner to her unmarried spouse of thirty years.
Credits:
Would you like to see your name in the credits list? In a couple of short steps, you can make that happen by supporting this podcast via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/orianafox
Visit www.theoshow.live for regular updates or follow us on Instagram.
“Refusing to be a wife with sociologist and coach Jo Van Every (Part 1)”
Oriana Fox’s Multiple Os - Podcast Transcript
[Theme music]
Oriana Fox:
Hello, this is Oriana Fox. Thank you for tuning into Multiple Os, the spin-off podcast for my talk show The O Show. The O Show is a live performance piece that mines the conventions of daytime TV talk shows for all that they’re worth. It features artists and other experts who have little to no difficulty ’spilling the beans’ about their lives and opinions especially when they define norms and conventions. So if you’re interested in candid confessions non-conformity creativity and mental health you come to the right place!
[Theme music]
OF
Hello and welcome to Multiple Os. I’m your host Oriana. I’m starting off this episode with a confession. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support of my parents, specifically, or maybe perhaps most of all my father, as well as my partner. In spite of my mother’s outspoken feminist values, and both her and my stepmother having modelled financial independence, in some ways, I feel I was raised to depend on a man. I live in a society that rewards this kind of dependency. Yet I call myself a feminist. Is this hypocrisy on my part, or merely evidence of how challenging it is to lead a feminist life? Here to help me and I’m sure many of my listeners and facing this, or similar conundrums is a sociologist and coach, Jo Van Every her 1995 book called Heterosexual women changing the family: Refusing to be a wife addresses this very problem, not just in theory, but in practice. It looks at the lives strategies of a modest sample of individual women, couples, and families striving to do feminism in their personal and domestic lives, to assert that their experiences are not evidence of feminist alternatives, but instead are anti-sexist, which is all they could hope to achieve given their context. Jo’s book was prompted by personal questions, and I’m catching up with her because I’m interested in finding out which strategies he borrowed from her case studies, as she went on to pursue having her own anti-sexist living arrangement after writing the book. So this is in fact an opportunity that necessitated the passing of time. This has been a 30-year project durational. So dear listeners, if you were asking yourselves, why is our host talking about a book written in 1995 when it’s 2021?, you need to remember also that here on this podcast, we fly in the face of mainstream neoliberal values. There’s nothing worse than planned obsolescence if you ask me. Although I wish sexism was obsolete, but because it persists, we must persist. So here on Multiple Os, we’re interested in seeking out what aids our pursuits and living otherwise. And if that means revisiting research from 1995, then so be it. We’re interested in feminist intergenerational continuity, and tracking the often slow pace of change. Having stumbled upon Jo’s book during my doctoral studies, as one used to do, by facing a physical stack in the library, as opposed to via algorithmic recommendations, I looked her up to see what else she had written, only to find that her career had taken a twist, and she ended up becoming a coach to academics. She helps them pursue their writing and other career-enhancing or diverting projects. Being a para-academic myself and facing the dilemmas and challenges they face. I took a mental note that I might pursue her services one day. That day has finally come! Not that I’m using my podcast as a cheeky way to get free coaching. But not only do I want to know how to assess and tweak the anti-sexist status of my own domestic life, I’m also reassessing the direction of my career, as no doubt many of you, my dear listeners are these days. So thank you so much, Jo Van Every for joining me today.
Jo Van Every
Thank you for having me, I have to say that you are not the first person to say that they’ve read my book in the last couple of years. And it sort of, I guess I’d say I am shocked because we do live in a society where we assume that this stuff written in 1995 is no longer relevant, or that people just don’t, you know, or out of date, or they just don’t come across it. Right? And as somebody who is a coach to academics and works on writing, I know that’s like a real fear. People feel like but I’m going to write this and then if people don’t read it right away, then it’s disappeared. And so, in one sense, I’m surprised, and on the other, I’m sort of like happy that even after all this time people still come across it in physical stacks in libraries and read it and find it useful.
Oriana Fox
Well, it’s funny, I can’t like, I don’t, I can’t pinpoint a date, frustratingly, when I read it, because I think it might have been more than a couple years ago, I think it might have been, I have this vague memory of I might have been like either pregnant or just had my second child like so 2014/15-ish. And so I reread the book, very, you know, like in the last week to, you know, refresh my memory.
JVE
And I don’t know when the other person had read it either. But it was I did a workshop, an in-person workshop a couple years ago, and one of the people that signed up said she had read my book, she was also a sociologist. And she worked on family so it was sort of directly relevant to what she did, but it still was a little bit, you know, I haven’t, I left academia in 2002 and so and I hadn’t, you know, I don’t I think, the last thing I published came out in 2000, maybe 2001. So I haven’t published anything in well..
OF
You published these books?
JVE
And well, although I have, yes, I have published them, I have self-published in the last, since 2016, a series of books that are about helping academics with their writing and publishing and are kind of some of the advice that I wish I had had when I was an early career researcher.
OF
I am benefiting from them greatly. I must say, Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been looking, I looked at your website as well, in preparation for today. And I started trying to put into practice at least the 15 minutes a day of writing. And that was super helpful. And yeah, and trying to figure out when I can get more time and also whether full days are helpful, and all those sorts of things and things I’m thinking about. But yeah, it’s interesting, because I’ve been trying to, you wrote your, you published your book, on January 5, notably, that’s my birthday, in 1995, which was only like six months after, I feel like it was really shortly after you finished your PhD. It was such a quick turnaround.
