Women's Work

A 'lifestyle book of the year' award nomination made me reconsider how we see women’s contributions

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My book has been shortlisted for Lifestyle Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. If you’ve read it and found it valuable, I’d love if you could take the time to vote for it.

If you haven’t read it but would like to, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By is out now! If you’d like to order the hardback, audio or Kindle editions, they’re linked below.

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

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Australian pollen might kill you. If your immune system isn’t used to it. You can see it, for one thing, off in the distance. The pollen. Coughed in vomit-yellow clouds from clusters of hunched, sexually frustrated trees. They’re desperate, like all of us I suppose in one way or another, to live forever. It catches in your gullet, gritty and unwholesome as a petrol station protein bar, so that you need a drink of water if you’re ever going to finish a sentence. When I shower on these Spring nights, I imagine the pollen leeching in nicotine-hued rivulets from my hair. From the tiny spaces between my eyelashes, and disappearing down the drain like evidence of a crime.

I’m unused to this. Nature in Ireland is like culture in Ireland. Softer. Mellower. More prone to police itself by noticing some individual behaving ostentatiously and declaring glibly with a wagging finger ‘Ah now. There’s no need for that. You gobshite’. The last bit is more often implied than said. That’s usually enough to shame us into line.

Everything is inflammation. Did you know that hay fever can cause bloating? Your abdomen is taut with unrealised grasses. Your eyes are pickled quail eggs. Your skin is snagging parchment. Your nose is a pulsating bruise. But if you’re Irish and someone asks you how you’re doing you have to say, nasally, fluidly, as though from deep within a submarine “Ah yeah sure. Grand. You know yourself.” It’s the law.

This was the condition I was in as I opened the email from my editor. The airport shuttle bus hefted its suitcase-laden weight through a scalding springtime Sydney morning and toward the terminal building. The sun wobbled the horizon narcotically as I peered through two holes in my hay feverish face, puffy and sepulchral, at the news that the book I wrote, Some Of Our Parts, had been nominated for an An Post Irish Book Award. Those are our national book awards. The big fellas. The big fella book awards for big fella Irish writers, and goodness knows we produce a disproportionate number of celebrated and talented writers. Sally Rooney. Marian Keyes. All those other fellas who came before. Writers of merit, influence, heft. Hefty writers. Not writers whose bodies register grass pollen the way normal people’s react to ebola.

Elation. Sneezing. Then a hot corkscrew of disappointment through the tender, esoteric tissues of my inflamed, grass-baffled, gut. ‘Lifestyle' book of the year. The book has been nominated in the lifestyle category. I thought to myself, briefly, ‘what does that mean?’ The question streaked up to be answered by my dehydrated brain. A brain which floated, contained and malevolent, like a frustrated aquarium shark peering about for something succulent to rend asunder. ‘It’s non-fiction books by women, usually. It’s the label we give to work we consider unserious, fluffy, or ‘other’. It is the category for things — usually female coded things — that don’t belong in other categories.’

My shoulders were engaged in a sort of septic, throbbing ‘womp-womp-womp’ where the straps of my backpack bit resentfully into their tense, tired, just-off-an-economy-flight meat. It was precisely the sensation you get when a flu is descending but this was an adverse biological reaction to some trees whose primordial imperative is not to go extinct.

Shame. That the book wasn’t nominated under biography maybe, which it might easily qualify as, or non-fiction perhaps, which it certainly also is. Or just something. Any category that isn’t pretty much always going to be presumed populated by books which are considered as being for women and by women. Because I know how they are considered. Where they are filed within popular consciousness. As we all do, I know what these sorts of labels code for. My suitcase rolls over my clean white shoe (Nike Dunks — the swoosh is pearlescent) as the bus tilts perilously between curved lines to cut across a runway.

But of course I’m wrong. A woman behind me coughs, and I’m almost certain I hear her mutter ‘fucking pollen’ in a heavy Australian accent as I consider this reaction I’m having — to being told my book is on the award shortlist; not to the pollen. It feels as though the latter has entered every drop of fluid within me — the cytosol that keeps my cells turgid, the moisture in my eyes, the saliva in my mouth, even the acid that churns in the flaccid crimson bag of my stomach — and bound it like cornflour. Thickened it up. Slowed it down.

Thickened me up. Slowed me down.

Because Some Of Our Parts is a ‘lifestyle’ book really, whatever that means. Yes. It is. It is a book about defying categorisation. It is a book about the ways in which we all occupy numerous identities, and impose identities on one another. It is a book about popular philosophy — the only kind I’m interested in writing, because philosophy is for everyone and identity is a challenge and a central feature of every single human life. It is a memoir, because I encourage others to interrogate the labels they carry by looking sometimes ruthlessly at my own. It’s a book about psychology, about figuring out who we are in a world that constantly tells us with no nuance at all. It’s a book emerging from more than a decade of especially careful and rigorous thought.

But — and I don’t mind telling you — it has a very pretty cover.

The shame I felt on that pollen-drenched bus was complete and utter nonsense. It was the lazy, passive absorption of some of the worst aspects of the ideology from which our culture springs. And I know where it comes from. It comes from both an ideological failure within our culture and a common but insufficient attempt to remedy it.

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You can vote for Some Of Our Parts here, if you’d like to

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Often, we attempt to recalibrate the present by reconsidering the past. There are plenty of books by female historians and philosophers arguing for the inclusion or reevaluation of various women from history. I particularly enjoyed Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, a book which gives an account of the lives of the five known victims of Jack The Ripper, looking past the prejudicial assumptions and class-based dismissals published in the scandalmongering press of the time and legitimately researches the lives of these individuals. Rubenhold’s book uses values characterising our time and context to question the dominant values of theirs. The result is valuable and enlightening.

