Multiple Os

Refusing to be a wife with Sociologist and Coach Jo Van Every (Part 2)

June 11, 2021 Oriana Fox and guest Jo Van Every Season 1 Episode 9
Multiple Os
Refusing to be a wife with Sociologist and Coach Jo Van Every (Part 2)
Show Notes Transcript

Oriana continues her conversation with sociologist and coach Jo Van Every who wrote the book Refusing to be a wife: Heterosexual women changing the family.  In the previous episode, Oriana spoke with Van Every at length about the personal choices she has made to live up to her feminist values in the domestic sphere, informed by her research into anti-sexist living arrangements. Their conversation continues here with Van Every explaining her views on the Tories; the pandemic; homeschooling; doggy daycare; and the ways in which her ethos informs her work as a coach. In this way, they explore the space between personal agency and structural contexts, and while Van Every recognises the need for wider structural change,  she asserts that we do not need to wait for them to happen for things to be better. 

Oriana Fox is an artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show.

Jo Van Every is a feminist sociologist; an academic writing coach; a parent (to a grown kid) and a partner to her unmarried spouse of thirty years. 

Credits:

  • Hosted, edited and produced by Oriana Fox
  • Post-production mixing by Stacey Harvey
  • Themesong written and performed by Paulette Humanbeing
  • Special thanks to Katie Beeson, Janak Patel, Sven Olivier Van Damme and the Foxes and Hayeses. 

Would you like to see your name in the credits list? In a couple of short steps, you can make that happen by supporting this podcast via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/orianafox

Visit www.theoshow.live for regular updates or follow us on Instagram.

“Refusing to be a wife with sociologist and coach Jo Van Every (Part 2)” 

Oriana Fox’s Multiple Os - Podcast Transcript

[Theme music]

Oriana Fox: 

Hello, this is Oriana Fox. Thank you for tuning into Multiple Os, the spin-off podcast for my talk show The O Show. The O Show is a live performance piece that mines the conventions of daytime TV talk shows for all that they’re worth. It features artists and other experts who have little to no difficulty ’spilling the beans’ about their lives and opinions especially when they define norms and conventions. So if you’re interested in candid confessions non-conformity creativity and mental health you come to the right place!

[Theme music]



Hello, welcome to Multiple Os, I’m your host Oriana Fox. Today, I’m going to be sharing with you the second half of the conversation I had with Jo Van Every. So this is part two; it’s a two parter. So if you’re just joining me and Jo Van Every now you’ll want to go back and listen to part one. Jo is a sociologist and coach who wrote the book Heterosexual women changing the family: Refusing to be a wife. And Jo and I, in part one spoke a lot about the practical things that she has done to live by her feminist values. And at the very end of that conversation, it became apparent that that kind of individual, personal politics would benefit from being supplemented by forms of activism. And I asked Jo, what political activism do you think is most important for feminists to be pursuing?



Jo Van Every

I always hate questions like most important, or what’s your favourite.



OF

Maybe, what are some of the some of the, rather than most important?



JVE 

I think one of the things I think one of the ones is really around things like pensions and social, you know, and unemployment benefit, like the all the benefits stuff, 



OF

Yeah, social welfare.



JVE 

Right, like all of that, I think what the Tories have done over, you know, since Thatcher, and we’re now into, like, the late stage of whatever that ideology was, and really seeing...



OF

Neoliberalism.



JVE 

We’re really seeing the implications of it. But, you know, when I first, I remember when I was an undergraduate in the 80s, doing a course about social policy and housing policy and stuff, and reading a figure that’s kind of stuck with me that something like 60% of people in the UK lived in publicly owned housing.



OF

Right? No, I was really surprised by those statistics in your book. 



JVE 

It was very high. And...



OF

Also, the median income was very low in 1990-whatever it was, when you were writing, It was, I was shocked by the number that there was so low what people earned.



