Read & Watch: Where'd you go, Bernadette

For Mental Health Awareness Month, we take a look at Maria Semple’s ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’. The book tells the story of a woman trapped between two major problems - one is the traumatic blow her creative life suffered following a professional setback; the other is the frailty of her mental health.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (2012)

Bernadette used to be a pioneering architect and served as an inspiration to many as a lively, brilliant and tenacious woman in a predominantly male-dominated field.

When one of her famous, award-winning houses was bought only to be demolished and used as a parking lot, Bernadette loses her creative vision, ambition and inner strength. In the meantime, her personal life takes several other blows which drive her into an even deeper crisis: the challenge of dealing with fertility problems and miscarriages, caring for a sick child, and the pressures of a crumbling marriage.

Bernadette’s spark and appetite for life come from the interaction with others, from palpable experiences and sitting on the edge of her comfort zone, from novelty, from the rush of discovery and movement. Most importantly, they are all derived from the very act of creating and when this stops, so does her interest in herself and everything else that surrounds her. But her love and interest in Bee, her daughter, never lose intensity. Even when depression, anxiety and agoraphobia are settling in, Bernadette always finds the inner resources to connect with her daughter, to stay present and active in her world - they laugh, joke, and blast their hearts out to 80’s tunes. And while Bernadette may not be perfect, she is Bee’s best friend - “I love Mom just the way she is,” she says.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019) © 2019 Annapurna Pictures, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

When reconnecting with her mentor, Paul Jellinek (Laurence Fishburne), Bernadette receives a piece of advice that encapsulates her story. He tells her: “People like you must create. If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.” This quote highlights the link between Bernadette’s creativity and mental health as two inter-dependent, co-existing facets of her being that will shape her life’s journey.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? isn’t about the pressures of choosing career over family or family over career. It’s not about traditional gender roles or even criticizing architecture’s professional challenges. Instead, this story tells us that we were destined for something, and once we find and pursue that goal, we’re better able to serve both our ideals and those around us.

As Bernadette elopes to Antarctica and rediscovers her love for life and architecture, she doesn’t dismiss or lose sight of the people she loves. She has indeed been blessed with many gifts … and the greatest of all, she knows, is her daughter.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019) © 2019 Annapurna Pictures, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Watch the trailer here:

About Maria Semple

Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Today Will Be Different (2016), Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012) and This One is Mine (2008). Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages. Before writing fiction, Maria wrote for the TV shows Arrested Development, Mad About You, Ellen, 90210 and others.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, an international bestseller, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and made over a dozen year-end best lists. It was short-listed for the Women’s Prize and received the Alex Award from the American Library Association. It was turned into a 2019 film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Cate Blanchett. Today Will Be Different was an instant international bestseller and was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review.

https://www.mariasemple.com/

Hiding Motherhood: on the Maternal Wall Bias in Architecture

Research shows that after returning to the office mothers often experience sidelining, coupled with the overall assumption that they are less committed to their jobs. There is no wonder then that this phenomenon, coined as 'secret parenting' by economist Emily Oster, is becoming an almost spontaneous attitude women recur to in an attempt to preseve their professional image.

One Fine Day, 1996. [DVD] Michael Hoffman, US: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

The 1996 film 'One Fine Day', portrays Melanie Parker, an architect and single mom, struggling to meander through her day while juggling career and parenthood. Leaving aside the unrealistic representation of the architectural office culture, one aspect that drew my attention was the heroine's almost instinctive reaction to hide the fact that the little boy roaming around the office was, in reality, her son.

A 2014 paper in Gender, Work & Organization (Giving Up: How Gendered Organizational Cultures Push Mothers Out), highlights the pressures of the office culture when women sometimes hide their pregnancies well into their third semester, conceal the fact that they have small children or even “pretended their children’s interests were of small importance to them.”

