by Karen Karbo
Sit with this a bit. What would your life look like? Is it better? Is it more interesting? Is the trade-off worth it? Is all the work to maintain best self—and there is a lot of it—something you’re willing to do long term?
When I spent a day thinking about this, I was surprised to find I felt tender toward True Self, even though for most of my life I’d cursed her for getting in the way of my becoming the sort of perfect female I thought I was supposed to be. I thought again about best self being like an imaginary boyfriend and realized another reason people build relationships with imaginary beloveds—it’s a way of having a loving relationship with yourself. Maybe, as Lizzo says, to become acquainted and make peace with our highly imperfect True Selves we need to be our own soul mates.
Chapter 5
A Short History of Self-Improvement During the Late Modern Age
Taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
After my father died in 2000, I found a safety deposit box in the back of his closet. It was apparently the Very Important Document Repository. Inside, carefully folded, were the original family certificates—birth, marriage, death—a copy of the name change document—we were originally Karbowskis—and a tiny, tobacco-colored newspaper clipping from the Detroit News announcing that my mother was changing her name. In 1955, these announcements were common in newspapers. They appeared at the back, usually among the classified ads. The object of these little announcements was to enter the change into public record, thus proving you weren’t a conman who went from town to town changing your name when it suited you. My mother had obtained a court order to change her name from Joan Mary Rex to Joan Mary Sharkey.
This was the first time I’d ever heard the name Rex. The Sharkeys were my mother’s people, and that funny name (sharks!) was one of the few things I knew about them. Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century George and Maude Sharkey emigrated from Ireland and settled in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Maude ran a boarding house and had three daughters, Lorraine and Julia, two years apart, and then twenty years later, my mother. I must have been in second grade when I learned about the age gap. I asked my mother what the deal was; she laughed from behind the smoke of her cigarette and said she’d been “the child of old loins.” Apparently, George had lived long enough to help conceive her, then was coming home drunk from the bar one night, was hit by a train, and died. By the time I was born George and Maude were long dead; Lorraine and Julia lived with their husbands in Detroit, and we lived in California and rarely saw them. That was the extent of what I knew about the Sharkeys.
The newspaper clipping was dated a scant four months before my parents married. Unlike Lorraine and Julia, who’d married assembly-line workers employed by the Ford Motor Company, my mother snagged my father, an industrial designer and engineer. Aha! I thought. My tidy, class-conscious suburban housewife mom must have been married to Mr. Rex before she married my dad, and didn’t want that name forever immortalized on her marriage certificate. I immediately conjured up a short, passionate, disastrous marriage to a handsome ne’er-do-well like her father. A marriage of which she’d been profoundly ashamed and had kept secret.
I immediately called a friend who worked as a public investigator and told him about the ancient newspaper clipping and my suspicion that my mother had had a first marriage. Within forty-five minutes he called back. He’d easily managed to obtain two documents: my mother’s birth certificate and her original request for the name change from the Detroit News, in which she revealed the reason for her request.
I’m going to stop right here. You’re probably wondering what a crumbling sixty-five-year-old newspaper clipping has to do with swearing off self-improvement. How does something my mother did in the mid-twentieth century relate to figuring out how to live life as your True Self? My mother lived, and possibly died, before you were born. She’s a stranger to you—and to me, it turned out.
Let us recall: to swear off spending a lifetime devoted to self-improvery it’s necessary to be armed with the knowledge about how the world really works. The reality that everyone you imagine is judging you is not judging you, because they aren’t even thinking about you, helps alleviate our shame. Wising up to the reality that the function of advertising is to stoke our insecurity, self-doubt, and self-loathing helps to loosen the grip of mass culture and rampant consumerism. Recognizing that the endless pursuit of self-improvement can make you feel crazy because it is completely fucking crazy, a Kafkaesque adventure where you should strive to be good, but not too good, because then you risk being unlikable, and there’s nothing worse than being unlikeable, confirms that the game is rigged, and helps reinforce what I hope is a growing sense that there is a better way to live. Likewise, an understanding of history gives us even more room to contemplate the idiocy of most self-improvement schemes and regimes. It gives us a broader perspective, a practice that is so underutilized these days, to employ it on a regular basis is practically a superpower.
Furthermore, you don’t want to be like Meghan McCain, do you? When she appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2009, in her role as precocious political pundit and the GOP’s new blonde to watch, she revealed herself to be the type of self-absorbed millennial who gives millennials a bad name. The topic of conversation was whether then president Obama was at fault for something or other, and one of the panelists referenced some crime or misdemeanor of the Reagan administration. McCain saucily admitted she knew nothing about the Reagan administration because “I wasn’t born yet.” After which she giggled. To which CNN political analyst Paul Begala said, “I wasn’t born during the French Revolution, but I know about it.”
