The Christmas Lament of the Oppressed Woman

Everything you need to survive Christmas is between the first and second pages of “Life Among the Savages”, a book by Shirley Jackson that Adelphi has just published to coincide with that annual event which is the Christmas lament of the oppressed woman.

I’m not on par with Daria Bignardi’s work, so I don’t no if she has already published the most popular of her formats this Christmas. The one in which Daria Bignardi, who has a career and grown-up children and I imagine service personnel, places the back of her hand on her forehead and invites women to rebel against domestic slavery.

I quote from memory from the replies of previous years: don’t do anything. Don’t collect socks, don’t wash dishes, don’t run after husbands and children who sow disorder. And all the Cucuzzaro: love each other, you count, holidays are holidays for you too. The smug feminism of those who have found thier rights is more pleased with nothing than posing as a victim of patriarchal harassment.

bignardi does very well,let’s be clear: she has my approval and even my envy. The female public wants to hear “poor thing, if it wasn’t for the dishwasher to unpack you would have won the Nobel”, and she writes: poor thing, if it wasn’t for the dishwasher – etc.

This year the copy even the New York Times, who, having a bit of a sense of the ridiculous, puts her most significant achievement as a biography of the Bignardian author: «Mrs austin invited the family to her home for Christmas dinner from 2003 to 2023». At first she liked it, says Elizabeth Austin. But then the gap between his abilities and other people’s expectations widened.

But she couldn’t say that dinner was no longer held at her house because,she illustrates with a bigardic image,the role of the one who invites you to the holidays had calcified around her like plaster around a fracture. And of course the males of the family don’t notice, those brutes.

Elizabeth Austin doesn’t say, as a thirty-year-old on Instagram would, “loaded with care work,” but that’s clearly what she means when she complains that yes, her brother wanted to be useful, but he didn’t realize that it would be worse if he put the responsibility of answering the question “should I open the white or the red?” on her.

We also have the curse of the firstborn, which has been all the rage among victim concepts lately, almost as much as the burden of care work and the harassment of the patriarchy. The firstborns, these guardians of tradition on whom falls the responsibility of keeping family traditions alive, the emotional labor, the fear that the social construct will collapse if they stop doing everything. It’s clear that I’m not the firstborn, it’s clear that I’ve always been lied to.

How does Elizabeth Austin’s drama end? That his brother and sister-in-law