In a long-hours office culture such as that of architecture where the expectations are high, where the permeability of time boundaries is assumed and where the amount of invested overtime is a reason to boast about over the coffee break, it is no surprise that women find it difficult to keep up. An AJ article written by Simon Aldous casts the spotlight on the illegal perpetuation of these conditions, revealing “employers are forcing staff to opt out of the EU Working Time Directive, which enforces an average 48-hour working week.” Leaving aside the unsustainable effects overworking has on the mental well-being of employees regardless of their gender, the bypassing of this directive could also lead to ‘further entrenching the profession’s male domination’. Under these circumstances, the adverse effects on the ability of women to progress in their architectural career become clear, even more so with the 2020 pandemic that puts further pressure on women as the primary caregivers for their children. The long-hour culture becomes a gender equity issue and breaking this bad cycle is critical if we aim to promote equal opportunities while becoming inclusive of those who choose to have children.

With few specifically tailored strategies designed to help re-integrate the returning parent, employers often propose part-time work as a win-win solution. In most cases, however, women find themselves trying to cram more work in fewer hours of allotted time.

Drawing from personal experience, this left me wondering: is the opportunity of working fewer hours per week really a viable form of support for mothers? Research shows that after returning to the office mothers often experience sidelining and demotions, coupled with the overall assumption that they are less committed to their jobs. There is no wonder then that this phenomenon, coined as ‘secret parenting’ by economist Emily Oster, is becoming an almost spontaneous form of tailoring our image to suit the work environment we operate within.

So why would people feel forced to choose a side to demonstrate their commitment to their profession, by minimizing the proportion parenthood actually occupies in their lives? Why pretend children are ‘of little importance’/ a negligible factor to prove they are invested in their work? Why are we scared to acknowledge our child-care obligations openly to our employers?

Hiding parenthood as the moment that completely re-defines not only our schedules but also our general approach and vision of life and therefore work, means we are providing our employers with a false image and limiting our own opportunities to design and access a more flexible working model within the office.

In a nutshell, if we want to see change, mothers and fathers alike should become transparent about the nature of their challenges, about the pressures they face. As she confronts and embraces the reality of motherhood in one of the film’s key scenes, Melanie Parker confronts both her boss and client in the meeting she chose to attend over her son’s soccer game: “Gentlemen, if you're smart, you'll want me as much for my dedication and ability as for the fact that I am going to ditch you right now and I am going to run like hell across town so that my kid knows that what matters to me most is him.” The client looks at her boss and says: “I like her”. Who knows, maybe this is the response we could also trigger if we decide to come clean about who we really are.

'Maiden' - Breaking the mould

[Tarcy Edwards]: My mom always told me, 'If you don't like the way the world looks, change it,' she says. 'So I thought, OK, I will.'

Maiden. 2019. Directed by A. Holmes.

The documentary tells the story of an all-female crew that entered the earth's biggest open sea sailing competition in 1989. Although open sailboat racing was male-dominated sport at the time, Tracy Edwards, the skipper of Maiden, managed to bypass intense backlash received from both an unforgiving media and the men dominating the world of yacht-racing at the time. The general consensus was that all traits and skills essential to becoming a worthy competitor, among which sheer physical power, mental strength, and the ability to think strategically stood in blatant contradiction with the very nature of a woman.

During an interview, Edwards describes sailing as 'one of the last bastions of patriarchy,' and I cannot help but immediately draw the comparison to the professional climate of architecture. At the center of all skepticism that Maiden's crew faced, stood the contradiction between the canonical image of the sailor as the driven, capable, visionary male and the physical and mental 'softness' of the female body. The connection is easy to make. In her article, "The good architect and the bad parent: on the formation and disruption of a canonical image," Despina Stratigakos sheds some light on how the image of the architect was historically constructed and how the female body and brain have been subjected to scrutiny ever since women began aspiring to join the profession. The idealized image of the architect, primarily associated with the qualities of the male body as 'healthy, strong and athletic,' was in stark opposition to that of the 'female and maternal.'

Throughout history, many voices rushed to highlight the reasons women were not biologically and intellectually fit to lend themselves to the job of designing buildings, with some claiming that women who 'misappropriated creative energies that rightly belonged to men, destroyed their femininity' (Stratigakos, 2008). A New York Times article titled "I Am Not the Decorator: Female Architects Speak Out" discusses the women's condition in architectural practice. One of the most potent comments comes from Yen Ha, one of the principles at Front Studio Architects, who discusses the lack of professional credibility she continues to face in the industry:

"We absolutely face obstacles. Every single day. It's still largely a white, male-dominated field, and seeing a woman at the job site or in a big meeting with developers is not that common. Every single day I have to remind someone that I am, in fact, an architect. And sometimes not just an architect, but the architect. I'm not white, wearing black, funky glasses, tall or male. I'm none of the preconceptions of what an architect might be, and that means that every time I introduce myself as an architect, I have to push through the initial assumptions.."

