Ambition Is Good, Actually

Even if it's women who are ambitious.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

It’s hard to deny the overwhelming signs that we are in the thick of a feminist backlash. One of the big ones: The unvarnished attacks on female ambition, female creativity, and women who want to define ourselves as anything other than wives, mothers, and homemakers.

In 2016, a fluke of the American democratic system allowed an accused rapist who lost the popular vote to nevertheless ascend to power. He made swift work of radically reforming the judiciary, and the judges he appointed eventually succeeded in ending the right to abortion in America, and opened the door to cutting off the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage, too. Right after Donald Trump was elected, there was national feminist outcry: A women’s march, a movement of women speaking out and saying #MeToo about the ways in which we had been assaulted, harassed, and sexually exploited by more powerful men. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, women have taken to the ballot box, voting in favor of abortion rights every time they’ve had the opportunity.

But this is hardly a feminist moment. Abortion is largely out of reach for millions of American women, and the Republican Party shows no interest in curbing its encroachments into women’s reproductive lives. #MeToo shifted the dialogue about workplace harassment and gendered violence, but several of the movement’s most prominent targets have seen their convictions overturned, and men newly accused of wrongdoing are generally met with a shrug. Trump may win again in the fall.

And into this political backsliding has been a big cultural injection of anti-feminism and conservative traditionalism. “Trad wives” are a thing on social media — these are women who define themselves as traditional homemakers, and who seem to largely find an audience in men who want to believe in the fantasy that there are tons of hot, subservient women out there who want to serve and service them, offer no opinions of their own, and have a full face of makeup on before their husbands wake up in the morning (all of the Trad Husbands are misogynists and some of them are, unsurprisingly, abusive ones at that). A gaping gender gap has emerged especially among the young, and research indicates it’s not just about policy differences between young men and young women; it’s a gap between more-liberal, more-politically-engaged young women and young men who have less clearly-defined politics other than embracing masculinity and aggression — especially when they feel insecure in their manhood.

Male sports stars are using their platforms to tell high-achieving women to give up their ambitions and embrace their truest purpose, which is staying home to raise children. Republican politicians are aggressively rejecting female voters in an effort to appeal to misogynist male ones. The Girl Boss is dead, and just about everyone is still kicking her carcass. And, at least judging from a recent essay in the New York Times, we’re back to the old saw of telling women that ambition is suspect, and that there’s nothing radical or feminist about wanting recognition for your creative work, or even a professional out-of-the-house life at all (the more radical answer, apparently, is embracing the inherent women’s work of childrearing and housekeeping, depending on a male breadwinner while “getting down to the level of the local, the intimate, the granular, the home.”).

Not every woman is ambitious. Not every woman is smart. Not every woman is creative. Not every woman is nurturing. Not every woman is anything because women are people and we are as varied as men are.