In a corner of her bedroom in a Paris suburb, Emma, the bestselling French comic-book artist who started a revolution over household chores, sits sketching on her computer. “I didn’t study art and I never wanted to be an artist,” she shrugs. “Drawing is a way to get my ideas across.”
The 37-year-old computer science engineer shot to international fame last year after her cartoon blogpost “You Should’ve Asked” went viral. Her drawings showed women submerged under the “mental load”, the invisible burden of constantly having to remember hundreds of tasks, far beyond the already substantial demands of work and ordinary household chores – booking doctor’s appointments, running the family calendar, buying presents, organising contraception, replacing kids’ clothes, the constant anticipating of others’ needs. It’s a feminist concept that has existed for decades, but Emma’s easy-to-grasp cartoon representation of it was a lightbulb moment.
“So many people wrote to me saying they’d been through the same thing: Korean women, Madagascan women, Indian women, women from so many countries,” says Emma, whose first book of comic strips, The Mental Load, is published in the UK this week. “It goes beyond motherhood – lots of women without children are affected by this. And I think it’s a topic that is misunderstood. Even most women couldn’t really conceptualise our exhaustion and explain it.”
She adds: “We had partners who took part in chores, but that didn’t explain our fatigue. There was a need to put a name to this fact of not just doing the tasks, but managing them, of never being able to get checklists out of our head. It’s exhausting. The new conversation around it has freed people up, allowed women to explain to their partners why they were complaining all the time.”
Emma, who keeps her real name private, grew up in a small village in central France with two teacher parents who didn’t push gender roles on to their daughters. As a teenager, she knew what it was like to have drivers beep and leer at her on her way to school, or to be harassed by boys in the playground. But she didn’t discover feminism until much later, when she was pregnant with her son and working in IT for a company in Paris where the male boss would drop pens down women’s tops, or ask female staff to give him a kiss hello.
“I became a feminist very late – at 30,” says Emma. “When I became a mother, I felt people judged me, infantilised me. And at the same time I changed job to a company that was very toxic, seriously sexist.”
She began writing and handing out feminist leaflets at Paris Métro stops before work. One day she added a few drawings and found they got a better response. So she started a blog featuring her comic strips in 2016. She describes herself as an anticapitalist revolutionary whose art is simple but about passing on ideas. She gained a modest following with her cartoons about discrimination, police violence and what she saw as the hypocritical restrictions on the Muslim headscarf in France. Then she posted a satirical take on society’s view of maternity leave in a cartoon called “Holidays”. It begins with a work colleague saying, “You’re going on holiday again! Well, it’s OK for some!”, then flashes back to detail the pain of labour, the anxiety of having a newborn, the torture of sleep deprivation and all the other reasons why: “I suggest you think twice before saying ‘holiday’ instead of ‘maternity leave’.”
“Holidays” increased Emma’s following but when she posted her cartoon “You Should’ve Asked” about the mental load last spring, she hadn’t anticipated the huge response. It was translated into several languages, and has led to international book deals. She has since given up her IT work to focus on her cartoons. Yet the global success of that blogpost has driven home how far society has to go. In Emma’s cartoon, when men tell their overworked partners, “You should’ve asked! I would’ve helped!”, this just pushes women deeper into the role of task-manager, expected to anticipate everything and think for everyone. So she was disheartened to see the media present the idea of the mental load as a women’s problem “that women alone can fix, not with their partner”.
“People actually began marketing books specifically to women on how they could get rid of the mental load,” she says. “Six books came out, all aimed at women, telling women how to organise themselves better. There was even one that gave women a list of phrases to use to ask a husband for help without hurting his feelings.” She was exasperated when companies asked her to join marketing campaigns for cleaners, diets and spa breaks.
The key for Emma is that the mental load is not one individual problem – so-called lazy partners or obsessively organised women. It’s a structural problem in society. Part of the solution would be better paternity leave, and some men have campaigned for this after reading her work. She also thinks it’s about education – not just encouraging women into the workplace but encouraging men to invest more time and energy in the domestic sphere.
Since finishing The Mental Load, she has been working on the “Emotional Load” – the idea that women are constantly having to manage others’ feelings and wellbeing – both in the workplace and the home, often by adapting their own emotions to fit others.
Emma’s cartoons are drawn from her own and her friends’ experiences. A popular one is about a man who comes home from work and disappears straight to the toilet to have a lengthy crap while his exhausted partner is wrangling kids into the bath and then bed. He says he didn’t have time to go to the loo at work or that he doesn’t like the office toilets. “Two friends told me their partners did that. I drew it, and as soon as I put it up, lots of women tagged it saying: ‘Yes!’’”
Some readers assume her drawings are simply about her relationship with her partner. Sometimes she does write about him. But she doesn’t use her work to point a finger. “We don’t argue that much over chores,” she says. “He’s a feminist and he’s very supportive of my work. But nor am I aiming to pretend my relationship is perfect because that would be to diminish other women and make them feel bad. The issue of the mental load exists everywhere in the world.”
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