JVE 

Yeah, but the public housing thing, right, like, compared to say, the US or Canada were, that’s always been a sort of last resort just for the most needy, right? In this country it wasn’t right, the post war, some massive expansion of publicly owned housing, which meant that, you know, a lot of people, yes, they were renting, but they had security, they had, like, you know, like, they had security of tenure, they were able to decorate their house, you know, like, all of that kind of thing. There were ways that if you had to move somewhere for a job, you could like, swap your council house here for a council house. Right, like, there was a whole system, right. And basically, starting with Thatcher, they started selling all that off, some of it is still in, you know, housing associations. So they’re not publicly owned, but they aren’t privately owned. right there, like, but the but also just the percentage is so much lower, and that whole ideology of the property owning democracy, right? Well, then what you get is this inherent contradiction between you as a homeowner, where your home is actually an investment and the equity matters, and where, you know, the whole way you’re sold the mortgage, and everything else is on the basis that it is going to increase in value, and therefore, you know, blah, blah, blah, right. And the idea that even people that don’t earn very much money deserve to live in good circumstances and have some security of tenure, right? Like that’s an inherent contradiction in this kind of housing policy that’s based around ownership right? And so that now what you have is a lot of private landlords, you have a lot of right. And then and then so all of that happens and then Airbnb like that, just the technological ability that makes it super easy for you to rent your home. Right? And obviously renting it out short term to people on holiday will get you possibly more than having long term tenants and whatever, then all of a sudden, you have this huge crisis in so many places, right? But that’s not because of Airbnb. Airbnb just kind of took something that was already a problem and just blew it up. Like, just like I think, you know, everything we’ve seen in this pandemic, like I don’t think the pandemic broke anything. I think the pandemic is like, have you ever lived in a Victorian house that has wood chip wallpaper? Or friends, right like that wood chip wallpaper? You know that wood chip wallpaper?



OF

What do you mean woodchip wallpaper?



JVE 

Well, it’s like, it’s bubbly, it’s got bits of woodchip embedded in the wallpaper. And it’s like, it’s like a textured wallpaper. It’s in a lot of older homes. Maybe people have started getting rid of it. But the fact is, here’s the rule about it. If you live in a house that has that kind of ugly wallpaper, you should never rip it off. Because what you think is Oh, it’s just wallpaper. I’ll rip it off. I’ll paint the plaster. I’ll put new, right? That wallpaper is holding the wall together 90% of the time. Okay. The reason they use that wallpaper is because the wall was kind of uneven. Right? And so unless you’re prepared to maybe increase your budget to get a guy to come in and plaster skim the whole wall, you never want to take that wallpaper off. You just want to paint over it and live with the fact that it’s bumpy and maybe not the most trendy thing going right. So I tell you this because that’s what the pandemic did, right? I think before the pandemic, we were sitting here thinking, Okay, some things are bad. Maybe there’s a crack, maybe you know, maybe but it’s just superficial. A little bit of poly-filler that’ll fix, it’ll be fine. Right? Pandemic came, riped the wallpaper off. Oh, no, it’s crumbling, actually I have a funny feeling there’s been some subsidence in the whole side of the house is gone. And really the roof’s gonna fall off, dammit. Now I need an engineer and an RSJ. And that’s what’s happened in the pandemic, don’t you think? 



OF

Yeah, that’s very good.



JVE 

Like academic workloads, like the day before. I remember, you know, the day my partner got the email on his phone saying, you know, on Monday, we are going to be teaching remotely. He had been on a picket line, protesting workload. The pandemic didn’t make academic workloads unsustainable. They were already ready so unsustainable, people were prepared to go on strike for them up and down this country. And then, despite that, they were like, Oh, you’ve been on a picket line, but Monday, even though today’s Friday and Saturday and Sunday are technically not work days. But I know you all pretend that you don’t really get weekends. You’re going to be working on Monday in a completely new way. And a completely, right?



OF

Yep. 



JVE 

And then. And then what have we seen, we’ve seen all kinds of women leaving their jobs to look after their kids, we’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen that situation where it’s like, well, it’s impossible to look after your small children do your job. So either it’s women’s careers that are struggling, or they’re the ones that are giving up their careers because oh, but his job is so much more important. It pays the mortgage, mine just pays for the childcare, or the extras, or whatever it is, right. 