A study carried out in London in 2013, focused on uncovering the reasons why professional and managerial mothers choose to opt-out of their careers. Unsurprisingly, it revealed one of the main challenges mothers face is that of blending into the workplace - "unless mothers mimic successful men, they do not look the part for success in their organizations."

Trying to stay professionally afloat while performing an ongoing balancing act with their personal lives, women keep facing one of the industry's most damaging preconceptions: being a woman and an architect or a mother and an architect for that matter, are mutually exclusive identities which cannot successfully co-exist.

Conversely, it's impossible to overlook Hollywood's influence in carving out the public's perception of the architect's persona as a rational, sophisticated, creatively consumed, white male. While the discussion on the topic of the architect's representation in cinema is broad, I would like to touch upon one of the first movies experimenting with the creation of an on-screen character embodying a female architect. The 1937 comedy 'Woman Chasees Man' focuses on architect Virginia Travis - played by Miriam Hopkins, who delivers a passionate speech to businessman B.J. Nolan as he ponders whether he should give her the commission to build his latest housing project:

"I know what you're thinking that I'm a girl. Yes, Mr. Nolan, but I have a man's courage, a man's vision, a man's attack... For seven years, I studied like a man, researched like a man. There is nothing feminine about my mind. Seven years ago I gave up a perfectly nice engagement with a charming, wealthy old man because I chose a practical career. I left him at the church to become an architect and today I'm ready and he's dead."

As historian Jeanine Basinger points out in her book 'A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women', Virginia takes pride in her efforts to adhere to "a man's vision," and the film draws out its comedic undertones precisely from her chaotic, impulsive, eccentric personality. Most likely, such representations received little attention at the time and were brought on screen purely because the career-hungry woman and even more so, an upcoming of a new species – the woman architect, intrigued rather than inspired.

So how come all these years later, women still use the same old mechanism to cope with male-dominated work environments? Continuing to act like 'one of the boys' and knowingly accepting masculine cultural norms does nothing else but contributes to the entrenchment and normalization of this culture. This exercise of emulating men on a daily basis is not only exhausting, but it pushes at the bottom of the pile the very qualities that contribute to creating a genuinely intellectually-diverse workforce. Women are natural mediators and strategists, excellent communicators, have an innate ability to view problems holistically, and most importantly, they make great leaders because they inspire and motivate other women to succeed.

Being more estrogen-led, women are natural team-players and will relentlessly work together to reach and end a goal. And this is why the story of Maiden remains so compelling decades later. Interestingly, the crew did not feel the need to mimic the attitude and strategy of their male counterparts to look the part for success. Instead, they kept their goal in focus and created visual moments where they played on their femininity, finishing the leg in Florida in swimsuits, having shaved their legs, and done their hair.

In an interview part of the BUILD Series, Tracy Edwards reflects on the episodes of overt sexism her crew had to face and candidly demystifies the self-constructed, heroic image of sailing as a sport:

"I realized this is not just about me navigating, this is about proving that women can race around the world. Because I raced around and it's not that hard - it was like to world's best-kept secret, it wasn't as hard as the guys made it out to be. When we used to sail into port, we didn't want to be male clones, and I think a lot of times, women have to become quite male to get to the top. […] We looked like we had sailed around the corner."

The film celebrates the defiant spirit of all women overcoming gender bias and side-lining in an insular community, proving that they are anything but an unskilled, weak link. As architects and as women, we are in clear need of role-models, and this is an aspect that should be addressed early on, starting with the curricula universities present to their students to the tenure of women in academia. Furthermore, as architects becoming mothers, we are often nervous the image we have worked so hard to construct in order to have our voices heard will fade into the background. While the complexities of addressing such issues in both practice and academia are evident, perhaps it's on us to reveal our own stories and celebrate those of others both within the field of architecture and beyond.