Consider also Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting’s Philosopher Queens, which seeks to acquaint readers with female thinkers who were not necessarily given mainstream consideration (though some certainly were, if arguably not enough of it) and granted the level of seriousness given by default to the work of male counterparts. They discuss people like Angela Davis, Iris Murdoch, the criminally underappreciated Mary Midgley and Harriet Taylor Mill (more widely known as the wife of John Stuart Mill, whose utilitarian theory remains the engine for the average moral argument you’ll hear made today). All of the women included in the book have broad appeal within modern feminist thinking. There are very prominent libertarian and anarchist female thinkers who do not necessarily fit that brief, and they are absent from the book.

Regardless, this general imperative to push women with cultural influence from the margins to the core of the mainstream is not a move to reimagine the history of ideas so much as to make more room for women in the annals of respectable intellectual space. That is a valuable endeavour. The neutral place of valuable ideas has traditionally been, and to some extent tacitly remains, reserved for men. It is easy to want ‘in’ more than to want to reconsider the value (and fundamental values) of that neutral place. The result is not necessarily to challenge the status quo in a deep way, but to allow women access to the rooms in which it is reproduced. That constitutes success within our culture. Progress.

Instead of celebrating what people have contributed in the way they contributed it, often in a parallel field, mode or context, we generally attempt to incorporate outsider work into mainstream respectability. But some things are worth celebrating in part because they’re forgotten or sidelined; because they’ve defied strict categorisation or take a shape that doesn’t look like what everyone else was doing at the time. It’s not about changing what men think — or what women who want ‘in’ think — ‘See!? Mary Midgley or Iris Murdoch really were important all along!’

That smacks of a sense that women’s achievements are not important or as meaningful as those of men until they happen within the bounds of male respectability. It cedes ground to the idea that the thing perceived as ‘women’s work’ —either because it directly bears on women’s interests or merely because it is created by a woman — is lesser.

Surely the radical perspective — the revolutionary one, the one that really kicks doors in and makes a constructive mess — is to assert value on your own terms. To simply refuse to accept the terms of a world that can indeed denigrate the ‘other’ — as I briefly denigrated my own work on receiving an email containing objectively lovely and flattering news — for poorly considered but deeply rooted ideological and cultural reasons. To refuse to accept that lazy, presumptuous and archaic account of the meaning and value in things that have long been coded as less valuable. To refuse to give precedence to labels imposed from the outside. To remain conscious and skeptical of the words commonly used to signal what something or someone is not, as much as what they are.

We live in a world that might consider books like the one I have written to be ‘fluffy’. Because it has a cover that declares ‘I am written for women’ (because that is the nature of marketing books). And because it is written by a woman. Because in order to ‘belong’ in the neutral place, you must carry the correct labels to gain entry. Because in order to be intellectual, educated, serious or informed, it’s preferable to present in a particular way, and that way shouldn’t be too overtly female-coded, if you can possibly help it.

The book I have written emerges from a philosophical tradition that is rich in men and women whose ideas have shaped the world we all currently live in. I’m not Mary Midgley or Iris Murdoch or Elizabeth Anscombe — nothing near, nothing like. I’m not Spinoza (I wish) or Kant (thank goodness - what a drip) or William James. But I am part of their legacy, like so many other people. I am a person whose work emerges from the work of those who came before me. Braver women (and men) who struggled under more difficult conditions, many of whom faced objective prejudice so that I might stand on a shuttle bus hunched over, pollen-flu riddled and momentarily overwhelmed by a pathetic, indulged sense of bloated entitlement, and get my head right.

So that I might kick myself up the arse and remember that the book has been nominated for an award. An award! The nomination alone is a stupendous thing. I wrote Some Of Our Parts thinking that it would have meaning to me — value to me — but expecting nobody else to see much worth noticing in it. If it did garner any notice, I imagined that it would be negative. I’ve written this book honestly. Really honestly. It reflects my views, which are not the ones generally expected of a person who looks and sounds like me.

It considers issues that are arguably controversial, like skyrocketing diagnoses of neurodivergence, my belief that feminism has become an incoherent ideology, and it criticises the faults in Irish culture —my culture — which exacerbate our worsening social issues and mental health crisis, among other things. Unsurprisingly, the book has annoyed some people — it’s not telling them what they already think, and that’s enough to do it in the current climate. But that in itself is a public service, and it’s about the most I expected of Some Of Our Parts once it went out into the world.

Pride. There on that endless shuttle bus journey — it stalled for about ten minutes atop what smelled like rapidly melting tarmac — I had the realisation that I had shrunk myself. If I decide that the female-coded thing is less, then I make it so. If I decide that it is an honour — likely a once-in-a-lifetime honour to be nominated in a category of outliers, people who connect with their readers and impact how they choose to live in the world — then I make that so. Let me tell you, that is what it is. To find myself there now, so far from the neutral place — acknowledged at home for having made something that reflects my values — is a wonderful privilege. An honour.

I sneeze richly as another slap of pollen passes over my red, turgid nose like the lick of a duelling glove. My nose whistles indecorously in protest at the undue pressure yet another sneeze puts on its already stressed machinery as the shuttle bus judders finally toward the terminal, which is in sight now. It would be a thing of great meaning to win an Irish Book Award, I think. Great meaning. But no matter what comes of that, I have made something that is different. Something that is difficult to place. Something that challenges. ‘Women’s work’. The quiet smile that stretches my pollen-parched lips cracks and stings, and I swear aloud so that the man beside me tuts huffily.

Yeah, awards are probably great, but I’d also like to survive until the end of Australian pollen season. Nothing in life is guaranteed.