JVE
It was a quick turnaround. And I can and I think and that was unusual, I didn’t do a lot of revision of the thesis, I think the crucial thing for your listeners, I wanted the subtitle to be the title, but the publisher wouldn’t let me because it doesn’t work well in database searches. Not all database searches, at least in 1995, would pick out, right, and subtitle. So all the good keywords needed to be in the main title.
OF
I must say I always think of the title as being Refusing to be a wife, as opposed to the other title, I think of it that way, I do.
JVE
Yes I do too. And I have, and my partner and I, although we have now been together for 30 years. We are not married and whenever somebody refers to me as his wife, he tends to remind people, that I wrote a book with that title. But one of, at least one of the participants in the study got a little bit offended by the title, because they were married and that did seem important to him. But the crucial thing is that in the original, in the conceptual stuff in the beginning, it kind of lays out what how I’m using that term. And I’m using it as something more than just being married in a sort of legal or whatever sense. It’s more about a particular cultural expectation of what wives do, and of marriage as an institution that’s kind of based in inequality. And I think a lot of people have done a lot of work to try and redefine it as a partnership and many people do that successfully. And they feel like marriage can do that. But what I was looking at was more a theoretical perspective drawing on Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard’s work about how relations of power are kind of built into the institution. And that was, you know, so it was many of these people in my study were married, some of them were not, but they were still kind of refusing to be a wife in that sense.
OF
Yeah. And then you start the book with this kind of confession, and well, not confession. But you, you started off by saying how you had this, when you were 18, you imagine that your future entailed getting married and giving up your job or career to raise your children and that your roommate at the time said that you had, that they were “little girls dreams”. So I just wondering what happened to your “little girl’s dreams”? And yeah, and also yeah, if you could tell us like kind of potted history of your career and relationship between your career and your personal life. If that’s ok?
JVE
That particular anecdote, like I remember that. And I think part of that was about, you know, that stage of life where you’re moving from being heavily influenced by your parents ideas of who you might become, and then going to university and meeting people who had parents with different ideas. So my mom had a very successful career before she met my dad and had us, but she didn’t always talk a lot about that. And I think for her, she felt like it was important to stay home with her kids. And so she gave up her job when she was pregnant with me and she never went back to work until I was about 11 or 12.
OF
Wow.
JVE
And in the end, she ended up working for my father, who at that point owned his own business. So it was partly, you know, coming out of a situation in which and also like, in hindsight, I can see that for my mom, there was also a lot of things associated with class in relation to that, although we don’t call it that because we’re Canadian and we pretend that class doesn’t matter. My mother will say that class isn’t important here, that’s the difference between being Canadian being English, my grandfather was English. And that’s not quite true. But I think there’s a lot of things tied up in that, and that her aspirations for me were very much about a particular model of middle-class femininity, which through the course of my undergraduate degree, I realised I really didn’t want. So I think that was kind of what the question that then started, you know, the things I had been reading, the kind of feminist stuff I was reading, the things I was thinking about, the things I was dissatisfied with, that kind of created that research question. And the reason that I went for anti-sexist is, so I kind of think of the question as at that time, so this was the mid while I started my PhD in 1989. So you know, in the mid 80s, a lot of the feminist work on family was really about critical, was critical of the family in ways that I accept, right. And the really dominant sort of mode of refusal was the sort of choice to be lesbian, and the idea of lesbian separatism, which I still find many things very attractive about that political position. And it just really struck me though, as a question for those who for whom, that wasn’t gonna work, which is, let’s face it, quite a lot of us. So do you either just give up on the idea that you can reform this relationship? Or is there a way where you can kind of transform what it means to be family? And so the question of the research and the book is really less about measuring, is this anti-sexist against some measure of have I ticked enough boxes, and more about if these people describe their own relationships as anti-sexist, what did they mean by that? And what could we learn from about, like, what would it mean to try and do family differently? And at the time, I think there was there were a lot of different. There were a few different studies, there was one Australian study, and seriously, it was 30 years ago, I forget the name of the author or that had framed her question precisely in that way, doing things differently. I know at the time, I met another graduate student scholar called Andrea Doucet, she was studying at that time at Cambridge, who was looking more specifically at housework and divisions of labour and specifically about doing that differently, or dividing that more equally. And she’s been working in that all the way through to now. I’m still in touch with her 30 years later, and she’s, her, a lot of her research has focused on men specifically and what, you know, what this sort of feminist moment means for men and families. And she published a book several years ago called Do men mother, or maybe Can men mother. And I think she’s recently come out with a second edition of that, you know, drawing on a lot of research she’d done with men whose female partners where they’re the primary breadwinner, gay men who were fathers, single father, like a whole bunch, she’s done a lot of fatherhood stuff, and thought through a lot of those issues. So there were a lot of people kind of try to figure out not just like, we kind of sidestep the question of well, why is it the way it is and sort of looking at can we make I...
OF
Yeah, I like in the book how you say there’s a lot of disagreement within the theory within feminist theory. And it’s like, well, why don’t we just see what we can actually do in real life, as opposed to in theory.
JVE
And I have to say that, if I was to say any lessons I learned from it, I would say one of the things is that doing those interviews was really simple on my part. Mostly I could just turn the tape recorder on, and it was a tape recorder. I was doing those interviews in 1991, I guess so like, exactly 30 years ago, I would just turn the tape recorder on and sort of get people started. And mostly all I had to do was pay attention to when I had to flip the tape over because you know, and the reason for that afterwards, I thought about it. And one of the reasons for that is that one thing about the people that I interviewed is that they talked about these issues all the time. And I think that’s crucial, right? It’s that you can’t just set it and forget it. It’s not like, oh, we’re married, and we make some decisions when we first get together about how things are going to be and then that’s just how things are in our relationship because things change all the time, including how we want things to be.