Appreciating that history didn’t begin the day you were born allows you to comprehend that regardless of your relationship with your mother, she too was trying to live up to some impossible female ideal. If, like Mary Wollstonecraft, she got the message that “beauty is a woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” chances are she passed that “wisdom” on to you. If she was raised to believe that a woman should crush it at Harvard, build a brilliant career, and lean waaaaaay in, then she probably passed that wisdom on to you. Unless you’re lucky enough to possess a female forebear who was a cheroot-smoking intellectual, bronc-busting cowgirl, sassy showgirl, or some other type of proto fuck-it-all outlaw, chances are the women who came before you felt considerable pressure to conform to their own standards of ideal womanhood.
What I learned about my own mother was this: that her real parents were not George and Maude Sharkey from Ypsilanti, Michigan, but a pair of teenagers who lived one town over. Her birth certificate revealed that they were Calvin Rex, nineteen, and Nora Kerrigan, seventeen. Their child, Joan Mary Rex, somehow came into the care of Maude Sharkey—evidence seems to point to my mother being left at the boarding house—who raised her but never formally adopted her. On the request to formally change her name, my mother wrote: “I would like to change my name to that of my foster mother, the only mother I have ever known.”
Suddenly, so much made sense about my mother’s anxiety that I would never find love, her endless concern that I might be cast out for being who I was. I tried to imagine how it must have been for her in the boarding house, the only child of Maude, after her older “sisters” had married and moved out. Was she afraid she might be sent away for failing to be cheerful and docile? Did she wonder why she was never formally adopted? All the people who have the answers are dead, so I’ll never know. But I do know this: we are the daughters of women who spent their lives struggling to meet the impossible cultural demands of their time. Because of that, we should cut them some slack, which, in turn, will allow us to cut ourselves some slack.
The late modern period coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of cons
umerism. This seems like a good place to begin our short history, for reasons that will make all too much sense in a moment. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and spread to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Before that, most of the goods regular people needed were made at home. Cottage industries were literally industries in your cottage. People lived in villages or small towns, working the farm, minding the shop, crafting goods by hand. Women labored alongside the men and were recognized as an integral part of the household. They made soap, bread and butter, cloth and clothing, and medicine. It was all artisanal, handcrafted farm to table, bean to bar, barn to yarn, sheep to sweater. Every family was a self-supporting hub of industry and everyone pitched in. The family couldn’t survive economically without women and their many skills.
Then new machine technologies were imported from England, and all the necessary goods—and a lot of unnecessary goods, as we shall see—began to be manufactured in factories. The goods made in factories were cheaper than the artisanal goods made in cottages, so the demand for cottage goods declined. Families left the farms for the mills, mines, and factories of more populous towns and cities. The public arena was born, and men were a part of it.
A small percentage of women were also employed by textile mills and coal mines. Because of their smaller size, they were often used to haul carts full of coal through the dark, narrow shafts, with a leather strap around their waist and a chain between their legs. For this, they were paid half as much as men. In a classic double-bind moment, even though their smaller size made them indispensable, they were despised for sacrificing their female virtue, their only treasure, by going to work in the first place.
Wages were low, hours long, conditions horrendous; in the early twentieth century a progressive political movement fought for and won better pay, fewer hours, and safety measures that transformed work from a place where you might lose a limb before lunch to much-relied-upon employment. There were no benefits, other than a paycheck.
Nevertheless, a middle class comprising merchants, businessmen, and bureaucrats began to emerge. One marker of the middle class was that they bought stuff they didn’t need, fancy stuff that made them seem more on par with the wealthy aristocratic class, to distinguish them from the unskilled laborers beneath them. Another marker was a stay-at-home wife. She was the original trophy wife, whose leisure telegraphed her husband’s success.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Woman Question, which had been tossed around for five hundred years or so, gained fresh urgency. Translated from the French, querelle des femmes, the Question had doubts lurking beneath concerning the fitness of women to handle basic human rights. Women were viewed no differently than children, unable to reason, control their emotions, or hold a complex thought in their heads. Before the Victorian era, the Woman Question was mostly just a popular topic bantered around among philosophers and intellectuals who would get shit-faced in the local pub and blather about it till closing time. Should women be allowed to go out alone in public? Should they be permitted to express their opinions? Own property? Could women be trusted to do all the things men did—read, write, study, manage the household accounts—or was it the equivalent of leaving the family business to a hedgehog? English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued that regardless of gender, the newborn human’s mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa. As we grow, we acquire both knowledge and prejudice; therefore women are no different from men in their abilities to successfully function in the world. A generation later French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) insisted that women by nature are subservient to men: “The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive. . . . When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specifically made for man’s delight.”