OF

[Laughs] Yeah. 



JVE 

And, you know, the money that comes in, it doesn’t have anything written on it. 



OF

It’s fungible. That’s the whole thing about money. Money is fungible.



JVE 

That’s the whole thing about money, right? All that bit about his money being more important than your money, that’s all in your heads. But it’s in our collective heads. And that doesn’t mean that we can just be like, oh, maybe it isn’t, like, it’s actual hard work to make it not have that. But I think what’s really happened is, you know, we’ve seen how much we do value certain things, and, wow, this government really doesn’t. Or, you know, like the whole thing with the nurses non pay rise, right? And how many people even when they were having to say, but you know, they don’t do it for the money. It’s like, I don’t care if they do it for the money. The work is valuable. And the money is how we show how valuable the work is. That’s how capitalism works. Money has a symbolic sort of function. You know, quite on top of the fact that nurses still need to eat. 



OF

[Laughs] Yeah. 



JVE 

So like, it’s Yeah, it’s hard. But yeah. So I don’t know where we got to, we kind of went around in a, you know, and I got it in a bit of a rant about.. 



OF

Oh, yeah, that was a good rant. I appreciated it. But yeah, there was something else because you mentioned having a cleaner and I’ve had cleaners on and off at different points. Now I currently clean my own home. But I do it sporadically. Low standards, as you say. But yeah, and I’ve also had childminders for my children and stuff, but the yeah, that’s what I want to say is that both of the childminders, I had lived in Council flats. So, I felt like and basically how it worked was that I paid them from my earnings, which meant that we ended up earning the same amount. Like, basically it would split my pay in half and I’d get the other half. And so I felt like Okay, so we’re earning the same amount that seems fair for the same number of hours of work, I guess, essentially. But I mean, I could never afford it full time, it was just like, three, two or three days a week, you know, anyway. But they’re basically they’re... So while my housing was subsidised by my partner, their housing was subsidised by the government. So...



JVE 

Yeah, I know, it’s a huge issue. Right? 



OF

But in America, that would not be the case, I mean.



JVE 

No.



OF

She’d be really, or she’d either have to have a partner, he or she, if it was a, you know, could be a male nanny, or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it’d just be, I don’t know just...



JVE 

The structure of the whole thing, like, that’s what I mean about, even when there are choices where you feel like, well, I value this work and I think that if somebody who really enjoys looking after children, which I hope, like, it would be ideal if the people that were doing childcare as a profession, were people who were like, I just really love spending a lot of time with children. Right, like...



OF

Yeah.



