“She’s got a great job, her teams love her, her children are well-behaved, she always looked perfectly groomed from head to toe, and to top it all off, she’s a supportive colleague. Oh yes, and she’s managed to keep the spark going in her relationship. Plus, she never looks tired. She’s a superwoman!” Such are the heroines of modern times... but they do tend to leave ‘ordinary’ women feeling insecure. Let’s unpick the idea and shake off those unhelpful constructs.
Superwomen: perfect or perfectionists?
The double shift and the burden of guilt
The “superwoman complex” was coined in an article by American columnist Judith Serrin, published in 1976. A “new female malady”, she says, is spreading as more and more women go to work. The symptom? A double shift. The parasitic agent? A feeling of guilt. The prognosis? Certain exhaustion. After-effects: loss of self-confidence and much more. The diagnosis is clear: the superwoman complex prevents women from fully enjoying the rewards of life at work and the independence that should come with it. Wherever they are, they feel they should be somewhere else, and they’re haunted by the impression that they are never fully present, never doing enough.
Always striving to do better, never feeling good enough
A decade after Serrin, Colette Dowling (who already coined the idea of the “Cinderella complex”), picks up the concept. In her book Perfect Women: Hidden Fears of Inadequacy and the Drive to Perform (1988), the psychoanalyst—an expert in internalized inhibitions—sheds light on women’s tendency toward perfectionism and the far-reaching impact it has on their well-being, their personal paths, and their careers.
Dowling believes that women are driven by an insatiable narcissistic urge for self-improvement, expressed both in the relentless pursuit of physical perfection and in the pressure they place on themselves to outperform in every sphere of life.
She suggests that this narcissistic impulse is created by women themselves as they compensate for society’s undervaluing of femininity. In other words, women have an inferiority complex that begins in childhood through an upbringing that does too little to foster girls’ self-esteem. And it’s reinforced in the collective mindset by what Françoise Héritier famously described as the “differential valence of the sexes”. It’s almost as if women are constantly striving to improve themselves, because just merely being a woman will never be enough.
Multitasking superheroines
But what do fictional superheroines have to do with all that?
While the case presented by Serrin and Dowling is well understood (and speaks to a large number of women), one question remains: why associate regular women with superheroines? Because Jerry Siegel’s Supergirl (or William M. Marston’s Wonder Woman) has virtually nothing in common with overwhelmed, guilt-ridden, working mothers. The characters of Lois Lane, Luma Lynai, Kristin Wells, Diana Dearden and Lana Lang from Superwoman comic-book stories have no family home to manage, no to-do list to tackle and no Superman shirt to iron! Her double life means being an ordinary human during the day and saving the world at night.
A superstar of invisible and undervalued work…
Haven’t we sold Superwoman short by equating her with a gifted multitasker of trivial tasks? And by doing so, don't we reduce the scope of our ambition by assuming that for a woman, being a superhero means performing daily chores perfectly? Doubtless, it takes a sense of organization, courage, resilience, patience, and resourcefulness to manage everything, while keeping a smile on your face; and it is quite legitimate to expect recognition for doing this genuinely demanding job that requires real and undeniable talents.
But, in a carefully planned schedule, crammed with a relentless succession of tasks as demanding as they are undervalued, when exactly are we meant to fit in the mission of actively shaping what happens in the world? When are we to implement a grand project that will bring meaningful progress for all humanity? Who will make it into the history books and fire the collective imagination of future generations for having mastered the art of hanging out the laundry? All while replying with the same diligence to emails from their boss, their parents (or in-laws) who want to know how the holiday plans are coming along and whether the family is coming for Sunday lunch (remember to buy a cake on the way), the bank (check the joint account), the school office (the canteen bill needs paying), and so on!
The effects of the superwoman complex on how women project themselves in society.
Guilt, unattainable expectations, and self-censorship
Not content with swallowing up women’s time and energy, the persistent myth of the multitasking woman also works as a powerful self-censorship agent on women who only allow themselves to achieve individual fulfillment if they have satisfied the obligations of the supposed feminine function of household manager.
Since the bulk of these obligations is a bottomless pit, it's a one-way ticket to feelings of guilt: nothing is finished, and nothing is done perfectly.
This fantasy of perfectionism, which Dowling identified as early as the 1980s, is a mountain of unattainable demands. It operates as an industry of discouragement thinly veiled as wishful thinking. Since I’ll never achieve what I want anyway, I might as well put it off—or drop it altogether—consigning what could have been a genuine project to the vast archive of unrealized dreams.
Could we become Supersisters instead?
An instrument of social control over women… and by women?
Looking at the mix of admiring fascination and outright hostility the contemporary Superwoman stirs up, it’s fair to ask whether—like the ‘queen bee’ or the so-called bossy woman—the ‘perfect woman’ isn’t simply a figure invented to serve a purpose: a tool of social control, exercised by women over other women. Isn’t she a stereotypical, if not caricatured, incarnation of what just femininity should be (neatness, morality, elegance…)? Yet she must rein that in so as not to cast a shadow on others. And don’t women take it upon themselves to validate or invalidate the image without men even needing to get involved?
Men are also subject to the social control of masculinity by their own gender. What makes this different, however, is that their superhero myth hunts down signs of weakness and, in doing so, tends to elevate men socially; whereas the superheroine myth as we interpret it today often reduces femininity to trivialities, while fueling a suspicious, if not openly critical, view of successful women.
Let’s build sisterhood to celebrate the diversity of femininity and the uniqueness of each woman
Men rarely welcome one of their own who gives the impression of dominating them. But they won’t accuse them of not being a real man. That idea goes a long way to capturing what fraternity means: it does not mean giving in to indulgence, refraining from all criticism or prohibiting any power dynamic in the name of “gender solidarity”. Fraternity happens when a group accepts other individuals despite their diversity (of style, behavior, or opinions). Each person’s unique traits can be expressed.
In other words, building sisterhood means accepting that women are just as different from each other as any other group of people. Accepting difference in others means you can give yourself permission to accept who you are too, in all your complexity, and allow yourself far more freedom than you would when you’re busy worrying about measuring up to some imagined ideal of femininity.