OF
Yeah.
JVE
And so I think what was really interesting was that all of these people, because they were consciously trying to do this in a way that was going to in some way, either, you know, change things, either for themselves or for their children, because for some of them, that was the motivation, even though you know, it’d be easier for me to do this, they have to see that men can also do these things where they need to see that women can also do these things. So it wasn’t everybody, but it was a lot of them. But because they were consciously trying to do that, it meant that they kind of reviewed and adjusted all the time. And so when I came to interview them, it was just like, oh, you want to hear about that. So we talk about this all the time, right. The other thing that made it really hard to listen to the tapes is that they almost always, and usually the man, baked things for me. Listening to the interview tapes always made me really hungry, because I could remember the food that they’d given to me. [Laughs] But um, so that was, you know, that was interesting about it, I think that thing about talking about it and being willing for it to be imperfect and then to like, adjust as you go along. Seemed like a big thing.
OF
I don’t know, with my relationship, I feel like we have, you know, we only have one fight and that’s the same fight over and over. It doesn’t change. Our lives don’t or haven’t changed that much in the 10 years we’ve been together, that it would evolve.
JVE
Yeah, there’s that too. I mean, I do have this very vivid memory as well of when I was working on the chapter about, there’s one chapter about housework, specifically. So there’s a chapter about housework. And there’s a chapter about mothering. And there’s a chapter about, there’s the thing about money, and then I and..
OF
I think one is about being a wife.
JVE
It might have been the thing about marriage.
OF
Yeah, marriage.
JoVE
Yeah. But um, and whether or not you do it, and what that means in relation to this. But when I was working on the chapter about housework, specifically, I remember having a meeting with my supervisor where I must have been really stuck, and not making progress. And we were having a conversation. I’m like, Oh, you know, I’m telling her what’s going on. And at some point, she like, this little light goes on in her head, and she looks at me, and she says, oh, you’re trying to live this, aren’t you? And I have to say that the quality of arguments you can have with your partner about the housework is sort of, can go way up a notch if you’re reading a lot of theory about it.
OF
[Laughs] I know, I know. Exactly.
JVE
It’s not just about whether you did it, it’s like did you think about it? And did you? There’s all of that. Yeah, there is all of that. But it’s also really easy to get into just patterns. So our pattern earlier on, was that we, um, we can’t cook together, because our style is very different. But we would alternate, we would each do about equal amounts of cooking dinner, that’s good. And only when I got pregnant, I had in the first three months of my pregnancy, I just felt nauseous all the time, like all day, not just, I mean all the time. And so he kind of took over doing all the cooking at that point. And then of course, I had a baby and I was you know, breastfeeding a baby and there was all that going on. So he just kept doing all the cooking and then at some point, I’m like, you do all the cooking now. He’s like, yeah, but it’s okay. And I mean at the moment even though our baby is now almost 24 years old and does not live with us, you know, and, and I’m, you know, I’m home all the time, like I could do more cooking, but mostly he really enjoys cooking. And he treats it as a form of creative rest. So like, for me, if I’ve had a really busy day, and I get to the end of the day, the last thing I really want to do is cook dinner. Actually, the last thing I really want to do is make another decision. Decision fatigue is totally a thing. And that’s the last thing I want to do. And so making decision about what to eat, and then actually doing the work to cook it and all that just feels like I mean, I can do it, but it feels like this huge chore. Whereas for him, he loves nothing better than to like, oh, I finished work, now I’m gonna, like look in the fridge, see what we have, and create some kind of meal. Right, and he makes beautiful food and he’s a great cook. And he’ll be like, and you know, it’s taken because he likes to do it at the last minute like that I’ve kind of had to push him towards, you need to. If you want to use meat, you need to think about it earlier in the day and take it out of the freezer. But apart so he’s now better at that and does think about earlier in the day. Plus, he loves to garden and he particularly loves to grow vegetables. So when he’s not here, and I have to cook for myself, like you know, it isn’t even like looking. I mean, in the winter, you look in the fridge. But if it’s not winter, there’s no vegetables in the fridge, the vegetables are in the garden. So you not only have to make a decision, you actually have to go outside, you have to see what, you can remember wherever they, like, I mean, the level of thinking that goes on. Just feel anyway, he’s very happy doing that. So, you know, that’s kind of what we do now is you know, that’s kind of become the thing, and every once in a while I feel guilty about it. And then mostly I don’t.
OF
What about cleaning? Do you make up for it and other ways, like when cleaning or something?
JVE
We both have very low standards.
OF
Yeah, I like that in the book you mention low standards.
JVE
And it’s January, we now have a cleaner again, which we have had at various points, including when I had a baby, I thought oh, somebody is gonna, if I have a baby, then I need to care about how clean the carpet is, so I better get somebody else in here to do that. It’s just not gonna happen all that. Well, no, early on. I offered to do all the laundry if I never had to go to a grocery store again. So...
OF
Wow.
JVE
Not only does he like cooking, he loves going food shopping. Can you see why we’re still together after 30 years? So yeah, so basically, I am now really incompetent in a grocery store, because I go to them so infrequently. And now that you can shop online, even if he leaves town on business, when we used to do that, he can still do the groceries for me and I just have to be in when they arrive. And in exchange for that I
do all the laundry, which I don’t mind at all. I don’t mind laundry, it doesn’t bother me.
OF
And what about with childcare when you’re, when your child was young, younger and dependent on you?