JVE 

You know, as opposed to, this is the only thing I can do given the other, you know, whatever, which has some of what’s going on. But if we think about it in that kind of idealised sense, right, it’s like, there’s all these different kinds of work that have to happen, a division of labour is not necessarily a good or a bad thing, right? It’s just, you know, especially if it means that I get to do art, and you get to do a lot of like hanging out with children. I mean, I use daycare for my dogs. And they love it, right? Like, they get stuff out of that, that they would not get with me, because they do. They’re huge and they really like to play with other dogs, but one of my dogs is a bit anxious. So he much prefers to play with other dogs that he really knows already. So daycare is better, because they’re all known dogs. And also, if you’re at daycare, and you’re a big dog playing the way big dogs play, nobody freaks out, unlike in the park. So big dogs playing sometimes looks a little bit scary. But you know, like, that’s the thing. It’s like, they love being with dogs, they love spending all day outside, even in like ridiculous weather, that’s kind of their jam. So they’re basically making a living, looking after other people’s dogs so that the rest of us can, like spend time with our dogs and enjoy our dogs without feeling like we’re not giving them what they need. Whatever, its the same with, you know, so I just and the woman, you know, I think you can think well, yeah, a lot of people are doing cleaning, because they have no options. And they’re being paid really badly, because people are exploiting it. And because as a society, we tend not to value it. And there’s all those things going on. And yet, you know, one of the women, she doesn’t come anymore, but one of the women I met through my knitting group, you know, she has been cleaning, her daughter’s the same age as mine. And she’s been cleaning since her daughter was little, because she was a single mom, and she wanted to pick her kid up. She wanted to pick her daughter up from school, and actually doing cleaning, domestic cleaning, and she takes in some ironing and stuff for people. But that was a way that she could basically earn a living and support herself and her daughter, while still being able to do the things she wanted to do with her daughter. And I think that the gap between housing prices, like the, what’s happened with house price inflation has probably meant that in the 20 years, since she or 24 years since she started doing that, that, you know, the ability to do that has shifted quite a lot, because she does have quite a nice house. But but that comes back to the thing about why are we all in this sort of, you know, housing as investment sort of policy, rather than people need to be able to afford a nice house, even if what they’re contributing to the economy is, you know, cleaning or childcare or whatever, that’s enabling somebody else to do this other thing, right? And so, you know, part of it is, is that, right? It’s like, how do we value this work? You know, why are nurses earning so little like that has nothing to do with whether we should hire nurses or not, that’s got everything to do with, we should value this work better. And so I think that’s, you know, and certainly one of the cleaners, the cleaner, I have now is a fairly young woman with kids, who basically has taken the opportunity of her husband being furloughed to set up her own business, she now hires two other women, right, and she’s been able to do this and you know, and she’s providing employment in the local area, you know, these people are not having to commute to, you know, whatever. And, you know, I think as long as people are being treated well and paid properly, and that kind of thing. So I think one of the problems is, if you feel like I’m gonna hire somebody else to do this work, but I’m gonna really cheap out, I don’t want to pay very much for it. Well, that’s when you need to question yourself. Yeah. But yeah, I think that’s part of it. Right is like, and I think there’s also the question of, you know, how did paying for the childcare end up being about enabling your work as opposed to enabling both of you to work. We all have children and children need. So I’ve never been to like I said, my kids went back went to nursery before I went back to work. And she stayed full time, even when I was working four days. And part of it is that I just think daycare, you know, well, just like the doggy daycare is good for my kid. Going to daycare was good for my daughter. Now, not all kids really like that social environment. But I never was like I need it to be like it would be if she was home alone with me. It’s more like she gets stuff from daycare that I cannot give her.



OF

Yeah, well, the social interaction with other children is really important. 



JVE 

Yeah, friends, but also just people spending time. 



OF

People paying attention to them who like, really know, like, care about...



JVE 

Because if you’re a stay at home mom, you’re not actually sitting on the floor playing with your kid all day or are you like, could you go do some things while I like get the laundry done, you know, whatever. And so it’s like that, right? And, you know, again, like for some women, that whole thing, they love that they’re really focused right? It just wasn’t me. And it doesn’t mean I’m not, I’m a bad mother, I’m just a different kind of mother. 



OF

Yeah. 



JVE 

And I often like, and I had the financial ability to write checques for things. So some of the way I mother is like, oh, somebody else is organising me, let me write you a checque so my daughter can join in? 



OF

Yeah.



JVE 

You know, other people just really love organising stuff and either don’t have the money to write the checque, or would rather organise it, then pay somebody else to do it. I’m like, fantastic. You’re organising a group thing. You know, that was kind of 90% of my homeschooling strategy. She made some great friends. Because people would hire, we lived in a city with a couple of universities. So it’s like, when the kids were teens, it’s like somebody would be like, oh, there’s a grad student that could teach like a little six-week thing about Pride and Prejudice. Who wants to go? And I’ll set it all up and I’ll pay them and you know what I mean? Like, I actually organised, one of those once, got a guy to do something and he loved it, it was a great opportunity for him. He got to spend this time teaching in a thing that wasn’t about, you know, you have to meet these kind of things and grade things. No marking, just can you engage with these kids about ideas around this? They were doing King Lear at the theatre, and they used an entirely indigenous cast. And he had both an English degree and was in and doing some Indigenous Studies. I’m like, can you just do some stuff with like a group of teens once a week and then go to the play with them at the end? He’s like, awesome and you’ll pay me? You know what I mean, wouldn’t you love all your teaching to be like that?



OF

Yes. 



