The worst thing you can call a woman these days is a ‘Karen.’ Their entitled raging strikes fear into the hearts of unsuspecting customer service workers everywhere, and “I will speak to the manager,” has been memeified across the internet.

I have laughed at these memes and clapped at the countless videos that chronicle the haughty rise and abrupt fall of Karens as they are banned from stores. I vicariously live through these moments; a balm to my personal experiences with Karens throughout my long career as front-line staff.  The first of my memory was working at the front desk for a little museum where a woman demanded a refund for the tour she’d already completed. I’d only been in the job a month and had no idea what our refund policy was. The day was busy and several other patrons were waiting for me to take their admission, and I explained to Karen that I’d have to ask my boss, who was in the middle of a phone call in her office upstairs. But Karen demanded I refund her money immediately as she had places to go and just needed her money back. I asked her again to wait so I could take care of the other patrons and get my boss. She began to yell that I was withholding her money; she needed her money now. There was a moment where the waiting patrons and I locked eyes as Karen bellowed about my rudeness and unprofessionalism at brushing her off for others.

Where was this behavior coming from? Why was she losing her mind? The tour was $5.00 a person. Less than the price of a movie ticket. Probably less than the Starbucks latte she’d bought that morning. And when my boss finished her phone call, we could sort it out. But Karen stomped around the visitor’s center, screaming about my incompetence, and trying to climb the stairwell to my boss’s office. My boss came down, and after enduring the shouted demands, handed the woman $10.00 for the two tickets, which Karen pocketed like Gollum’s Ring and continued to shout at me as she left. I think it says a lot that I can still hear the exact tenor of her voice decreeing my ‘rude incompetence’ a whole decade later.

But I write here not to bury the Karen, but to perhaps shed a sympathetic light on a burgeoning phenomenon that haunts the memories of customer service workers everywhere. As with any bad behavior, maybe there’s a diamond of a righteous cause underneath the charcoal surface. It’s not really about the $10.00 refund, but something bigger.

If we look at the rise of the Karens in the context of the history of feminism, perhaps we can appreciate them as the latest expression of women buffeted by double standards about assertiveness, independence, and strength. In preparing to talk to my students about the short story, “A Mother” in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, I stumbled across an essay suggesting that perhaps the way I’ve read it (and taught it) for the past few years has been completely wrong.

In the story, the main character, Mrs. Kearney is approached by a theater manager, Mr. Holohan, to have her daughter play piano accompaniment for a four-night concert series at his theater. Mrs. Kearney graciously accepts, and stipulates out a contract for her daughter’s payment, to which Mr. Holohan agrees. To assure her daughter’s professional success, Mrs. Kearny takes over the planning of these concerts, right down to the programs’ typeface. Joyce goes to great lengths in the first few paragraphs to set up Mrs. Kearny as a strict woman of great musical talent who has social standing in the community, and wealth and education behind her. Mrs. Kearny is a competent woman, a smart woman; a woman who is immensely capable of pulling off this great production. As the story progresses and the concerts begin, Mrs. Kearny is disgusted by the lack of talent in Holohan’s performers and the small audience and tells him as such. She becomes more upset as each concert progresses, and when she finds out Mr. Holohan will be canceling one performance, she approaches the manager to make sure her daughter will still be paid the full amount. He rebuffs her and she demands to speak to his manager, the theater owner.

He promises he’ll bring the matter to the theater’s committee, but no one will give Mrs. Kearny an answer. She demands that “I have my contract, and I intend to see it carried out.” (Joyce, 44) When Mr. Holohan still won’t answer her, Mrs. Kearney refuses to let her daughter play until she’s been paid. Mr. Holohan agrees to pay her half, and then the rest at the end of the weekend. This is not good enough for Mrs. Kearney, as not only has she been given the run-around, but she personally did all the planning for the event. The argument devolves quickly into an adult tantrum with her loudly exclaiming, “I’m not done with you yet!” (Joyce, 77) Mrs. Kearney’s dialogue here brought me immediately back to the museum’s front desk where a woman about Mrs. Kearney’s age demanded her $10.00.

I’ve read “A Mother” multiple times, and I’ve always looked at Mrs. Kearney as one of the original Karens. She married her rich husband for the practical purpose that he had money, and then used that money to satisfy her own personal interests and her daughters’ education. She managed her daughter’s potential music career by making contracts with the local theater and taking over the concert planning, then caused a massive disturbance when she felt her daughter hadn’t been paid appropriately, before the contract was even completed. With a few modest substitutions, we can imagine Mrs. Kearney as a 21^st century suburban terror, snarling at a beleaguered coach to turn her field hockey playing daughter into team captain. 

But essayist Elizabeth Gavin has a different perspective on Mrs. Kearney, and one that fits much better with Joyce’s literary subtlety. One of the hallmarks of The Dubliners is that the surface of what’s being said is a foil for the real purpose of the story. A character who is described as ‘bad’ may very well be ‘good,’ in reality. And therefore, Joyce’s Karen, as Gavin suggests, may not be the self-centered, manager-seeking mother she’s made out to be, but someone who is simply demanding she and her daughter be paid for their time. After all, Mr. Holohan agreed to the contract. They used Mrs. Kearney’s social standing and connections, her daughter’s talents, and her planning expertise without hesitation. But at the end, her contract may be in danger of not being honored. Mr. Holohan won’t listen to her or take her feelings seriously.