JVE
So one of the decisions I made was to use a nursery in the neighbourhood we lived in rather than to use one at work. Like I didn’t even apply for a place at the one at work, because we didn’t work at the same institution. And I really felt like so I feel really conflicted about workplace childcare as a feminist, because I think it’s a good a good thing I think more workplaces should offer it. I think it makes a big difference to a lot of workers who are parents and it shouldn’t just be women that it should be something that fathers yeah as well. And and it means that and especially if you are in a job where you go into the office every day, I think workplace childcare is probably a really good option for a lot of people. At that time, we were both academics, which means We didn’t go into the office every day, we maybe went in, you know, three or four days a week, but work could work from home. And, and he certainly did because he was commuting. So the choice we made, was to use a nursery in the neighbourhood. Because then it wouldn’t just default to being my job, right, to pick her up.
OF
So your child, my child is a her?
JVE
Yes, my child is a her.
OF
And you have just one child?
JVE
Just one child. We had conversations about having another one, but he slept so badly after she was born, that it came down to, I’ve just kind of got over the insomnia and depression and I don’t want to go through that again. So that, you know, didn’t happen. And I also when she was young, there were a couple of times when I actually went and did things like I mean, I, I had a steady leave when she was a year and a half old. And I arranged to be a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver for a month.
OF
Wow.
JVE
And just went
OF
was that hard?
JVE
It wasn’t really. I mean, clearly, she was at home, she went to nursery, she had a dad, it was one of those things, right. And, and one of the things I figured out while I was there is that most of the time, it wasn’t hard, because I wasn’t in places where I expected her to be like she’d never been in the apartment I was living in. When I was at work, I mean, she was never at work with me. So when I was like, there was an office at the, in the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies that I could use. And so when I was in there working like, well, I wouldn’t, why, I mean, I had a picture of her on my desk. The times I would miss her is say on the weekend when I go for walks, go into town do fun things in, Vancouver has a lot of like it’s on an inlet, ao it has beaches that are kind of in the city with like a lot of parkland. And so if I was in those spaces on the weekend, and you would see other families with little kids, then I’d be like, oh, she would really love this or whatever. Yeah, but apart from that, not really. And one of the other visiting scholars that was in that Centre at the same time was from China. She was there for a whole year and it left her eight-year-old back in China. And I remember she and I had had a conversation about how, how often other women scholars in the Institute, which was a centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, so they were all women who mainly identified as feminists, that one of the first things they would ask was, oh, what’s happening with your daughter? And where’s your daughter? And how right, you know, how could you leave her? And I think that was really that’s one of the things that was really interesting about the work that I did.
OF
Do you think if you were a man, they would have asked that question? Would they have asked?
JVE
Would they have asked the question? I have no idea, but also that it’s still so ingrained, even amongst feminists. I mean, I regularly had the experience of giving a paper about my research, and having to, in an academic audience, and having someone in the audience get really angry with me.
OF
Really?
JVE
Yeah. So, you know, once I gave a seminar paper, and like, about some of that housework stuff, and one of them, one of my women colleagues in the audience stood up and like, I still remember this almost word for word, even though it was probably 25 years ago, she says, ‘What kind of marriage what I have, if I counted every time my husband did the dishes?’ And, you know, it was a small place, I knew who her husband was.
OF
Right.
JVE
I just kind of felt like, he’s a bit of a shit. But I just like, and also, you know, even while I was doing my PhD, I remember other women, academics, like who were in the department like the actual other like lecturers and stuff and who were feminists doing feminist work. And when they chat to me about my work, they’d be like, oh, well, that’s all very nice to hear, but what you realise, what you learn when you get a bit older is that men just aren’t very good at this stuff. And I’m like, so what was interesting for me, because I’m the sort of sociologist that then says, how is it that somebody who identifies as a socialist and a feminist comes out with this very sort of essentialist explanation of why their husband doesn’t look after their kid, which is basically what they were telling me?
OF
Right.
JVE
And I think part of it is the is that the central contradiction of what we’re both trying to do is that we’re trying to make individual choices about living a feminist life in inside a structure that makes that hard.
OF
Yeah.
JVE
Right? And that, you know, it isn’t as simple as saying, I’m not going to stay with this guy, if he doesn’t do the dishes, or if he, right? lt’s that we all make some of those decisions, right, that we decide that on the balance we would rather be in this relationship than not. And at some point, we decide we’re gonna put up with something that kind of annoys us and feels like it contradicts our feminist principles. Right?
OF
Yeah. [Laughs]
JVE
I don’t want to count how many how many times he does the dishes or, and the thing I think that I find disappointing is the way we try to universalize that and erase the fact that we did make a choice.
OF
What do you mean by universalise? What do you mean?
JVE
Well, so when, when someone says to me, what you’ll learn when you get a bit older is that men just aren’t very good at that. Right? So she’s not saying, he didn’t do that and I decided to stay in the relationship anyway, and that it wasn’t a deal breaker. She’s saying, I didn’t really have a choice, men aren’t any good at that. Right? Like, so that’s, that’s the part, and I think that comes back to what, and I won’t be able to quote Marx very well, either, because, you know, but you know, the thing about doing things in circumstances that aren’t of your own choosing. That quote, right, which I’m pretty sure is Marx. The thing about doing things in circumstances that aren’t of your, anyway.
OF
I don’t know, we’ll look it up later, put it in the show notes.