JVE 

High on itellectual engagement, low on bureaucratic bullshit. Woo hoo! What’s not to like? So yeah, so yeah. So I don’t know, I think that’s part of the thing about that conflict between what you’re able to choose and what the structure makes easier or harder, and the compromises you’re willing to make around, do I want to have this fight to say that these are his kids, and he needs to pay the daycare? I’m not judging you for not having that argument, I’m just saying,



OF

No, we have we have. Like I said, our only argument is that argument, you know, is around this question. But we have this breakthrough, where as I was saying, we had this breakthrough, with our usual fight due to the lockdown, which at first made it worse, but then having to confront that we kind of got over a snag in our arguments, because I had to homeschool by default, our kids, and which I don’t think, I might add, I don’t think I did a great job at because, and I’m really impressed with what you’ve described so far that you provided for your own daughter.



JVE 

One of the issues is whether you’re in control of what you’re doing in homeschool or whether you’re doing what the school is telling you to do, or whether you’re completely like,



OF

I was like completely off on a limb. The school did nothing at that on the first lockdown. The school didn’t do anything really hardly anything to support us. They gave us a like a ridiculous list of things to do that was completely unrealistic.



JVE 

But also wasn’t a choice you made right? It wasn’t like you thought, Oh, this isn’t working, what could we do instead? And you didn’t have like an a friend who has enabled so many things in your life, but who then went and did a bunch of Google research and sent you loads of online resources about how you could organise it. You didn’t have like an email list of other people that have made this choice and were already on the journey who were able to answer you’re questions. You didn’t have any of what I had, right? 



OF

The lucky thing that I had was like a job that all the workload is like primarily in the beginning half of the year and therefore I had very little actual work interfering with my time with my children.



JVE 

That was good. 



OF

That was lucky, but at the same time that was just fueled the resentment to my partner who wasn’t having to do any of that...



JVE 

Yeah. 



OF

...because he his full time job just continued, you know, online. So, yeah, I mean, it was like, I just like there were a lot of arguments to begin with, like, just me wanting him to recognise that this was having a bigger negative impact on me than it was on him. Like I just like I don’t, I understand that we can’t necessarily change anything about this, but I want you to recognise that this is what’s happening.



JVE 

Those are those arguments I was talking about, right? Yeah it’s like, I don’t care if you do this or not, I want you to notice that I did it. 



Yeah. [Laughs]



[Laughs] I would like it not to be taken for granted and invisible.



OF

Yeah, this is the time of year that I normally would work on my own artistic projects, and like my book proposal, or whatever it is that I would be working on. It’s my work and this is the time I have in the year to do that and that has been sacrificed for, because of the pandemic. And it’s like, I want you to recognise that and appreciate this, as opposed to, you know, just going on your computer every day and ignoring. Yeah, anyway.



JVE 

I know. It’s hard. And like, yeah, that’s that’s the thing. It’s like, could you notice and let me know that you noticed? Like, that’s the hardest argument ever? 



OF

Yeah.



JVE 

Right.



OF

It’s also like, if there’s an impact on, you know, well, because there’s, yeah, in my work, there’s not a lot of external validation going on. You know? And so if he, if he belittles it, or doesn’t, or undervalues it, it like feeds into that self doubt, you know, self deprecating thoughts and stuff. And I’m just like, it’s hard enough to motivate in the face of, you know, a paucity of external rewards. And now I’m gonna face you belittling, or making me feel like what I do is worthless, because it doesn’t earn or whatever it is, you know, it’s like, yeah, this is just compiling. I finally got that through to him, like in this more recent, I don’t know, few months, I was just like, recognise this dynamic that’s going on. That it’s just, anyway.



JVE 

Yeah. So so one of the things as well, like, you were saying, does your partner do any like, so when we so we, they, we were then working, and then he did a four day week thing. And we actually bought a small holding that was outside of the city, and he was home more, and he did a lot of stuff. I mean, we were pretty like unschooling in our approach. We weren’t really structured in a lot of ways. But he did a lot of things. So like, I mean, he has A-level French, and you know, his grammar and stuff is loads better. So he’s the one that taught her French, right, which, you know, they did by reading things, like, you know, what’s the, Le Peintre de la vie Moderne, that sort of thing in French. Because, you know, she was interested in art and so let’s...



