The headline on Gaby Hinsliff’s article (19 April) reads “Meghan’s gone from royal upsetter to tradwife in three short years. Given what’s out there, you’d do the same”.
Well, no, I wouldn’t. I’d just erase myself from the public eye: the one thing she cannot or will not do. For the problem reflected in this article is not jam – Meghan Markle’s or anyone else’s. Jam is not the problem. (Which may or may not be a line from Taylor Swift’s new album...)
The problem is that the public eye is ruinous. Especially for women. Plenty of women work 50-hour weeks as business consultants or professors and simultaneously do whatever we do at home, trad-wifey or otherwise – playing music, making jam, growing tomatoes, raising children.
But because we don’t do it on Instagram or the pages of the tabloids, neither sphere gives a damn about the other. Hence both careers and qualities-of-jam remain unjudged and unaffected.
Pleb that I am, I cannot have it all, but I can have my high-powered career, my lumpy craft pottery and my homegrown greengage jam. Pity Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama, who apparently cannot.
Dr Catherine Merrick
Sawston, Cambridgeshire
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