Inherent in the Question was a realpolitik component: what to do with this new class of women. As the nineteenth century surged into the twentieth, as factories and machines became more efficient, and as businesses became larger and more complex, the middle class continued to expand, and every woman who could afford to remain at home did so. A new, robust, and stratified bourgeois class blossomed, with capitalists and industrialists at the top; bankers, attorneys, academics in the middle; and blue-collar workers on the lowest rung. In the early part of the century, capitalists had joined the ranks of the upper class (much to the chagrin of the aristocrats), and the middle class expanded further. If you were a successful tradesman, you could now count yourself part of the petite bourgeoisie.
The middle-class wife went about shaping herself into a signifier of her family’s affluence in the market economy. Godey’s Lady’s Book, published between 1830 and 1878, helped her figure out how to do this. It published articles on fashion, hygiene, health, and how to ride a horse sidesaddle. Each issue also published the sheet music for popular songs to be played on the pianoforte and the poems and stories of nineteenth-century literary greats Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Godey’s was a source of inculcation, teaching women how to be refined within the domestic sphere, the only place they were fit to inhabit. And the more refined they were, the more they succeeded at femininity.
“The Angel in the House,” the famously execrable poem by Coventry Patmore, outlined the perfect feminine personality, the one to which women should all aspire.* She should be graceful, gentle, submissive, self-sacrificing, uncomplaining, and sweetly dim. She existed to produce heirs and to soothe and flatter her husband.
“A successful man could have no better social ornament than an idle wife. Her delicacy, her culture, her childlike ignorance of the male world gave a man the ‘class’ which money alone could not buy,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Women had to work very hard to improve themselves—to become less fully human and become more conventionally feminine.
The successful “The Angel in the House” brought to heel every “unpleasant” aspect of her personality. If she was smart, she played dumb or kept quiet; if she was logical, she feigned irrational emotionalism; if she was self-reliant, she pretended to be incompetent and needy; if she was confident, she learned to lower her eyes with a shy, self-deprecating smile.
Virginia Woolf, speaking before the National Society for Women’s Service in 1931, had had enough of the insufferable, boring, martyr-y angel. When Woolf was invited to write a book review, normally a privilege reserved for male writers, she told how she had been forced to kill off the angel before she could proceed. “She [the Angel in the House] slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’”
Meanwhile, less affluent women, then as now, still worked; they had no choice. The livelihood of their families depended on it. They still worked in factories and mills (the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 forbade them from working underground). They worked in sweatshops. During World War I, they worked in bomb-making plants. They cleaned homes and offices. They waited tables in bars and diners. They were secretaries and typists. Like Maude Sharkey, the woman who I thought was my grandmother, they ran boarding houses. They were the living, breathing answer to the Woman Question—clearly women can get and keep their shit together enough to hold down a job and take care of their families at home—but nobody much was asking it about them. They labored in anonymity in part because they had little to contribute to the burgeoning consumer culture. They weren’t free to buy things they didn’t need, or that would communicate the wealth of their family or impress the neighbors.
The more cultured a woman was, the more leisure she enjoyed, the wealthier her husband was, the more she was liable to be sickly, by which I mean sick in a trendy way that indicated what a delicate flower she was. Illness became a marker of the upper-class wife. Neurasthenia was a popul
ar ailment, a vague illness consisting of low energy, unexplained “nervous” headaches, and bad moods. A rich woman might easily spend her days feeling faint, suffering from nerves, and retiring to her room in the afternoon with a headache. The week of her menstrual period, the week before, and the week after, she rarely arose from her sickbed. She mastered the art of looking ethereal and ravishingly beautiful, while also appearing to be at death’s door. If she was too hale and hearty, she might tuck into the arsenic. Then she was really sick. Imagine a sort of protoheroin chic. Does this sound vaguely familiar? That to be truly feminine, in the eyes of the culture, you must be too weak to stand up? In my compulsive dieting days, I remember that feeling well.
Hysteria was another malady du jour exclusive to well-off women. No one quite knew what caused it; the early Greeks believed it was caused by the womb wandering around the body. Symptoms included insomnia, anxiety, irritability, both sexual desire and lack of sexual desire, and “tendency to cause trouble for others.” For a time, the cure was “pelvic massage,” wherein the doctor would paddle her pink canoe until the patient was feeling relaxed and happy.
It was a status symbol for a rich man to send his wife to expensive health spas. Also, he would keep a small army of doctors on retainer, other men who would sweep in and minister to his wife, without ever curing her. To be a woman of a certain class meant to always have something undefinable wrong with you. If you squint, you can see the dim outline of modern self-improvement, where to be a desirable woman means always being in perpetual need of fixing.
A word about doctors. The medical industry as we know it was also in its infancy. The American Medical Association was formed in 1847, right around the time it started to become clear that to survive in the market economy, doctors needed patients, and a lot of them. How convenient, then, that apparently just being female was an incurable ailment.