Oh, right, The Painter of Modern Life by Baudelaire. 



Yes, she reads Baudelaire in French to learn, because she’s interested in French and modernity, and all that kind of thing is so.



OF

Great.



JVE 

You know, you don’t do that in school. But you know, so he did a lot of that stuff, you know, so we kind of did all that sort of together. And also sort of, she did a lot of stuff on her own. Or, you know, I wrote cheques, and she went to things and I drove her around. 



OF

So, when I looked you up, when I like, googled you, or whatever, when I first got the book out of the library, I noticed that you’re coaching at the time, or it seemed to be directed at people who wanted to move out of academia in into some other kind of, applying their academic, whatever. 



JVE 

Yeah, there was a little period. Yeah.



OF

Yeah. And that’s what particularly, I was like, oooh, that might be me. 



JVE 

Yeah, I don’t do that anymore. 



OF

Why don’t you do that anymore?



Unknown Speaker 

So I kind of took a while, like, I’ve cycled through a few things, I kind of had an idea what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t really define it. And it was. So it took me a while to figure out what the specific coaching thing is. So for me now, it’s more about people who are in academia and helping them make that job work better for them and not sort of burning out while they’re doing it. Like, you know, I spent a lot of time encouraging people that it’s okay to take the weekend off and not to work evenings, to actually take your holidays and figure out what you can say no to and all that kind of thing. And again, it’s one of those things, right? Different people have different choices. Sometimes the choices you have are not all great. And so in a way, it’s more about aligning as much as you can your values with the values of the institution and figuring out what room for manoeuvre you have. And really deciding whether this is where you want to be or whether you just need to be doing something completely different. But it’s about not just being like oh, this is what’s needed of me I have to become this thing in order to learn this money and to really kind of take some of those questions about academic freedom seriously, as opposed to treating it as, however some people are treating it. I really don’t want to get into that. But I think there is something about, you know, what’s attractive about the job to a lot of people is the autonomy. And then they spend a lot of time being like, but somebody has to lower my workload. It’s like, well, you know, one of the things is that you have to just sometimes you just have to do it yourself. And your perfectionism is getting in the way. And nobody’s ever going to make your workload so that you can do everything to your perfectionist standard without burning out. That’s kind of like, you know what I mean, and that’s a contradiction nobody can do anything about except you, and maybe a therapist. I’m not a therapist, I’m a coach, I can help you catch yourself and figure out a different way to take that thought and how to act in a way that is, you know, more in line with where you want things to be. But, you know, I, like there’s just a, right? So that’s kind of where I am now. And I’m doing, you know, I’m really enjoying it. And people are writing and they’re finishing things, and they’re doing things and they are almost all women, and many of them have children. It’s not like I advertise it as women only or anything, and there are men and I do have some raving fans who are men, but almost all of them are women. And I think that’s partly just about willingness to ask for help, or might be an indication of how just bloody overwhelmed women are.



OF

Right? Yeah, I bought this book actually called I think it’s called Overwhelmed. The book is called Overwhelmed: How to work love and play when no one has the time. And it’s by Bridget Schulte. It’s super relevant, obviously, to the topic of the podcast, it’s just about how everybody is like, you know, busy, it’s like the buisiness epidemic or whatever. Yeah, you know, people in Montana are busy, you know. But yeah, she’s looking at it from like, a feminist perspective. And she finds that Denmark and their kind of social welfare system to be the one or their kind of ethos around work and, and life, work/life balance is the one that all of us should be trying to mirror. But obviously, you know, there’s always that point that people make about the scale of, you know, Denmark is a relatively small country, and therefore places like...



JVE 

It’s also about the history and about the culture and about, you know, it’s not like, we can just be like, oh, here’s the thing, we’ll just take it off the shelf and it’ll fit with us. It’s like, yeah, no. 



OF

Yeah.



JVE 

you know, it’s just...



