The right way to be a "woman"

Gender backlash, womanhood, and resisting rigid rules

This week from 1/24-1/26, Barnes and Noble is running a sale on preorders for This American Ex-Wife. Members can use code PREORDER25. Premium members get an additional 10% off.

Please preorder my book and make it successful so that together, we can make Brad Wilcox of the Insitute for Family Studies very, very mad.

In 1967, as divorce rates in America were rising, Louise Rohner published The Divorcée’s Handbook. The book was a practical guide for all the newly divorced women in America and included tips like: Never go out with another woman so as not to turn off potential suitors; stop crying and get a job; rebuild your finances, get a job, and keep your mouth shut about your divorce, no one likes a whiner. It’s a hard-nosed pull yourself together, girl kind of a book. A book for a generation of women who get a grip and bite their lips just to save a little face.

I wanted to hate the book when I started reading it. But some of the advice is good. “Don’t be plagued by doubts about yourself,” Rohner wrote. “Don’t be worried or frightened by the future. So much of our thinking is taken up by looking back or looking forward that we miss the present.”

In another section she states, “Emotionally you must learn not to depend on men. Some divorced women find they can’t be alone and try to fill every minute of their time. This is about the worst thing you can do. Until you face the fact that you are alone and make peace with it, you will never own your own life. As long as you depend on a man for your happiness you will never truly be happy. Of course, you can, and should be, happy with men. But not exclusively so.”

She also recommends a lot of moisturizer and sunscreen. Who can argue with that?

Divorce, ladies, is a new reality. We live in it. No use fussing about the past. Rohner offers us the way to fix our lipstick and get our lives back together. Most of the book is concerned with how to dress on dates to a sporting event or a cocktail party. How to act when you begin dating someone new and you have kids, and of course, how to make sure your second marriage lasts. Because this type of advice is all about shoring up the status quo.

She chides in one chapter, “Don’t step foot outside your house without your face on. It’s just a good rule because you never know who you are going to meet. And wear something decent, even driving the car pool. How embarrassing to get a flat tire dressed in your lavender wrapper.”

In every word and sentence you can hear Rohner’s own attempt to tidy up the world that second-wave feminists had trashed. If Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique had upset the balance of heterosexual marriage in America, Louise Rohner was there to right it with advice for women to get back in the saddle and back in love.

Part of the book was serialized in newspapers and it seems as though Rohner enjoyed a decent amount of success. She remarried not long after the book’s publication.

The Divorcée’s Handbook is a guidebook for being a proper woman at a time when what makes a woman and our very idea of womanhood was being questioned. It’s a type of house-cleaning work that some women do whenever the very idea of what a woman is and can be expands beyond the box we are normally shoved in. Louise Rohner wasn’t very famous, but there are plenty of other examples.  Phyllis Schlafly. Pamela Paul.

In 2022, after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Republican senators attempted to pass a “women’s bill of rights,” that defined “womanhood” based on sex assigned at birth. They argued that it was necessary to protect women from violence and maybe losing at a sporting event.

Using the phrase “define a woman” as some sort of gotcha, an entire movement has risen up to restrict the concept of womanhood to a narrowly defined “born with a uterus” terminology that constricts and attempts to right a world made complicated.

These rules and rigid definitions and codes of conduct are always supposedly done for our benefit. Get back inside the safety of the patriarchy. Do your nails. Line your lips. Stay in your bathroom assigned at birth. Too many women fall for it, because fear has been sewn into the female experience. We are taught to walk afraid through the world — with the knowledge that anything can and will happen to us if we are not protected. But really, the safety being offered is a cage.

When the definition of who and what we can be is expansive and inclusive, it offers freedom. And sure, yes, some fear. But the dangers to us are exaggerated and usually the things that kill us lie inside the home not outside of it.

America is currently in a time of gender backlash. And in this space are new versions of the old images, cropping up, offering women a model of who and what they should be. All my friends and I are obsessed with Hannah Neeleman of @ballerinafarm competing in a Mrs American competition just 12 days after having her eighth baby. The thin, white, rich, blonde influencer and mother of many is the paragon of who and what patriarchy values as a woman and a mother.

We are obsessed, because we are living in a world of gendered backlash. A world where states are passing anti-LGBTQ laws — making it harder for trans people to access care, for people to perform in drag, for kids to read about queer lives. In this world, here is this woman who fits the “ideal,” who performs motherhood and patriarchy with all the wealth and assistance, and rustic farm style that none of us is afforded. Her womanhood, her motherhood, is a performance of wealth, whiteness, and a thin body.

Imagine instead she was Black. Imagine she was a single mother. Nonnormative fertility choices are seen as monstrous when made by people whose lives and bodies don’t fit the culturally acceptable limits.

I read Rohner’s book on the advice of Marsha Gordon, the author of a biography of Ursula Parrott — a woman whose life inadvertently pushed the limits of what society thought acceptable for her gender. And she was punished for it and forgotten.

Rohner’s book, while fun to read, reads like a circling of the wagons. A moment of backlash in a world changing. Girl, wash your face, put on some clothes, and find a new man, she seems to tell women. The world is destabilizing if women are not controlled. 

In one column published in response to Rohner’s book, a woman wrote in The Hammond Times, “Louise Rohner are you for real?” She goes on to explain that not all women want to be married. That many of them are happily divorced and single. And so what if the house is messy and things aren’t organized? Who cares if everything isn’t perfect and tidy and your face isn’t done? Who cares if you are not performing womanhood for men and men alone? 

We fear a woman unleashed. We fear a definition of woman so expansive that it can encompass the world. We try so hard to restrain and redefine women so that even the ones who fit our definition of appropriate womanhood must walk a tightrope. We want to keep women in such a tight box that even the “good ones” barely fit. They must always be trying, always working, keeping their face done and their clothes right, so they don’t have time to breathe, let alone realize that the life they’re being offered is meager and small.

And I can hear Rohner and so many others in our gender backlash time grab their pearls and say, “What do I have if I don’t have this? This thing that has made men hate me, leave me, hurt me?” And the answer is, honey, what you have is the entire world.

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Further reading/listening:

This is linked above, but

Sara Petersen

’s recent newsletter on Ballerina Farm is worth reading.

If you haven’t heard the This American Ex-Wife podcast yet, GET ON THAT. You can listen wherever you find your podcasts. New episodes drop on Thursdays. Last week’s episode featured Marsha Gordon and we talked about ex-wives of the past! And tomorrow’s episode features

Aubrey Hirsch

!