As I entered my teenage years, I found myself revisiting my childhood. At thirteen, I built and decorated a dollhouse with the help of my neighbor. To accompany the task of gluing wallpaper, placing shingles, and staining wooden floorboards, I listened to Carly Simon’s discography. Simon’s grounded voice and nostalgic lyricism paired perfectly with my sudden childhood recollections.
Now, as I venture into my 20’s, Simon’s music has become all the more relevant to my experience. Her songs expose the limiting expectations placed among young women under the heteropatriarchy whilst stirring up a nostalgia for childhood that has never felt more distant. Simon’s ability to elicit these feelings is a talent deserving of recognition.
Carly Simon’s Way it should be
It is impossible not to notice the messaging ingrained within every medium that tells women how to be. In Simon’s 1971 song That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be, she reveals a complicated feeling towards the dominant assumption that marriage is the ultimate purpose of dating. She stresses the tiresome pattern of dating to live together, to marry, to have a family. Simon’s depictions of unhappily married couples distances her from the widely embraced narrative. This critique of what defines a meaningful relationship is refreshing to hear.
The dominant narrative that women should be wives and mothers grows increasingly louder the older I get. Domesticity becomes the ideal. The source of these expectations can be found hidden among the materials we encounter.
A Mother’s Magazines
I tiptoe past the master bedroom where my mother reads her magazines
https://genius.com/Carly-simon-thats-the-way-ive-always-heard-it-should-be-lyrics
Most magazines are funded by advertisements. So naturally, many magazines have historically profited from the patriarchal definition of ideal “femininity.” Carly Simon’s description of her mother reading magazines makes a subtle nod to cyclical consumption of how a woman should be.
I scroll Instagram and Tik Tok and am confronted with so many ways that a woman should be. “Day’s in the Life” seem like literal rule books of how to exist. There are right foods to eat and wrong foods to eat, right ways to have a body and wrong ways. I constantly consume conflicting definitions of how to be me.
Carly Simon has shown me that there is no rule book. When I cease to consume these definitions, I may begin to break the cycle of accepting a definition of a woman that isn’t mine.
A girl’s Dollhouse
Our made up characters were us, and we were them; they gave us life, and in return we gave them desires and destinies.
Boys in the Trees by Carly Simon (19)
As I re-examine my childhood memories I notice how intertwined domesticity has been to my imagination. Growing up, the location of my imagination was a miniature home filled with a miniature family. I delighted in the family dynamics created by the distinct personalities that each doll had. Within the dollhouse, my imagination refused limitations. I could test the boundaries that were so firmly set within life through play.
Carly Simon’s nostalgic voice provides me with access to my childhood. I become closer to my girlhood: the most authentic version of myself.
Simon’s Pathway to ME
As my awareness to the all-consuming patriarchal ideals grows stronger, it is crucial that so to does my sense of self. For me, Simon’s music does just this. So, whenever the messaging becomes all consuming, I always find myself back at square one with Carly Simon.