Miel, the example you quoted interested me for several reasons worth mentioning at length. I notice most of the posts here tend to be short, so I hope I'll be forgiven a very long post.
Yes, it's a good example of how some women can undermine another woman's self esteem and goals by judging her negatively for being a poor cook or housekeeper. Or a "bad mother," which you didn't say, but it is implicit in what you said about women who would rather devote time to something else, such as a career. Fair enough, point taken!
However, I don't see anything uniquely "Western" about women cooking or caring for the home. Women do these things pretty much the world over: in Russia, China, Japan, the Mideast, South America... In Mumbai wives at home cook lunch for their husbands while the renowned dabbawala service delivers these "tiffin boxes" to their husbands who work in the city.
More relevant. when women criticize other women for "falling short" of certain standards, it's not "men's rules" they're enforcing, but women's rules and women's standards, far more than men's. I grant of course that plenty of men would grumble if their wives didn't put food on the table, or left the house in an unholy mess. But that's a lower level of expectation.
Take cooking for instance. Plenty of women love cooking--like the sister-in-law I mentioned in a recent post (and many others too). Many women "bond around" cooking, among other activities, the way men "bond around" more typically male topics, from cars to carpentry. Of course individuals vary widely, and I do realize some women hate to cook and just see it as a chore.
However, the point I'm making is that men by and large are happy enough as long as food tastes good and fills their stomach. It's more often women who are concerned with the finer points not only of cuisine, but especially, of nutrition, whether food is "healthy," the calories and carbs and possible toxic ingredients and all the rest of it. Women read the warning labels, while men gobble down what's inside regardless. (A stereotype, as with all "gender" things, but a tendency nonetheless.) Come to that, there are some men who are irritated by their wives' insistence on serving "healthy" food and prefer to eat junk food!
This doesn't have to be "Western" either. I ran across this from a Saudi woman who is fluent in English, working in business, with little time to spare in her life, who just the same feels compelled to fulfill what she sees as her domestic responsibilities:
Now... most Saudi women have their maids cook for them... my husband doesn?t really mind, but I cannot think of a woman, who is a total stranger to cook for me and my family and transfer her energy to them! Besides, I?m an excellent cook and I?m a really picky eater. I want my husband and kids to eat clean, tasty, and healthy food. I don?t want to be under the control and mercy of a maid, who might decide to leave all of a sudden and who is basically not a trained cook nor a professional house manager; she is just a helper at home. It?s my house and my family, and I?m responsible for them.
Her sense of responsibility, her natural need for control over her domain, and her pride in doing things well all stand out. And she makes it clear that this is not something her husband is "forcing" her to do. These urges come from inside herself, no matter how "patriarchal" Mideastern culture may be compared with our own. (I have to admire her for that.) And if somebody criticizes a woman--complaining for example that "she's not feeding her kids properly"--it's more likely to be another woman rather than a man who does that.
The point seems clearer still when it comes to housekeeping. Generally speaking, women like to keep a neat, clean and attractive home, even when they're living alone, so men have nothing to do with it. Men of course appreciate that, but here again, men's standards on average are lower. A typical "bachelor pad" is likely to be cluttered, less elegant, and most important of all, dustier and dirtier. Research has confirmed that women have less tolerance for dirt than men do. Some theorize that the evolutionary basis for this is the avoidance of pathogens to which children are particularly vulnerable, since women have always been more involved in child and especially infant care.
So if a woman criticizes another woman for failing to keep an immaculate home, it's women's standards she's enforcing, not men's. In any case keeping a fine home can be one way that women compete with other women for status. Some women are downright "houseproud" in ways that actually irritate their husbands. who are told "don't do this, don't do that; you'll make a mess." Generally a man wouldn't care if his hostess's house was not completely spotless. But there are women who would draw a finger across their hostess's mantelshelf and remark to a friend "Look at that! She doesn't even dust!" I couldn't imagine a man doing such a thing. Women's instincts, women's standards, women's rules. People have standards for their own sex that they expect other members to uphold, and look down on those who fall short. With men it's things like being "tough," and a man who isn't "tough enough" is a "wimp" or a "sissy." Women have standards for themselves in quite different areas, including cleanliness. Anyway all this fits with my earlier conjecture that the meme related to the well-known observation that "women's worst critics are other women."
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In spite of all that, it turns out that's got nothing to do with the meaning of the meme. I suspected all along that there was something behind it that was not being explained. So in the end I Googled it and found it was only the first sentence of a more complete quotation. It's on a poster here, but I won't display it because it's too big and overflows the screen. It's from the journalist and author Sophia A. Nelson (born 1967), who said this:
Be a woman other women can trust. Have the courage to tell another woman direct when she has offended, hurt or disappointed you. Successful women have a loyal tribe of loyal and honest women behind them. Not haters. Not backstabbers or women who whisper behind their back. Be a woman who lifts other women.
So that explains Candy's remarks about "confrontation" and so on that I couldn't make sense of before. Obviously I had a mental block. In my mind if someone had offended me there were only two alternatives: to confront, or not to confront. (Echoes of Hamlet's "to be or not to be.") It didn't occur to me that there was a third alternative: namely, to go dragging third parties into a petty and purely personal dispute between two people. I suppose I might grumble to someone else; but grumbling is just grumbling, a mere venting of feelings that stops there. This is about something more: about triangulating third parties into the dispute and actively whipping up hostility against the offender, orchestrating a kind of "vendetta by proxy." Not a nice practice at all, especially since the target doesn't know she's being targeted or why, and what to do about it. I certainly agree that people who do this are not to be trusted. At least tactful confrontation is honest.
