The Danger of Women's Weakness
On chivalry and "presumed pregnant"
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A few days ago, Nicole Ruiz has a thread on twitter that I’ll excerpt below (and render a little more paragraphical than the original format permitted). The full thread is here.
One way motherhood really changed my thinking: I often felt vulnerable while pregnant but not visibly so & suddenly I very much wanted the traditional social graces afforded to women as a whole—like a seat on hot public transit—but many times it was never offered…
It's also difficult for me to write succinctly about because I was also pleasantly surprised by the ways pregnancy made me feel strong and even ... empowered?
but i also felt vulnerable, in ways i didn't expect
For me, the 1st trimester was also the hardest time of my pregnancy.
Your baseline heart rate is higher, you're nauseous, more susceptible to heat, exhausted as your cardiovacular system rewires to handle 150% of your blood capacity
And no one around you can tell.
I cannot shake the incredibly strong belief that any society that does not budget in social fabric that accounts for this state, this potential invisible vulnerability, as an inherent possibility of womanhood, is not a good Society.
It's reshaped how I think about a lot of public spaces & experiences.
It seems so simple but upholding social graces that acknowledge a woman could be pregnant make it much easier to be pregnant.
I really appreciate Nicole writing through this thought, because I think she’s put her finger on what can be lost when women aren’t helped by default and I suspect what she’s said is inflammatory. (Even here).
I can paraphrase it as:
pregnant women have intense needs, including times when they don’t look pregnant
folks should defer to their potential weakness without being asked
ergo: women should be treated as weak by default
Some folks who responded positively to Nicole on twitter said they’d never understood how hard the first trimester could be until they were pregnant, that it felt like a preview of what their old age would be like (though at least then they’d be visibly old!).
But the downside of this bargain is apparent, especially to women who don’t plan to be/don’t want to be pregnant. When equality feels premised on interchangeability, asking for a major social asymmetry means compromising your claim to equality.
If women are weaker (at least some of the time), and you’re expected to make space for unseen need, then… isn’t it fair to say you don’t want us to hold the same jobs? Isn’t it obvious that women will be less productive sometimes, and not even be out on maternity leave?
I’ve had pretty manageable first trimesters until my most recent baby, where I had to spend more of the day lying down because I felt so carsick-y. I was lucky(?) the worst of it was in the gap between finishing up at one job and starting the next. I was reserving that time to write The Dignity of Dependence. And I could set my own hours and pace.
It was the first time I’ve been pregnant and thought “I would struggle to do my job like this.” And I closed out that pregnancy with two weeks of medical leave before delivery because the anti-premature labor medicine I was one left me exhausted and teary.
Ideally, I’d like employers to think more about employees having variable productivity, depending on pregnancy, kids being sick, their own parents’ health crises, etc. and to budget in slack and load sharing. But if you can skim off just the most stable employees—male, not chronically ill, and with other siblings who are in charge of moving dad into assisted living… wouldn’t you try?
A lot of our social contract depends on not acknowledging there can be real differences, and real costs to the differences between men and women. I wouldn’t necessarily say that women are weaker, but that we’re less buffered. We are more intimately exposed to others’ need.
What are the costs of acknowledging it?
This seems like another area where bodies, especially female bodies, don't mesh well with our society.
I have actually quit a job for both of my first trimesters, because I was SO sick and there wasn't any other real option. I generally appreciated the deference I received, but in my subculture it's the kind of deference you would give someone who's already carrying something heavy. Men (and women who weren't pregnant at the time) didn't treat me as weak but as already occupied. CEOs have secretaries because they're too busy doing "more important" work to attend to minor admin responsibilities. Priests have altar servers, and it's not because priests are incapable or weak but because they're busy with important work. That's how I always felt that I was treated - although I know the deference can be done in a condescending way (it just wasn't in my case).
I remember toward the end of my first pregnancy, I kept saying, "I dont feel fat, I just feel like I'm carrying something really heavy, and it's exhausting." Since that experience I've bristled at the idea that women are the weaker sex. I do think that men are generally better equipped to lift heavy things with their arms, but they are always able to put them down and get a breather. When you're pregnant, you can sit but you can't actually put the baby down. It takes an extraordinary amount of physical strength and endurance to be pregnant (and I haven't even gotten to birth yet) and why don't we count that as strength? Is it because it isn't useful for anything else?
If I were to get in a Tardis and go to Regency England, I’d be mistaken for an Amazon. I’m an athlete and regularly do strength training, and whenever I read a Jane Austen novel, I’m struck by how the women can’t do anything physically demanding. It seems like they’ll go on a walk and faint. I’m getting married in May, so I can reasonably expect to potentially get pregnant within the next three years. If my first trimester is terrible, I’ll be silently wishing for that social deference from men, but at the same time, I don’t want to go back to a world where it’s assumed I am and will always be too weak to do anything physically demanding. This is part of why I’ve, in the past, reacted negatively when receiving unsolicited help carrying things from men (moving a mini fridge from a college dorm). Yes, I’m physically weaker than male athletes, but I’m not a Regency lady. Is there a way to show sex based social deference that acknowledges a woman who might be weak today due to invisible causes like early pregnancy/menstruation can still do things like lift weights and run marathons on other days?