JVE
But the person that told me that men aren’t really good at that sort of stuff would have been able to quote that..And so I think that’s. The thing is that I’m not the kind of person that’s that, oh, well, we all have choices, and you’ve made these choices. And therefore, you know, maybe you made bad choices, you could have made other choices. I just sort of feel like, on the one hand, yes, we do have choices, but we don’t always have the choices we want.
OF
That’s right. Yeah.
JVE
Right. And so given the choices we have, we do make choices. And so some women who are feminists, and who would really have liked to have a relationship that was more equal or less, you know, this or that, or, you know, or who would... Like to go back to the thing you said in the intro, right? You’re here because of your dad and your partner, partly financially supporting you. And so did mine, right, my dad supported me through my education. My partner and I have both worked, but there are times right, like, in between my PhD and getting my first job and, and then when I decided to do this freelance thing, we were in a financial position where we didn’t need two full-time professional incomes. And where I could, right? And then I decided to homeschool my kid and like all of that thing, right? And so there was a point when she was a teenager where I’m like, I never set out to be a stay at home mom because I didn’t. I mean, she went back to, she went, she started going to nursery before I went back to work. And at one point I went to, I negotiated down to a four-day week and still kept her full time, right? Like, sometimes I didn’t take her on the fifth day, but mostly it was like, I know she goes to nursery full time. So I never really wanted to be a full-time mom. It wasn’t like, I was back home and I, no shade on people who do, but it just wasn’t what I wanted. Right. But you know, at some point I did become this person who was kind of working part time from home and homeschooling my kid and I looked like one of those kind of moms, but and a lot of the other homeschooling moms were like that. Even when you avoid all the evangelical fundamentalists who I mostly did because we have nothing in common. Mostly I hung out with this sorta hippyish homeschooling moms. But even then a lot of those were women were like, oh, I don’t want to send my kid away. And I’m like, I don’t have any problem with that. It’s just that school wasn’t doing it for her. She was really, she came home one day when she was eight and said, can I stay home tomorrow and do harder work with you? I’m like, oh, well, something is wrong there. So, you know, so there are times when I have been financially dependent. All of our money is together, but it hasn’t felt weird, but you know, that’s a choice that I might have said I would never make and at some point that I probably wouldn’t have made, but then there was a point where it was like this feels like it isn’t really a threat to my independence or whatever. So I’m going to go with it. And that’s a privilege, because not everybody has that choice. But you know, given the choices you have, we all make choices that feel like, okay, I think this is the thing we’re going to do now.
OF
Yeah. So yeah, going back to something you said about husbands and I don’t know, choosing where and I don’t know, you, I was wondering whether you like, did you have like a list of qualities you were looking for in a partner? Or was it just like?
JVE
No, in fact, although we have had to enter this information in on immigration forums in more than one country, we do not have an anniversary because we cannot agree on when this relationship started as. So it’s not like, so he had had a relationship when he was an undergrad. So we met at Essex, we were both PhD students, he started a year after I did, he had been in a relationship when he was an undergraduate that had been very serious, they had been engaged, it had ended, he was really cut up about it, he was not looking to be in another relationship. I was in the middle of this whole exploring, you know what, blah, blah, blogs, learning stuff about my sexuality, all kinds of other things, I wasn’t really looking for a relationship. So at what point whatever it is we had became this relationship, it happened sometime in 1991. Like I can put a date on it that I’m reasonably confident if anybody from the home office is listening. [Laughs] It’s true, I can say when we moved in together, but you know, it wasn’t ‘big L’ living together when we started. At some point, it did turn into that. But like, nobody remembers a date. So one of the consequences of that is my daughter now pays attention to a load of dates, when she gets into a new relationship, even if she doesn’t have any expectations for it to go anywhere, just in case because she doesn’t want to be the kind of person like her parents who doesn’t have an anniversary.
OF
That’s so funny.
JVE
[Laughs] I know, when she told me that, I was like, What? And she goes, well, I don’t want to have not have an anniversary, like you guys don’t have an anniversary. And I’m like, yeah, it really does do any harm. But she’s like, I would like to have an anniversary to celebrate if I end up in a nice relationship. So I just keep track at the beginning, just in case.
OF
It’s nice, that’s fun. Yeah, yeah, with my partner, it’s really easy because we pretty much got together like, from our first date, like I moved in, like two days later or something like that.
JVE
So you’re like the stereotypical lesbian ,right? After the first date you showed up with a U-haul?
OF
Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. We spoke on the phone. And then like we, a week later, we had a date. And then it was like, two days later, I moved in. It was kind of ridiculous. And then like, within a year, I had my son so or something like that. I tried to, I think I even fictionalised the, for a while, I think I was like, no, we met a year earlier. And I looked back at the emails, I was like, actually, I made that up.
JVE
And see for us it didn’t like I don’t even know, like, did we have dates? I mean, if I think about it really hard, I can. But we did like one time we did go on a date. I remember we went to see Goodfellas and that almost like sunk the whole thing, right? Because I really liked it, but he would have walked out and I really hated it, like really hated it. And then so like, one of the issues is because that was like the first movie we ever went to together, like we never went to movies for like a decade, like a long time that it just never came up. And even now, it’s like when you’re thinking about what are we going to watch on Netflix or whatever, it’s just this whole, like, finding something we’re both going to like it’s going to be...
OF
Funny.
