Authors:
Cover and pictures designed by
Justyna Molednowska-Ruiz
I.
On March 8th we celebrate International Women’s Day. It is a day dedicated to reivindications of equal rights for women; of visibility of women talent and of showcasing women success. However, what means, in 2023, to celebrate International Women’s Day?
First, let’s make a brief historical overview of women’s day celebrations. The origin of Women’s Day can be traced back to ancient Rome, where Matronalia was celebrated on the first day of March. It was a festival celebrating Juno Lucina, the goddess of childbirth (“Juno who brings children into the light”), and of motherhood (mater is “mother” in Latin) and women in general. Matrona in Latin means a married woman with children, so that day the goddess Juno was worshipped, who symbolised all female virtues, fertility and motherhood. All these features then made up the definition of femininity and according to tradition, on this day the husband gave his wife a nice gift.
The celebration of Women’s Day –as we know it nowadays– was established much later and was associated with labour movements, active in North America and Europe, and was initiated by the Socialist Party of America. They took place on February 28, 1909 in the United States and were intended to commemorate the New York strike of women in the clothing industry, which took place on March 8, 1857. This date was an inspiration for setting the official Women’s Day as the memory of the strike mentioned above.
Nowadays, despite an important advance towards equality over time, gender balance and labour rights –for any gender– are far from being fully accomplished. Therefore, the International Women’s Day still in 2023 has a claim to raise awareness of gender inequality in all areas: from education bias to career and personal fulfilment.
21st century feminism is characterised by an economy of visibility. Many studies display that femininity interacts with the evolving digital culture. Mobile technology and social media have been at the heart of all femininity shifts, as many social platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for self-expression, intersecting with the post-feminist sensibilities that make femininity more visible and public. But not only for self-expressions it matters, it plays also a significant role in the fight against gender and racial discrimination, let’s take for example the #metoo movement, which we have been able to observe globally since 2006, mainly thanks to social networks.
Another feature of popular feminism is its focus on body positivity and self-confidence that can be easily created and consumed through content shared online, from user-generated hashtags like #deffyourbeautystandards, #nomakeupselfie) to commercial campaigns selling products with feminist-inspired messages, such as: Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful campaign. Technology also enables women to collaborate more easily in organizing campaigns related to women’s equality, fighting for their rights, as well as reporting misdeeds and violations of women’s rights. Information disseminated through social media quickly and effectively reaches a wider audience, which has a huge impact on reacting rapidly to such negative behaviour; to obtain references, finding guidance and help.
Without neglecting the importance of movements such as #metoo or the relevance of technology in opening new ways of self-expression for women, this article aims to take a micro-analysis perspective rather than the helicopter view of the social movements. We aim to explore how women ‘celebrate’ each day, every day. We aim to pose the questions: how are women living their everyday lives in contemporary societies? Which are the crucial challenges they face? What does it mean to be a woman nowadays? And, ultimately, how is gender –female, male or any other gender orientation– lived in everyday life?
II.
Guided by our passion for cinema, we will observe how contemporary women’s daily realities have been depicted in films and paired it with research on gender and everyday life1.
For instance, in Almodovar’s film, Women on the verge of a nerve attack, or many of the female characters in Woody Allen’s movies, women –similarly can be said of men– seem to be facing what can be characterised as the heteronomy of desires and identity. They seem to be facing the pressure of being perfect mothers, look perfect and lead successful careers in a world of always-on, 24/7 business-as-usual corporate cultures which mystifies overworking in order to afford the consumerism ethos publicity and certain luxury lifestyle media, blockbuster films and TV series seems to inevitably associate with an accomplished and successful life.
In Gender and everyday life2 Mary Holmes asserts that
“Gender is not an actual property that individual women share and men have in common, but an illusion or a masquerade around which only certain ways of being human are possible. Every human being is understood in gendered terms, but almost always they are somehow not feminine enough or too masculine, and so on. This means that what it means to be gendered is never fixed, that we can never get it ‘right’.”
Mary Holmes
Women –and men– are haunted by a ghost in their personal and professional lives: by the invisible hand of Adam Smith that decides their destinies in their professional careers supposedly according to the fluctuations and requirements of the market; to the perfect ideal or normal behaviour that haunts every single choice in everyday lives -as the as in the Hichkcok’s film Rebecca– leading to an never ending competition between genders and within genders that in many occasions has as a consequence that women are hindering the career and development of other women.
III.
Nevertheless this reification of women –and men– daily choices by imposed stereotypes, tradition and others’ pressure to conform, it is precisely in the ambiguity of the everyday life in which women –as well as men– together with the very ambiguity of the very definition of what gender is, what opens the door to new possibilities to new horizons, different ways of living, beyond the heteronomy of achievement and perfection and fixed identities. Opening the door to creating everyday living, although brings up possibilities, also implies an angst as we see in films such as Madison Bridges, Kramer vs. Kramer or Revolutionary Road that put in clear manifestation that women demand more than to play the traditionally assigned roles (mother, wife, housekeeper, caregiver, etc.). Their angst and dissatisfaction is a consequence of the women’s evolution and demand for real emancipation and self-fulfilment.
