Are you “a perfectly healthy woman, a mother with a thousand eyes and a thousand hands”?

What the young bride Pucki aspired to in 1935 would today fall under the terms multitasking and self-optimisation. Between overwhelm and devotion, women have long been masters of navigating contradictory expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to juggle family, career and household responsibilities simultaneously; on the other, women were once denied access to universities because female brains were supposedly incapable of handling several tasks at the same time (Sex in Education, 1873).

How do these ideas about the “nature of woman” fit together? Where do the images come from that shape our understanding of femininity and women’s lives?

In the dance performance fem:me, the artists’ collective DIPHTHONG engages with the prevailing images of women from the 1950s and contrasts them with the realities of women’s lives. Through a journey across time, guided by literary reference points, the performance reflects on the creation, reception and resonance of a social role model.