Jam is not the problem for Meghan Markle

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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