JVE
So the Canadian immigration forms are much more detailed than the British ones. But yeah, so you know, when asked those kinds of questions, we can come up, like we have a good enough shared story about how it started. But because it started that we were all kind of hanging out in the same group of friends and we lived in the same direction of campus. So, when the bar, when the student union bar shut and we needed to walk home, like he walked me home, right, yeah. It’s kind of how that started. And then at what point did it become something else like is sort of unclear and also happened in stages that were, you know, of, of partly that were about ‘is this the kind of relationship I want or not?’. But yeah so his first job was in Scotland and we were still living in Colchester and I was teaching at the University of East London one course blah, blah, blah. So he moved and then I just had this real thing about, do I want to follow him? Do I want to? Right?
OF
Yeah.
JVE
Like, you know, we’ve been in this relationship for a couple years, do I want to be dependent on him? Do I want to follow him? Right? And I remember one of the guys that I was co teaching a course at Southbank with at the time was like, feminists, they’re always asking these, you know, those kind of things. But for me, that was really important. And yeah, so I didn’t have a checklist of what I was looking for in a partner, because I wasn’t really looking for anything. I didn’t even know if I was looking for a partner.
OF
Right? I see. So it sounds as if like, the kind of anti-sexist ways in which you you live with him are dictated in a way by his preferences for activities just as much as anything, any feminist politics. Like, it’s like, oh, he likes to cook, he likes to garden, so, I don’t have to do those things.
JVE
If he didn’t like to garden, nobody would garden. Right?
OF
Right.
JVE
And we would have bought very different houses, as opposed to looking at every house in a sort of, is there a place for him to grow vegetables kind of way. Right? Like, that’s more about what kind of a house you need. But also, I think the other thing is that I don’t think I would have been in this relationship, although I didn’t have a tick list, I don’t think I would have been in this relationship if he wasn’t committed to those kind of feminist points, right.
OF
There you go.
JVE
Right. But then, you know, you kind of combine that with, you know, things slide and then you’re like, actually, I’m not really upset about the fact that I’m doing all the cooking. I’m like, okay, and so, you know, but that’s, that’s great. Like, I don’t have to do it, just do it to tick a bunch of boxes. But we do, yeah, so we can talk about, you know, what’s going on there, you know. So, yeah, that’s part of it, is that it’s more of a kind of fundamental, you know, sharing a bunch of values rather than trying to make something happen. Does that make any sense?
OF
Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Hearing about your situation, like, just makes me think how horribly, you know, I don’t know, that’s not the right word, my own living arrangement is, but just because, well, I think it’s it has to do with like, a lack of financial or not in the lack of independence, I have financial independence, but the fact that he earns so much more money than I do, necessarily creates this imbalance in our relationship, like, and yeah, I can’t remember how I phrased it? I think I found a way of phrasing it in my, in my document to you. Oh, yeah. So you talk about, yeah, the impact of lack of opportunity employment outside the home influencing women historically, such that becoming a wife and mother seemed for many middle class women to be the only viable pursuit. And these days work is more and more precarious.
JVE
Yes.
OF
And also, some theorists even say that all work is feminised. So in almost all fields were expected to have these portfolio careers rather than a job for life. And in my own respective careers of like, academic and artist, that are ‘prestige fields’ where the supply exceeds demand, so that I do loads of work without pay, such as this podcast, for example. And, yeah, I and because of that, you know, like, I feel like I will never earn as much money as he will and we will always have this kind of imbalance in our relationship, which I guess I ‘earn my keep’ in these other ways, like these domestic ways.
JVE
Right? Yeah. So, one of the things I mean, that’s a common narrative about what creates the inequality. But when we talk about, like, the choices you have, right, like, you feel like I don’t have that many choices, because this is like these, I can’t, I need to earn some money. And these are the ways I earn money and then involves right blah, blah, blah, and they’re kind of precarious and hard and whatever. But we tend not to look at, and we, as a society, we tend to value that full-time, well-paid job and going up the ladder, whatever. If one person in the relationship has it, it almost becomes this kind of like, oh, well, why would they give that up? And so I think one of the questions that I have is, well, why wouldn’t they? Right?
OF
[Laughs]
JVE
If they’re also committed to this being a more equal relationship and they recognise that you know, the fact that they earn more than you has nothing to do with the inherent value of the work they do. It’s got to do with a whole set of things about capitalism and, you know, public funding or you know, how we value the arts or whatever. So it’s almost like not just, you know, it’s like, if you, if the two of you value the work that you do, the art and the teaching and stuff as much, then just the fact that the institutions that pay you don’t, doesn’t mean necessarily that, you know. Like that, I don’t know, like, I just kind of feel like I’m not saying you should do it a different way, but I’m saying you can totally have a conversation about that. I mean, I’ve gone and asked for like a four-day week. Right? And yes, I’m willing to take less pay. And in a four-day week, I’m a huge fan of the four-day week, by the way, I’ve done this in two different jobs. So you know, if you’ve got a full-time job, the four-day week, is actually pretty awesome in terms of you still have enough time at work to be able to do the kind of stuff you can do and a full-time job. And you also...
OF
You free up that day for other things.
JVE
And actually the amount of income you lose, when like most of the time like unless you’re starting off on the breadline, right, like it just kind of. Right? And yeah, and so it’s kind of like, you know, it does make, you know, it can make a significant difference in how much time and energy and everything else you have for this stuff outside of work. Right. And so the idea that, oh, well, I have to make all those compromises because I’m in the lower-paid job. It’s like, well, why isn’t and that was one of the things I think about the people I interviewed for my PhD work like 30 years ago is that many of those people had chosen to make compromises around work and income, like yeah, and yes, they had choices, but they had chosen and both of them had chosen like men had chosen to work half time, or to stay home and look after their kids so that their partner could pursue her goals or, or they chose to both work part-time so that they could completely share everything.