OF

One of the statistics or facts in the book that really struck me was that it’s women who work part time in order to, you know, have time for their kids. They work the most hours of anybody like 



JVE 

Yep. 



OF

Yeah, so I thought that was like, Oh, yeah. Yeah, that sucks. 



JVE 

And it’s partly because, you know, we have this thing.



OF

and they also feel like they’re not doing really well in either one you know. [ring tone] Is that telling you you to do something else? 



JVE 

Yes. 



OF

What is the other thing you have to do? 



JVE 

I am talking to my own coach. 



OF

Oh, okay. Yo’u’re a coach with a coach? 



JVE 

Yes. 



OF

The plot thickens. 



JVE 

The plot thinkens. I mean, it’s been fun talking to you. 



OF

Yeah, it’s been really nice talking to you, too. I’m trying to think, Oh, yeah, I did want to say this, like I was just gonna plug, do a little plug for you, which is that you can get a hold of used and new copies of Jo van Every’s, out of print tome, Refusing to be a wife, which will shorten it to via the web, and there’s also an ebook version available. And if you want to know about her academic coaching services, go to Jovanevery.co.uk, where you’ll find loads of helpful advice and information for free, as well as details of her paid services. So check those out.



JVE 

Thank you very much. It was lovely to talk to you and I’m glad somebody has read my book and thought about it and wanted to talk to me about it and all of that, because, you know, if there’s any academics listening, I would just say, you know, it happens in weird ways. Sometimes people do read that thing you think nobody’s gonna read. And they read it like 20 years after you published it when it’s no good to any of your promotion things anymore. But, you know, that wasn’t the only reason any of us wrote it.



OF

That’s true. Thank you. That’s a very good point to make. Yeah. Okay. So thank you. Thank you again, and I’ll let you go. 



JVE 

Okay. Bye. 



OF

Bye. 



There you have it, folks. That is the conclusion of my discussion with Jo Van Every which had a kind of post-script via emails between us in which she said the following. It was about wanting to connect up her feminist research with what she does now. The connection is that, and I’m quoting Jo here: “my feminist principles guide, how I do my work. The services I provide, to a vast majority of women clients, help them figure out how to do meaningful work without just making that the only thing in their lives. So while we focus on academic writing, finding and protecting time for it, using that time effectively, the way I do that is to acknowledge that, for example, choosing to have children was not a bad choice, or taking time to look after elders is not an unreasonable thing”. So that was Jo talking about her practice. And then she goes on to say, “the other consistency is being in this space between personal agency and structural contexts. I’m not doing a lot of activist work, but my work is helping other women find the limits of their own agency, and power to create the conditions that make things better for some other women. Because while what we can do individually is limited, it’s not insignificant. We don’t need to wait for bigger structural changes to happen for things to be better”. So yeah, I think that was a really helpful and positive note to end this podcast with. The other thing that we went on to have an email exchange about apropos of our conversation was that I’m not just an academic trying to fit in my academic writing, with my teaching job, but I’m trying to fit in academic writing and art. And I was thinking, well, I’ve also always thought that my backup plan would be to be a therapist. And so I was thinking, well, maybe one day I’ll be a coach to some other people like me who are balancing these different, who are juggling between being artists, academics, teachers, and parents, or other caregiving responsibilities. So that could be a path for me, because maybe I’m, well, I’m certainly the person that needs that coaching. And since Jo has a coach, then maybe I could be a coach with a coach doing that coaching. Just a thought. So perhaps she has helped me to change my career, even though she says she’s not, that’s not her forte. So yeah, so maybe this conversation with Jo Van Every has changed my life. I hope it’s changed yours. But if it hasn’t, then I’ll go on accepting myself unconditionally, my life and other people, and I hope you will too, because we’re all just fallible human beings. 



Next time on Multiple Os, I’ll be speaking with the writer, filmmaker and cultural critic, Juliet Jacques. We’ll be speaking about her memoir Trans, but also her new book Variations, which has just come out, hot off the press. So that’s something to look forward to, Juliet Jacques.



Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to support this series, and all my other creative endeavours, please support me via patreon.com/orianafox.