Paris Journal: My Binder of Women

Yesterday we were dining at a Vietnamese restaurant at Place d’Italie, the Chinatown of Paris. Two tables away, a young attractive woman prepared her date’s Pho, fastidiously placing sprouts, greens, peppers, and lemon juice in his bowl of broth and meat. He held a large cell phone in front of her face and texted the entire time. Even if the message had been urgent, he could have placed the phone discreetly in his lap. At that moment, I was embarrassed to be a woman.

I was reminded of the time someone pulled me aside and told me that my husband had a perspiration stain on his tie. She said, “Don’t bring it to his attention. That would just embarrass him. When he’s at work one day, discreetly take it to the dry cleaner, then replace it in the drawer, and he’ll never be the wiser.” I’m not proud to say that there have been times when I’ve internalized the idea that women’s work should be invisible and unacknowledged.

The situation for women in France is both better and worse than in America. Birth control is readily available, as is daycare and maternity leave. But officials address us by our husband’s first name, and we’re expected to wear heels even while traversing the entire city.

My husband calls my daughter’s school here “the land feminism forgot.” So many of the families came here for the husband’s job, and he is the only one who has a work permit. The school is full of highly educated women who cannot legally work and who, predictably, become very involved in school activities. At the parent association meetings, the speakers use the feminine plural, which is only grammatically correct when there are zero men. I’m reminded what it must have been like for my mother’s and grandmother’s generation.

Maybe it’s the election season, with its pandering and slandering of women, that made me especially sensitive to these situations. I am in no position to pass judgment on anyone’s choices, since I have been in almost every role: sole breadwinner, stay-at-home mother, freelancer, and full-time staffer. I’m convinced we need to stick together, as women, instead of justifying our choices by berating those of others.

I could fill this binder with a book’s worth of portraits, but I’ll close with one of the kind of woman I’d like to be, several decades from now. Yesterday, I spent the day with Aimée, the seventy-year-old mother of my one of my friends. (Note to all my other friends: Even if you can’t make it to Paris, send me your parents.) Aimée is traveling around Europe by herself, because she is, as my friend said, “the definition of plucky.” We walked from St. Germain des Pres to Etoile, then back to the Louvre, through rooms and rooms of antiquities, Renaissance paintings, and Egyptian treasures. I was the one who finally begged to stop for food and rest. She is an avid hiker, so it was natural for her to walk the streets of Europe instead of taking tours, and when I saw her she was on her fourth country. Every half hour or so, she would look at me and say, “I can’t believe I’m actually in Paris!” I admired her childlike wonder and enthusiasm, her perseverance and intrepidity (not cancelling the trip just because her traveling companion got sick at the last minute). She made me proud to be a woman.