OF
Yeah, every one of the men were not that wedded to themselves, their identity was not wedded to being a worker or their career.
JVE
I think that’s probably true. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is where the work that, you know, I mentioned earlier, by Andrea Doucet, who I met when we were both doing sort of related things as PhD students, has gone on and done a lot more work about the men and looking at the kinds of men that choose fatherhood or, and looking at relationships in which women are breadwinners and that kind of thing. And, you know, because it is interesting, right. And I noticed on Twitter last week, and I will not because it was Twitter, and I don’t take notes and memory, I have no idea who this was. An academic in London, maybe at a London institution? So she had an article coming out, but she also had like a little video about it. But she did a little summary in a Twitter thread and it was about research on unemployment, looking at both men and women who were unemployed. And I think they were probably professional couples, so we’re not talking about lower-paid workers, but people who have, and one of the things the research shows which she summarised is that when men become unemployed, both partners treat that as really important. And his job was really important, he really needs to get another job, he ends up having space and time, and distraction-free to look for work as if that was his job. And when women become unemployed, in dual-career professional couples, that is not the case, it ends up being considered, oh, well, you’re not employed. So you can now do all this work. It’s like so when he’s unemployed, instead of saying oh, you’re available, look after the kids, because I’m earning all the money now, or whatever, it’s like, no, oh, no, you need to be saved from that work, so that you can find more work. Whereas, right?
OF
Right, I noticed that in the book. It was, there was some statistic about like men who are unemployed do less housework than those who are employed. And I found that shocking.
JVE
Right? So when I saw this thing, like last week, I’m like, here we are 30 years later, I think one of the questions you asked me by email is like, how much has changed? It’s like 30 years later and I’m like, Lydia Morris was finding that back in the 80s. Right? And we’re still finding that now. And I don’t think it’s true of everyone. But I think one of the things is the work that I read around how couples organise their money. There was one study I remember reading, it was from the States and it was dual-career corporate couples, so not just middle-class professionals, but people earning a lot of money. And she looked at how they organise their household finances, and when they pooled their money together. Right. They tended to still in their heads, treat his money as paying the mortgage and the bills and all that kind of stuff, and her money as paying for the childcare and things. Whereas when people kept their money separate, right, then they had joint funds that were for specific joint things and then childcare was in the joint pot not coming. When all the money was together, childcare came from her salary, even though on paper.
OF
It makes no sense.
JVE
It does, though, because the thing is, it isn’t about the money, it isn’t about the money in your family, either. Right? It’s about you, having internalised this idea that because he earns more, you should maybe do more of other things to kind of make up for that, as opposed to having a conversation about whether it even matters to him.
OF
Yeah, no, we have this conversation, Jo. We have this conversation. This is the one argument we have is based on this inequality. And I feel like actually, since lockdown, we had a kind of breakthrough with it, where he, like you said, I have all these theoretical arguments to back it up, you know, it’s just like, if you were single, you’d have to pay for a housekeeper and this and that, and, you know, and all this extra child care. And, and yes, I earn less money, but part of that is that I want to you know, I’m able to pick up my children from school like I’m the one that does that primarily, although actually today he’s going to be doing that today because I’m talking to you. But yeah, and I have a job that’s really close by, I maybe couldn’t get a better like more prestigious, more well paid academic position that I’d have to travel to, but it won’t be worth it because I then have to pay all this money to somebody else to pick them up because he wouldn’t pick them up. because he’d be too busy with his own job anyway.
JVE
And I thing that’s the thing, it’s about your values, right? Is it more important that we’re earning more money? Or is it more important that we’re getting to spend time with our kids? And I think this is a contradiction that feminists who want and have children have been struggling with for longer than I have. Right? Like.
OF
Yeah.
JVE
You know, I mean, I’ve been chatting to somebody the other day, who now has grandchildren, and she’s like, this has been the thing like since and you know, how long? So I think how to be a feminist mother is an even bigger question, really. But it’s also like, how do we really value those relationships, even in a society where we value right, like, and so for you, like, that’s what I mean about making choices, like you’re like, sometimes it feels like, wow, I don’t have this much money, blah, blah, blah. But it’s also you’ve kind of chosen that right?
OF
I’ve totally chosen that.
JVE
You’ve said my kids are more important, right? I chose to have kids, and I really love my kids and this is what’s going on.
OF
And part of the reason I have so little money, though, is that I chose to be an artist, you know, the number one reason why I don’t make much money is like, I chose this. And I chose a particular way of making art that doesn’t make money. You know, it’s just like...
JVE
Exactly, but does art make you happy? And does art make some kind of contribution to the world that you find valuable and meaningful?
OF
Yeah, all those things are true, I can answer all those things in the affirmative.
JVE
And like, do you really want to be earning a lot? Or would earning a lot of money doing something that didn’t make you happy? And or didn’t do meaningful things in the world? With that, like, Yeah, and I mean, like, that’s often sometimes the choice, right?
OF
I know. Yeah, that’s what I always say to him. It’s like, well, you know, when he when he gripes about him making more money than me, or whatever, as like a reason for why I should do something. I’m just like, if I made more, I’m always saying like, what would be the consequence of me making more money? It would just be you know, it, like we could go out to dinner more or something like, what would the benefit be? It’s like, we’d be like, more upper middle class than middle class. I mean, like, it didn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference to our life that’s meaningful. And yeah, I’d much rather like yeah, be able to pursue my work. But I guess I just worry about like, the longer, the long game, though. I’m just interested in pensions.