To dissipate this angst, is it the call of developing a business or entrepreneurial career that women are aiming for? We reply to this question with a yes but, … If you put ourselves in the shoes of a woman we will realise that they are for more. This more, in many cases, can be difficult to clarify it and to transform it an actionable object.
This need for more comes from a feeling of emptiness, of living as if playing a role: whether wives, mothers, entrepreneurs, professionals. Living sleepwalking, with the autopilot on. In many cases –we could say the majority– women who have joined the workforce have changed the control of parents or husbands for the control of bosses and managers in the workplaces. They have entered a business world in which what prevails is an impossible and inhuman –not matter for women or for men– 24/7 commitment to work not only if women want to have chances to advance in their careers but just to simply to keep the job. This contemporary way of camouflaging slavery makes the work-life narrative mere rhetoric as the research published in Harvard Business Review in the article What’s really holding women back?3 asserts.
As Rose Feller character in In her shoes film, many women have already started to realise that their overcommitment to work is not what is holding their lives; in fact it is what is causing their dreary, anxiety and burnt out.
IV.
The feeling that many women feel in contemporary societies of needing more is the call of the angst that Heidegger described as the consequence of inauthentic living4 –that is happening to human beings in general, obviously not only to women.
The achievement and hyper-exposure race that contemporary globalised culture sets as the continuous battle for likes and others’ approval condenes its participants –not matter of females or males– to dissatisfaction, anxiety and, ultimately, to boredom.
The call for an authentic life –for this something else that women in the films mentioned above as in real-life seems to be claiming for– demands a daily creative effort. It requires the courage to take action to unite the world of dreams with the world of daily life. To transform everyday lives, day by day, into a project of living. It might seem as an impossible task, easier to say than done. However we believe that everyone can craft their very own creative lifestyle, transforming their daily lives one step at a time. In fact, in many ways we are all creating our daily routines, perhaps in an unconscious way.
What is crucial – and a truly challenging task– is to transform daily routines from mere repetitions to repetitions that makes the difference5; from the feeling of living as if playing a role from a script written by others, without fully committing ourselves to our desires and passions, to the courage of taking action and feel the very creativity of our actions. From taking the world as given, to making sense of the world, raising self-awareness and developing our unique creative rituals, following our values and priorities –not the siren call of influencers or celebrities performed for magazines or social media–.
In order to overcome the lack of orientation and direction in our lives, as the characters of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, to find and develop our personal language and narratives, we need to spark and nurture our creativity to experience our time7, embodiedness and presence, the dynamism of living8 with others and not the life of others.
V.
If gender roles are socially constructed and this social construction brings up inequality, the most radical would be to make gender disappear together with inequalities8. We shall then focus on human beings and provide opportunities for everyone to be whoever they decide to be.
What does this mean for workplaces? As the above mentioned research publised in HBR depicts, the work-life narrative as a justification of why women careers derail (since women are supposed to be more committed to the family and taking more accommodations –part time work, etc. –) is simply that, a narrative that is not backed by the data and is just covering the real problem that we have cited earlier: the impossible long working hours that professional careers de facto impose. It is worth quoting from this research:
“Women and men alike suffer as a result (of the overworking culture). But women pay higher professional costs. If we want to solve this problem, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees. Such a reconsideration is possible. As individual families and employees push back against overwork, they will pave the way for others to follow. And as more research shows the business advantage of reasonable hours, some employers will come to question the wisdom of grueling schedules. If and when those forces gain traction, neither women nor men will feel the need to sacrifice the home or the work domain, demand for change will swell, and women may begin to achieve workplace equality with men.”
What’s really holding women back? – HBR Article by Robin J. Ely and Irene Padavic
In the essay the Creative Talent search for autonomy and why companies should trust them we made clear–with case studies from corporations to the public sector at local, regional and European level– that it is a full transformation of the organisation culture what employers need to tackle, moving from the work-life balance narrative and accommodations (hybrid work part-time flexible working, etc.) towards an organisational culture shift focused on the humanness of each individual and in sparking and nurturing their creativity not matter the gender, race, sexual orientation or any other background characteristic.
In Roman times, as we’ve seen above, the women’s day celebration was the first day of the calendar year. Herein this article, this 2023 International Women’s Day, we invite you to the first day of a creative transformation of everyday living, in every domain of life, from home to work and anything in between and beyond, for women, for men, for everyone! We invite you to begin a celebration of life, every day.
Happy Women’s Day, Everyone!
Suggested citation:
Ruiz Soria, A.C., Molendowska-Ruiz, J.E., (2023), Creativity Women’s Day, Economía Creativa, Article 1, 8 March.
Economía Creativa 