This week she announced – via a personal essay published in American Vogue- that she will stop playing tennis competitively.
She has played little in the last couple of years, but this announcement made her official withdrawal from competition.
At 40 – nearly 41 – she wants to have another baby (she has a daughter Olympia, four).
“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete,” she wrote.
Even Serena Williams’ body won’t let her be pregnant and play tennis the way Serena Williams is expected to play tennis.
The language she used to announce the decision was important, as was the forum in which she announced it.
She wrote the story herself, accompanied by iconic pictures where she looks like a sort of Olympian mother-goddess, her little girl hiding in the folds of her flowing gown.
Williams said she didn’t like the word “retirement” because it didn’t feel modern to her.
Instead, she used the word “transition” and said she was “evolving away from tennis”.
Serena Williams won the 2017 Australian Open while pregnant with daughter Olympia.Credit:AP
She was open about the disappointment and frustration that accompanied her decision.
“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” she wrote.
“I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.”
What do you do when your incredible body, which has given you one of the greatest sporting careers of the contemporary era, starts making demands of its own – demands that are non-negotiable? No advance in gender equality can alter the inexorable decline of female fertility with age.
And what lesson can we lesser mortals take from this rueful withdrawal by Williams?
Some commentators have said it shows that women can’t have it all, after all. Not even the most soaringly brilliant and driven ones.
But I am not sure any woman who has tried combining motherhood and paid work; blissed-out baby years and economic security; she has ever been under the illusion that “having it all” was possible.
Perhaps the public resignation letter is yet another advance Williams had made on behalf of us, lesser women.
Historically, it has been dangerous to openly lament the frustrations and limitations of female biology. Female bodies – while miraculous – also let us down and impede us in ways that men don’t experience.
Serena Williams with sister Venus (left) at the Critics Choice Awards in May.Credit:AP
But we daren’t talk too openly about it – it feels a little like we are giving over to our enemies. “See,” the chorus might say, “You thought you could do it. You tried, but you’re just not up to it, physically. There’s nothing to be done!”
But Williams’ essay rejects that fear. It forms part of an emerging feminism that is concerned with the physical, lived experience of women in their bodies, and how those bodies interact with a society that is still built for male bodies.
Open conversations about the practical and social consequences of menstruation and menopause have begun, particularly in relation to workers.
These conversations are being led by younger women who refuse to feel shame about bleeding, and older women tired of being ignored by a medical and economic establishment that expects them to silently endure sometimes-excruciating physical experiences.
Progressive companies are introducing menstrual leave, and governments and health authorities are having frank conversations about the impact of menopause on older women in the workforce. Female tennis players have started speaking about the “mental stress” of the all-white Wimbledon dress code, praying they don’t get their period during competition.
Female body business is no longer something we have to hide or pretend away.
This is the ultimate third (fourth?) wave feminist dream: not just that women will be allowed to take an equal place in society, but that society itself will become more feminised, and meet them halfway.
But Williams’ made it clear she accepted her body’s ultimatum very reluctantly.
“I hate that I have to be at these crossroads,” she wrote.
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This reluctance is contrary to the marvelous spirit of resistance she embodies on the court and off.
The most interesting part of the fashion essay is when Williams talks about her anger, and the stubborn contrarianism that urges her to prove her critics wrong.
Just reading it made me want to punch the air. It’s an underdog’s mantra: “There were so many matches I won because something made me angry or someone counted me out.
“That drove me. I’ve built a career on channeling anger and negativity and turning it into something good.”
She also has a great line on hostile media: “No matter what you say or what you write, you’ll never light a candle to me.”
There is much talk about “the great resignation” but as a friend of mine remarked: “Maybe Serena’s had the great realization.”
That realization is the one that comes to all of us – that there is a season for everything, and it’s OK to say that, sometimes, that really sucks.
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