JVE
Okay. So when we were living in Canada, where there is a system a little bit like the US where there are pension funds, where you have a limit you can put into them, and then you don’t pay income tax in the year you earn it and you pay the tax when you draw it. Anyway, in Canada, they have what are called Registered Retirement Savings plans. Now, because he didn’t leave academia, he also had an occupational pension still does, whatever’s going on with the USS, he still is, right. So he has a pension from work, which kind of reduced his ability to pay into that, but also reduced his feeling that he really like needed to do extra pension savings. But I was working freelance all this kind of stuff, I had like a piddling pension from my seven years of academic labour paying into USS, what we ended up doing was like, you could get what’s called a spousal RSP. You don’t have to be married, you just have to be together. But basically, it’s where one person pays the money in and gets the tax write-off in the year they earned the income. But the money is then the pension plan for the other person. Right, and they can’t take it back. So that was one way that we distribute, redistributed some of that money in a way that like, gave me more stake, right. Also until this house, which because of the changes due to the hostile environment, I am not allowed to co-own because I don’t have the right immigration status yet. But until this house we’ve always owned our houses jointly. Right? We’ve always made sure like some of those things, right? That they’re there together. This is like, and even though I’m not allowed to be on the mortgage, or the deed for this house, there’s, we’ve discovered there was a thing called, now I’m gonna forget the name of it... Anyway, it’s a trust, this house can’t be sold without my permission, basically, even though I don’t own it. So it gives me the same rights that a wife would have, right, in terms of the house, which we both had to sign, right, to do that. So we’ve like, done those kinds of things, right, as a way of saying, yeah, you earn less, but we want to prepare for that. So I think it just means thinking creatively about stuff that a lot of people don’t think about. I also sometimes like I try to think about retirement, and I’m like, you know, I’m clearly really bad at predicting the future. Right? I moved to Canada didn’t plan to come back, move back here. People are like, Oh, are you going forever? I’m like, I don’t know, I was coming to Canada forever and now I’m back in the UK. What am I? I can’t predict, I’m going for now and I have no plans to come back. But who knows? You know, I can’t predict the future. And, and you know, the world is a complete mess. And you know, what if, you know, like, this is the thing, I think about the refugee crisis, right? Like, yeah, those people are poor when they get to us. But the poor people, they weren’t poor when they left. The poor people in Syria have not turned up on our shores. The people that have turned up on our shores are people who had professional jobs, who owned houses, had equity in houses, that kind of disappears as soon as somebody drops a bomb on it. Right? Even if you have insurance, it mostly says acts of war are not covered. Right? Somebody drops a bomb on my house, all the equity in my house is like worthless. If somebody decides to destroy the banking system, because there’s some kind of evil government something, then all the retirement savings I’ve ever had don’t mean a damn thing. In my head, that’s kind of what happens, right? I’m like, I should have more retirement savings. And then I’m like...
OF
That’s funny. I remember when the Enron scandal happened, my mother was so happy about that. She was like, those people saved!
JVE
Right. My partner’s mother used to always worry about her sister, who, you know, who was an actor? And, you know, so she’s like, but she doesn’t have a pension. Well, you know, she died of cancer at the age of 60 and that was horrible and I don’t want to make light of it. But clearly, it never became an issue that she didn’t have a pension. Right?
OF
I know, yeah, but it is kind of a feminist issue because, yeah, like women, divorced women are, you know, are among the poorest, like, are, oh, I can’t remember the exact statistic, but they’re, they lead impoverished later adult lives.
JVE
And I think part of that is a structural issue about how our, you know, our financial security and old age is related to our ability to earn an income when we’re younger, and that it’s all based on, you know, what I mean? Like, I think that’s the structural problem, right? And there’s choices we can make about, okay, if he’s worried about your, you know, retirement, he could put money into your retirement funds now, right.
OF
That would be nice.
JVE
You know, all that kind of thing. Like, there’s those kinds of choices you can make, but it’s still, you know, and this, like your mother’s in the US, where it’s like, everything is related, you know, your ability to get health care, everything is all related to like your ability to earn an income in a country that doesn’t even really have employment law worth talking about. So, you know, I think that’s partly about yeah, like, yes, you can say I’ve made poor choices. On the other hand, you’re like, really, I shouldn’t even have to think about these choices. Why is it that I have to choose between being able to make art and pick up my kids from school and having retirement savings. Why do we live in a society where that’s even a thing?
OF
Yeah.
JVE
Right? Like, that’s, that’s really what it comes down to. So I guess that’s where for me it’s like, yes, that it’s worth thinking about what choices you have, and guiding those choices by your values, which might include feminism. And then, and then there’s like accepting that the choices you have are actually sometimes pretty shitty.
OF:
Yep.
JVE
Right?
OF
Which is why political action is often necessary to accompany the kind of personal work you’re doing to live up to your feminist values.
JVE
Yeah.
OF
So yeah, so what, what? political campaigns or, I don’t know, yeah, what political activism do you think is most important for feminists to be pursuing?
JVE 20:56
Oh, good god.
[ding sound]
OF
I’m going to cut that conversation off right there because Jo’s about to go on a rant. So it’s a little bit of a cliff-hanger. I’m sure you’re dying to know what feminist activism Jo finds to be extremely important to compliment the lived feminism that she is crafting in her day to day life with her husband. No, actually [Laughs] with her partner. We’re about to get political in part two.
[Theme music]
OF
Thank you so much for listening. As Jo pointed out, we can try to make good choices but sometimes the choices we have available to us aren’t all that great. So yeah, I’m going to keep on unconditionally accepting myself, my life and other people because we’re all just fallible human being.