Let’s hear it for the ordinary, unremarkable woman
Lauren Libbert calls for International Women’s Day to celebrate our everyday achievements
This International Women’s Day, why can’t we celebrate the “normal” women, instead of the outstanding ones? I’m a normal woman. I haven’t broken through any glass ceilings, fought for women’s injustice or survived a traumatic life event. I don’t earn a six-figure salary, sit in a boardroom and I’m not perceived as “successful”, necessarily, in terms of work or financial achievements. I’m a divorced mum-of-two who earns her own money and worries about it constantly. I’m a single parent raising my sons to (hopefully) respect women.
I spend a lot of my time very unglamorously emptying dishwashers, cooking, food shopping, cleaning, driving my boys here and there, yelling at them to get off screens and helping them with their homework. I speak to my sisters every day, my ailing 92-yearold dad twice a week. I have very good friends who I don’t see as much as I’d like because we’re all so busy with our kids. I have a fiancé who I love very much but with whom I’m balancing the needs of our four children as well as ourselves. I’m a mother without a mother, having lost mine nearly five years ago and I miss her most days.
As a freelance journalist, I work from home and rarely wear expensive dresses or full-on make-up and most of my jumpers have a stain on the underside of the sleeves from spending much of their time drifting in and out of the kitchen sink.
I’ve earned a modest living over the years, trying my hand at different ventures and side hustles, launching a podcast with moderate success, writing a novel, still unpublished, and recently starting a little business helping entrepreneurs get their stories into the press. I turned
50 this year – a whole half-century – and I am just doing my best, not breaking new ground.
How wonderful it would be if International Women’s Day could, for once, highlight the stories of women like me. Ordinary, unremarkable women putting one step in front of the other every day, championing other women in their own small ways through parenting, paying tax, sustaining friendships, earning a living, keeping the family budget together, looking after elderly parents, making sure their children eat healthily and sleep on clean sheets.
It’s wonderful to hear about inspirational women at work who have defied all odds to write a bestselling book or run a multimillion-pound business, but these powerful women in their freshly pressed designer dresses look nothing like me. They will be sitting on panels today, sharing their wisdom and all that they have learnt, yet they are as alien to me, and my life experience, as a man in a sharp suit sitting at the head of a boardroom table. Many women I know feel the same.
Out here, in the real world, is an army of strong, emotionally resilient women doing invisible work without public profiles or letters after their names.
I have a friend who hosts weekly dinners for the elderly and disconnected, and another who is an active godparent to a friend’s daughter after her mother died, aged 44, of breast cancer. She is constantly travelling across the country to advise her on university choices and what property she should invest her inheritance in.
I know women who are stay-athome mums and volunteer at their kids’ schools, helping the less able with their reading; women who work at night so they can afford what their children need in the day; women who are child-free – not by choice – and have directed their loss and pain into a new career in therapy, so they can counsel others.
Nearly all of these women will spend at least a third of their week mired in domesticity, emptying countless dishwashers, cooking an endless supply of nutritious meals, wiping god-knows-how-many work surfaces.
Their impact is never reflected on the stock market or in a publisher’s annual figures. Their worth lies in the homes they create, the children they raise and the outward ripples of the individual connections they make.
Why, then, on International Women’s Day, do we only publicly celebrate the women who have broken through in areas traditionally dominated by men?
The women I surround myself with work hard and often put themselves second. They carry much of the emotional and domestic labour and are caring, nurturing, giving, loving; stereotypical “female” qualities that don’t get much kudos any time of year, least of all, ironically, on International Women’s Day.
It’s time we changed the narrative. Look at what real women are achieving every day and congratulate them as they fall into bed, exhausted. We may be normal women, but we are heroic in every way.
Happy International Women’s Day.
Look at what real women are achieving every day and congratulate them