Reading this through a feminist lens, Mr. Holohan has probably not suffered from someone paying him less than he deserved under circumstantial changes, and so has no contextual understanding for why Mrs. Kearney needs to be paid ‘right now.’ However, it is very possible and mostly probable that Mrs. Kearney has dealt with broken contractual promises many times in her life and knows from personal experience that her daughter is in danger of being taken advantage of, as she feels personally taken advantage of in putting so much work into a concert series that, in her opinion, miserably failed.

This interpretation of “A Mother” assumes additional force when we place it in history. Ireland in the nineteen-teens had not yet given women the vote, nor could they own property, run a business alone, or work in any job outside teachers and maids. A woman’s place was to be squarely in the home, raising children and taking care of her husband. Mrs. Kearney is pushing the envelope; she may not vote or own property, but she wields her education and influence to secure a career for her daughter that is outside the usual feminine sphere.  It’s a situation eerily similar to contemporary Karens more than a century later. The difference, perhaps is that the Karens of today can vote, own property, and work a job of their choosing, and so can their daughters. But, has the societal view of women and their ‘place’ really changed? Is the “I will speak to your manager,” less a demand and more a plea to be taken seriously? 

When I think of my own mother and mother-in-law, both in their early sixties, and cringe at the Karen tendencies they display every so often, I have to equally remind myself that while they are products of the generation emerging from the women’s liberation movement, they were raised in the highly gendered family structures of the 50s and early 60s. When I was first married, my mother-in-law was horrified to find out that I did not provide meals for my husband. She thought it was because I hadn’t been taught how to cook. The reality was that my husband is perfectly capable of cooking for himself, and I was not contractually obligated to provide him food based on my gender. There was a curious spark in her eye the night we had this conversation. It was clear it had never occurred to her that her status as ‘wife, female’ didn’t automatically equate to ‘food preparer.’ That perhaps it had been unfair that she had been societally obligated to give up her lucrative accounting career to raise children and cook three hot meals a day for her husband.

Similarly, when my brother became a father, my mom was flabbergasted that he participated in the feeding, changing and getting up in the middle of the night with his wife. The idea of a man sharing in the domestic parenting of his child, while applauded by my mother, still shocked her. Growing up, my father worked, my mother took care of the children. Even though she often worked part-time, and later, when I was older, full time, the role of primary parent was automatically placed on my mom’s shoulders, simply because she was wife and mother, and her place was ‘at home.’

But what does this all mean for the Karens of the world now? While Karens can be any age; SachsMedia’s Karen Meme Breakdown suggests the median age of manager-seeking-Karens is around 54 years old, roughly the same age we can hypothesize for Mrs. Kearney. And if Mrs. Kearney was riding the first feminist wave that brought international women’s voting, modern Karens were coming of age right smack in the middle of 2^nd wave feminism that brought the systemized sexism of women being at home to light. The emerging women of the 1970s-80s were encouraged to get an education and a career….they were no longer societally bound to the home. So they went to college, got jobs in the workforce and earned their own paychecks.

But then came children, and their husbands were not staying home. Or getting up with the baby. Or doing the dishes. Or making dinner. So they quit the career, stayed home and raised the children alone while their husbands went to work. Just like their mothers. Instead of using their degrees, they volunteered for the PTA or the class-mom, they ran the football fundraisers and the track pasta nights. They threw their drive and tenacity into their kids’ sports practices and choir concerts. They prepped uniforms, fed, cooked, and cleaned. And no one paid them. No one acknowledged their hard work, their sacrifices, and the lost opportunities they left sitting on boardroom tables to go back to the home.  Like Mr. Holohan and Mrs. Kearney, society was happy to use Karen’s talents and time and labor for its own benefit, but not Karen’s. Mrs. Kearney was allowed to run the concert series for free, allowed to make contracts for her daughter, but not allowed to collect on them. Karens were told they could have it all, the degree, the career, and the family; until it came time to pay the bill.

The Karen who accused me of rude unprofessionalism was an older mom with a young child running in and out of her legs while she stood off with me over $10.00 in the visitor’s center. Her husband was outside, reading the path signs. I can hypothesize about this Karen’s life a decade removed from it. What contract had she made with society about what her life would look like, only to be spending her weekend at a stuffy little museum with an absent husband and unruly child? Was she being crushed under the weight of a life that was too heavy? Maybe her daughter was too misbehaved to finish the tour, and she was embarrassed. Maybe her husband was ignoring their daughter to enjoy himself, leaving her to deal with the mess. So best then to just get a refund and leave. Maybe she’d wanted to be somewhere else that day, alone with a minute to herself, doing something with the degree she worked so hard for. And when I passed her over to help the other patrons, something broke inside her and she feared, like Mrs. Kearney, that this was just one more way society would take advantage of her.

To me, it was only $10.00, but to Karen, it was a reminder of the contract she signed with a society that still hasn’t paid. 

– Abagail Belcastro