Don’t Tell Me How To Act as a Woman and Don’t Tell Me How Much to Write Every Day

Please stop assuming that you know what is the only right way for other people to achieve a satisfying life.

The women’s liberation movement was concerned with how society could eliminate unfair sex roles. One of the primary goals of the movement was to allow women to make decisions about their lives and give them choices about things like reproductive rights and working outside the home.

I remember being in graduate school, and getting into a discussion about a woman’s role in the family. I made a statement about always wanting to be the mainstay of the home while my husband was the primary breadwinner. Not because I dreamed of being submissive, or because I thought I wasn’t capable of getting by without a man. Because I believed that there was a reason for there being different gender roles, and that one gender could supplement the other. I made it clear that this was just how I would like my life to be, and that similarly every woman and family had the right to decide what worked for them

Perhaps I didn’t express this as well as I could have and it came off as sounding like I was suggesting that women should still be expected to remain in the home whether they wanted to or not. I had hoped that at least the part about the comment only applying to me and my life would have gotten through.

But a few people took offense, and one of my classmates took aim. At me.

“Oh my God! Do you even hear yourself talking? After everything we’ve fought for, you want us back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant! You’re harming women everywhere by buy into the misogynist BS! Women should have careers now, fight to break through the glass ceiling, work to surpass men in every area of life! And you want to still be kept under a man’s thumb asking permission to walk to the corner store to buy him a six pack!”

I was taken aback. Maybe she didn’t hear the part about choice, I reasoned. Maybe she didn’t hear what I said at all.

But thinking about, I had been clear, and I had underscored how my comment was something that I was just applying to myself and not others. Then I started getting upset. Unfortunately, by the time I got to this point and was ready to respond, my classmate had stormed off.

I wasn’t trying to say that I understood everything about the feminist movement. And yes, I got how long and hard the fight had been to get women even some of the rights that men had and we didn’t for a very long time. But I also thought the mainstay of the movement was increasing opportunities and choices for women.

Dictating that because women could now have careers without it being looked down upon, was different from saying they should or must have them. How was that any different from saying because women could have children they must have children or dictating that women must stay in the home and weren’t allowed to have careers?

If the movement was about allowing women to make their own choices, why were only some of those choices considered acceptable? Just because it was now women dictating to women, that didn’t mean it was any better than men doing so.

With all the articles by people who are saying that everyone should be publishing at least once a day on Medium if they currently aren’t publishing that much, or two or three times a day if they are, I find I am having a similar reaction to my reaction above. Freelance writers have had a hard time finding platforms where they can write what they want and get paid for it.

Either they’ve had every move dictated and had no say in what they wrote or their schedule in order to get paid, or they wrote what they wanted and got paid pennies, if at all. Then Medium came on the market as a platform that provides writers with the freedom to explore who they are and how they want to pursue writing in their lives. And like the lives of women, the lives of writers are each different and each person has the right to decide what works in terms of what they right and the best publishing schedule for them.

Hearing from other writers who are successful that the only way to do this is to publish every single day seven days a week or better yet two or more times a day, can cause new writers to panic or give up entirely if they find they can only publish a few times a week. Trying to force themselves to write two or three times this amount, can result in poor work or the inability to write at all. And that’s just not fair.

So please, stop telling writers on Medium that they have to publish every day to succeed. It isn’t any more true or helpful than telling a woman now that she can, she has to have a full time career even if it isn’t her goal or what makes her feel successful There are different ways for different people and each is equally acceptable and can be made to work successfully for a satisfying writing life. But it’s up to each of us to decide what it takes to make this happen.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies. She is Editor for 1-One-Infinity, The Partnered Pen and One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity and Mental Gecko. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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